FEATURES

A$AP ROCKY

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 17:45:10 +0000

After releasing just one free mixtape, stylish rap fanatic ASAP Rocky signed a record deal worth $3 million. With all eyes on what he’s going to do next, I took a ride up to Harlem with him and the ASAP Mob to discover the secret behind their swagger.

“Fuck the money, fuck the fame, this is real life / The insights of my trill life”– ASAP Rocky, “Palace”

Harlem’s Always Strive And Prosper crew, led by “dat pretty motherfucker” ASAP Rocky, recently got evicted from their plush 20th-floor midtown party pad. They were accused of distracting the night watchmen with a string of sexy women and killing the old guy downstairs with second-hand ganja smoke. Rocky, the 24-year-old rap sensation behind “Peso”, 2011’s most striking hip hop anthem, was quick to point out that “smoke goes up, not down” and that it wasn’t his problem if people “can’t handle bitches coming in wearing trenchcoats with bikinis underneath”. The residents committee failed to acknowledge his argument. Petitions were signed, blunts were rolled, sizzurp was slurped, and finally, one cold New York morning, the  “Raf Simons murderers” were forced to drift back uptown, with Rocky moving out to his mom’s place in New Jersey.

Now without a central Manhattan HQ, the offices of Polo Grounds Music on West 30th Street have become the de facto ASAP assembly point. Owned by Bryan Leach, a man who for better or worse brought the world Lil Jon and Pitbull, the office is covered in platinum plaques, cardboard cut-outs of various crunkateers, and a plasma screen permanently tuned into BET. Industrial-sized bottles of Bacardi, Patrón and Hennessy line the kitchen sideboard, and the only sign of food is a large bowl of lollipops.

Several group members, all of whom affix ASAP in front of their rap names as a show of solidarity, mill around looking for things to do while they await the return of Rocky, who has been spreading his psychedelic blend of southern swagger and New York street talk on Drake’s Club Paradise tour. ASAP Ferg aka Fergenstein, a cuddly man whose penchant for mid-90s Versace glasses, Margiela sneakers and Hermès scarves knows no bounds, inspects the fridge’s supply of Corona. He bears an uncanny resemblance to the late soul-crooner Gerald Levert and is fast gaining a reputation to match. At one recent ASAP show a female fan rushed up to the stage and handed him a bunch of flowers as he performed his syrupy love ballad, “100 Million Roses”. ASAP Twelvy, the most traditional East Coast spitter in their number, likes to keep his own counsel. With gold grills lining his bottom teeth and a grey beanie with “Hennessy” emblazoned across it, there’s a whiff of the Wu-Tang about him. Leach, a huge man with mischief constantly flickering across his eyes, paces around the room, shadowboxing. “Rocky’s gonna be the new Kanye,” he explains after finishing his impromptu martial arts demo. “He’s gonna influence fashion and music. He’s not scared. He’s fearless, you can see it in his eyes. That’s what Kanye was, fearless. When Kanye first started he was lumped in with the new backpack era, the Mos Defs and the Talib Kwelis, but he knew what we know – it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon.”

The former TVT Records A&R vice-president first got involved with the ASAP movement last summer after being sent a link for Rocky’s “Purple Swag” video, a woozy tale about his love of drinking codeine-laced screw-juice and smoking high-grade purple Kush.
 After hunting him down, Leach was surprised to discover that Rocky wasn’t from Houston but was actually a fellow Harlemite. Born Rakim Mayers in 1987, the young MC had grown up around hustlers from day one, with his dad going to prison for selling drugs when he was 12. He got into the street pharmacy business too, peddling pills in the Bronx and living with his mom in a shelter before earning enough to move her out to the Garden State. Growing up rough himself, Leach felt an affinity with the “trill life” Rocky rapped about, particularly as he was doing it in a style that alternated between slowed-down, strung-out drawls and the triple-time rhyme style pioneered by southern luminaries like Pimp C and Three 6 Mafia.

“When I found out he was from Harlem and doing southern shit I was like, ‘That’s how I made my whole career!’” the entrepreneur says animatedly. “I’m from Harlem, but I’ve signed nothing but southern shit, from Lil Jon to Pitbull and Jacki-O. It took me about three weeks to find him. He didn’t wanna sign with no labels, he wanted to be independent. So my biggest thing was making him understand that I understood exactly who he was, in more ways than he realised. He’s an outcast from Harlem who’s not doing the typical New York sound. He has all these southern influences and comes at the business from an independent state of mind. I was like, ‘I’ve done all that shit. I can help you.’”

In fact, linking up with Leach proved more than just helpful – he made Rocky rich beyond his wildest dreams after negotiating a deal last October worth $3 million with Polo Grounds/Columbia. ASAP Ty Beats, the shy, 18-year-old producer who created the braggadocious “Peso” beat from an old SOS Band sample, still finds it all hard to believe. “It’s crazy man,” he says. “I’m so fucking proud of myself and all of ASAP right now. ‘Peso’ is near two million views – I never dreamt I’d have two million views on a beat that I made or a video that I was a part of. This shit is amazing. It gives hope to everyone out there who don’t believe that things like this can happen.”

In the hallway, ASAP Bari, one of the clique’s clothing designers, is having the huge anarchy symbol on the back of his custom ASAP Nike jacket photographed. “This jacket means a lot,” he says. “Right here you got the Public Enemy target because ASAP is a target right now. The anarchy symbol on the back means we’re wild. We’ve got our motto on the side because you’ve always gotta strive and prosper. It’s called the ASAP Worldwide Destroyer because we always cause destruction.” Also in the hallway is ASAP Nast, owner of the greatest studded Versace leather jacket in New York. Wearing a Black Scale cap emblazoned with the word “FUNERAL”, skinny jeans, a denim shirt and that jacket, he looks more like a skater punk than a hardcore rapper.

“ASAP don’t dress like other people from Harlem,” Leach says, in between attempts to ring Rocky to find out where he is. “They’re more like SoHo kids. The internet is the new zip code and they reflect that. It’s a huge movement that includes all your Odd Futures, Kendrick Lamars, Drakes, all those other guys. It doesn’t matter where you’re from or what you wear any more. It’s about being true to yourself.”

Leach finally gets through to the chosen one. He’s downtown, shopping at BAPE, and wants everyone to meet him there. It’s the news they’ve all been waiting for, the ASAP equivalent of the Bat signal lighting up Gotham’s sky. En route to Greene Street, ASAP Bari and ASAP Nast explain why they’re all so obsessed with making experimental fashion statements. “Some people can’t understand the schemes and the wild dress image,” says Nast, the glow from the streetlights reflecting off the hundreds of metal studs on his leather lapel. “People in New York might never have heard our music but they’ve definitely seen our fashion shit because we mob around town doing all kinds of crazy shit the hood ain’t ever seen. Most people in the hood are like, ‘Oh shit! What da fuck are you doing?!’”

“You gotta understand, we just tryin’ to be different from niggas uptown,” Bari continues. “There’s a breed of fashion in Harlem: if you’re not fly, you’re nobody. Where we come from, fashion is key, whether it’s hood fashion or fashion period. People used to think we looked absurd, but now we the flyest motherfuckers out there.”

“Yeah, everybody in Harlem is gonna dress like this now,” Nast says in a machine-gun pitter-patter. “We’re experimenting and doing different shit with it. You’ll see a little bit of everything in our style – that’s our versatility. We don’t know nothing else. We only know fashion and music. And to be honest, to make it in the music industry these days you gotta have some type of style, because no one wants to look at you otherwise. Even if you got a rugged, dirty swag, you gotta have some type of style.”

Arriving at BAPE, Rocky is finishing up buying three pairs of sneakers. Dressed in his favourite Rick Owens t-shirt, an ASAP Worldwide Destroyer jacket and the same “FUNERAL” hat as Nast (the same cap he wore in the “Peso” clip), the group’s poster boy is in a bubbly mood. It’s been a while since the posse have been together en masse, and his joy at seeing his surrogate family is palpable. “Is this that Versace jacket?” he says looking at Nast’s leather. “That shit is nice, bro.” As he pays at the counter, Nast and Fergenstein kick off a spontaneous freestyle cypher in the middle of the shop, to the bemusement of a family of German tourists who have no idea who they are or why they’re shouting over someone else’s song. Rocky laughs and heads out of the shop to chat to Bari who suggests that they all go uptown to grab some food and swing by his grandmother’s apartment, as she hasn’t seen them since ASAP broke the internet. Rocky, Nast, Twelvy and ASAP Yams – the Puerto Rican member whose facial birthmark and 212 chest tattoo made him a blog celebrity thanks to his thugged-out cameos in “Peso” and “Purple Swag” – jump into a black Escalade chauffeured by an old boy who hands out cigars for the guys to dissect. Nast crushes up some weed and pours it into Rocky’s hands as a huge orange sun disappears behind the Queensboro Bridge. It takes the entire journey for him to roll up the blunt, to the amusement of the driver who boasts he could have done it quicker with one hand while still driving.

Arriving in Harlem, they jump out at the Rucker Park basketball court for a group picture. One of the most famous street courts in B-ball history, it’s located opposite the notorious Polo Grounds project and was where players like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Dr J and Wilt Chamberlain honed their skills before becoming NBA legends. “When I was 16, I stopped playing basketball and was trashed after that,” Rocky laughs after lighting up his blunt at long last.  
“I ain’t even going to lie to you. I was wack as fuck. But I still talk shit like I’m dope. None of them ASAP niggas can beat me on the court though. Motherfuckers think they fly but they’re terrible too.” As if to prove a point, two of the gang throw bottles from the stands towards the hoop. Both miss by miles. Standing on the iconic green steps, they crowd together for a family portrait, blowing smoke and throwing various As and one-fingered salutes into the sub-zero night air.

Ten minutes later, a dozen black Timberlands are trudging up a dark stairwell in the St. Nicholas projects on 116th Street. Opening the door at the end of the hallway a little old lady grins warmly at the face standing behind it. “Rocky!!!! The superstar! Look at ya!” He leans in and gives Bari’s granny a hug, beaming with pride as the flash bulbs pop off. Another excited female voice shrills out from inside the small apartment, “Is that Raawwwky? Dat pretty motherfucker?!?” Bari’s mom pulls him into the kitchen and gives him a big squeeze. “You’re holding it down, you’re really rocking it!” Rocky looks visibly buoyed up by the experience as they leave a few minutes later to satiate their munchies. “That’s what it’s all about,” he shouts at the top of his voice. “Love! It’s all about that love!”

Unsurprisingly for a posse whose music pays homage to DJ Screw, UGK and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, they choose to grab some southern soul-food at Amy Ruth’s, a local restaurant whose dishes are named after celebrities who have gorged themselves there. Sitting down at a long table in a private room, ASAP Ferg observes that it looks like a re-enactment of the last supper, with their saviour holding court in the middle. But instead of calling Rocky Jesus, Ferg says that he looks more like “Denzel Washington with braids”, causing everyone to crease up. A few more anonymous ASAP members turn up and the table erupts into another spontaneous freestyle session, with Ty Beats banging out a rhythm on the sugar pot.

“When I’m making music, it’s for the love of art,” Rocky says after the last lyric has vanished into the ether. “If you don’t like art you’re probably not gonna like what I do. I’m for the people who do artsy shit and don’t get the shine that they deserve. But 20 years from now or when I’m dead they gonna be on my dick because I’m so futuristic. It’s all good, as long as they know one day that I’m a pioneer. I’m paving the way for a long legacy.”
It appears that part of the ASAP legacy plan is to practise pescetarianism, so no-one orders the Ludacris fried chicken or the President Barack Obama BBQ wings. Instead they go for the Doug E. Fresh catfish and salmon croquette options.

“I was actually raised a couple of blocks down from here,” Rocky recalls. “We on 116th and Lennox. I was raised down that way, 116th and Morningside Avenue was the block I was born on. It’s the same shit you see in the movies – crackheads, crack dens, bad bitches, minxes, chinchillas, Rolls Royces, dice games, fat asses, more bad bitches. My music pays homage to all them and all the rappers that did this before me, even motherfuckers that had clown-ass one-hit-wonders that I hated, I got respect for them because they had to endure all the shit that I’m going through right now. And just because we’re from New York it doesn’t mean I can’t be influenced by Texan guys that sip purple drink, which I do, ride slow, which I do, go slugging, which I do, you know, talk about that trill shit. Everything that I’ve been through I put into words. I really do live this life. The trill shit. At the end of the day you’ve got to look at it like I had enough balls to say, ‘I’m from New York and I want to make this kind of music.’ I want to make what appeals to me and I sound good doing it like this, so fuck anybody else.”

At the end of the table Bryan Leach pours out generous glasses of Bacardi and Henny from two huge bottles he sneaked into the alcohol-free zone, possibly the ones from his office. Over dinner the mob clamour to hear Rocky’s new song “Pretty Flacko” and chat about the logistics of tomorrow’s video shoot for “Wassup”, the third single off his critically acclaimed free mixtape, Live.Love.ASAP. Conversation flows between dirt bikes, dirty pants, and trying to find out which one of them used to “beat off in the cupboard in the middle of the night” at their old apartment. No one owns up to it, but Bari blames Nast.

“God sent me to entertain the world and inspire through music,” the man formerly known as Versace Rocky says after polishing off his plate of salmon and ordering another one to take out. “That’s just what I’m here to do, that’s my mission. I’m not doing it to say I need more fans. I was doing it out of fucking basement studios riding round Harlem having fun before all this. If you keep that, that’s what people love. At the end of the day man, I’m so fucking big-headed and full of myself that I’m going to enjoy myself no matter what. If I was listening to my music I’d be like, ‘I wanna be that ASAP, he’s dope as fuck. He’s a pretty motherfucker.’”

As dinner finishes, Rocky starts lining up a few booty calls for later that evening and some final studio sessions for the ASAP Mob’s first group mixtape, Last Cab 2 Harlem. Ironically, outside on 116th Street, their chauffeur is slouched in the passenger seat of his SUV, red-eyed and slaphappy, but looking nothing like the designated driver. Rocky wisely chooses to hang around for a while longer. Sitting in a quiet corner of the restaurant away from his brethren, he swigs back another covert glass of Hennessy. “I feel that my success affects my brothers, my ASAP niggas, because it’s not directly happening to them, but it’s happening to them,” he says as Nast and Twelvy pull faces at him through the restaurant window. “This is more than a frat, this is like a cult. ASAP is my religion. I love those niggas man, I love them. They make me levelheaded, they make me sound. I feed off of their energy. You know, let’s have some fun, let’s be kids again – that’s all I wanna do. I’m in my youth and I don’t wanna grow up. All I got right now is my fucking bills and my work, that’s it. When you get older you get stressed, you get kids, marriages, mortgages and fucking prenups. I don’t want none of that shit. I’m just anxious to have fun and to make people into believers. And I believe now is my time to shine, brother. Come to the light.”

The following day, Rocky is in video-star mode, inspecting a black Lamborghini that’s parked outside a mansion in leafy upstate New York. “I might have to get me one of these,” he says as he swaggers in front of the camera for the final scene of “Wassup”, a promo inspired by his favourite movies, from Belly and Enter the Dragon to, yes you guessed it, Scarface. So far they’ve shot a giant cocaine pentagram, bathed in a tub full of money, and tied a woman painted as a $100 bill to a diamond leash. Now, dressed in a silk tux jacket, Versace loafers, a Hermès scarf and a pair of Cartier specs, Rocky is doing his best to channel the ghetto-fabulous spirit of dirty-south idol Master P. Clams Casino’s haunting pitched-down beat blasts out from a pair of travel speakers as Rocky gets down to business. “Pretty nigga in some shit you never heard of / Only thing bigger than my ego is my mirror / Uh / Clothes getting weirder / Money get longer, pretty nigga pin your hair up...” After a few takes, the director asks why the hyperactive young rapper isn’t being more animated. Maybe the Rottweiler shackled to his arm is holding him back. “Nah, this is where I’m trying to be smooth. I’m trying to be cool,” he says before bursting out laughing at the ridiculousness of the situation. “Well, I’m trying...”

Text © Tim Noakes 2012
Photography © Ari Marcopoulos

JORDAN KIM

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 11:48:31 +0100

Nostalgia fuelled music videos with a dark sense of humour

When Cutty Ranks said, “Six million ways to die, choose one”, we doubt suffocation by bubblegum, electrocution by spaghetti, and decapitation by lazer disc were high on his list. They were at the top of Jordan Kim’s though. Paying homage to Argento, Bava and Obayashi, the director’s recent video for Toro Y Moi’s “How I Know” tells the story of three Darwin Award nominees who break into a haunted house and end up as guinea pigs for the homicidal urges of two sexy ghosts.

“I made a list of the least predictable ways one could be killed inside a house,” the 30-year-old says. “I wanted it to be more funny than gory – the deaths were mainly a vehicle to get to the ghost part rather than a chance to gross people out or be violent. I had to cut some ideas out for being just too weird and ridiculous – at one point I wrote down: ‘ghost puts guy's head into a bread maker and they turn into bread!’”

Kim’s mischievously black sense of humour is fast becoming his trademark. His previous video for Teams vs Star Slinger revolved around an alien in a dodgy rain mac who attempts to return someone’s lost house keys… only to devour their owner once he had tracked them down.

“I often laugh when bad things happen to me. Not sure why, I think I've always been that way,” says Kim. “With my videos, the dark humour is partially a byproduct of trying to do something unexpected. I love TV shows and films that combine genres, like Twin Peaks – super scary and funny at the same time.”

Trained as an animator, Kim got his big break working on Tim & Eric’s Tom Goes to the Mayor, before going on to co-write and make animated segments of kids playing inside 8-bit video games for cult children’s show, Yo Gabba Gabba. Currently in pre-production on YGG’s fourth series and also writing a short film, you can be certain that whatever Kim’s anamorphic vision focuses on next, it’s going to be pretty far out there.

“I wrote a script in film school about an alcoholic wizard with a nun girlfriend. My friends still think I should make it, but I doubt that's gonna happen,” he laughs. “But I definitely want to direct feature films, do some comedy writing for TV, make a video game, and also grow a vegetable garden.”

TEXT © TIM NOAKES

JORDAN KIM’S TOP THREE VIDEOS OF THE LAST 20 YEARS

Cornelius "Fit Song" (2006)
I'm a big fan of videos that try to sync a narrative to the audio. I've watched it about thirty times and still can't figure out how exactly they made it, which is also exciting.

Radiohead "There There" (2003)
The imagination and detail in the art direction is pretty incredible. I also loved the idea of stop motion people.

Bjork "Bachelorette" (1997)
This is probably the first video that made me want to direct videos. Still holds up really well too.

LANA DEL REY

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 12:25:24 +0100

Lana Del Rey’s hypnotic ballad “Video Games” rips the heart out of everyone who comes across it. Tim Noakes meets its creator to find out how faded Hollywood glamour and shitty boyfriends inspired her to write 2011’s most striking single

Lana Del Rey looks on the verge of tears. Sitting under an old weeping willow, the pop singer’s big brown eyes glint dolefully in the sun as a summer breeze carries her cigarette smoke across Regent’s Canal. To an outsider, there seems little for the 24-year-old to be upset about – in the space of a month, the promo clip for her hauntingly vulnerable ballad “Video Games” has been viewed over half a million times and has reduced hardened music critics to blubbing wrecks. She’s won fans in artists as diverse as Juliette Lewis and Skream, inspired folk and dubstep cover versions and signed a major record deal with Interscope/Polydor – all without officially releasing “Video Games” as a single. It’s the stuff that dreams are made of. So, why is Lana feeling so blue?   “It seems like for all the people who really loved ‘Video Games’, there were just as many who said they hated it,” she says in a delicate purr, pausing to drag deeply on her fag. “That changed things for me. They said I looked really fake and posed, and stuff about my lips… It just really hurt my feelings and it made me wish that I had never put it up. If they said I was a bad singer that would be one thing because I know it’s not true, but when they say, ‘Oh, look at her face, she looks so plastic...’ that, as a girl, hurts your feelings. Those comments made me re-evaluate everything.”   Tellingly, she looks drastically different today compared to the “Lolita lost in the hood” who starred in the “Video Games” clip. Gone is the volcanic Priscilla Presley beehive and natural make-up. Instead, bright red power lipstick, dark auburn sideswept hair and sharp eyebrows are the order of the day. She looks like the quintessential American dream girl, a fact re-enforced by a fluffy stars and stripes jumper, short denim shorts and some sparkly Nike dunks. This must be what Del Rey’s YouTube page calls her “gangsta Nancy Sinatra” look. She laughs at the suggestion.   “I didn’t come up with that! My managers were struggling to describe my music to labels and kept saying, ‘What genre is it? What style?’ I called it Hollywood Sadcore. But my manager said, ‘She’s like a gangsta Nancy Sinatra!’ And as soon as it flew out of his mouth, it fucking stuck like glue. I spend eight fucking years writing gorgeous songs and someone in a meeting says ‘gangsta Nancy Sinatra’ and that’s that. It’s brutal. I know two of Nancy’s songs but she’s not someone I’ve ever really listened to. I know everything about Frank, of course, because he’s the real singer. It just goes to show how fucking stupid people can be sometimes.”   The self-confessed rebel lets out another wicked little giggle. She may be reticent to admit the similarities, but you can see where her manager was coming from. Del Rey’s epic vocal harmonies, dark subject matter, devilish sense of humour and vampish pin-up persona owe more to the grindhouse appeal of Ms Sinatra than today’s autotuned drivel. Whereas J.Lo thinks the height of musical innovation in 2011 is remixing the “Macarena”, Del Rey looks to Bogart and Bacall for inspiration. She quotes computer scientists, Baz Luhrmann lyrics and Goodfellas dialogue on her Twitter feed, and as far as we know is the only pop singer who cites the ambience of Coney Island as a major influence on her music.   “Yeah, of course!” she says excitedly. “Coney Island is the perfect mixture of grandeur and desolate, barren land. To me, that’s gorgeousness, not to mention the most popular vacation destination of 1932. People came from all over North America just to sit by the seaside. Now no one goes there. To me, that is interesting. That’s what I like in music; that’s what I like in film; that’s why I like Antony and the Johnsons; that’s why I like David Lynch…”   A natural born outsider, it’s not too much of a leap of the imagination to imagine Del Rey being cast by Lynch, Tarantino or Stone as a smoky nightclub singer or gangster’s moll. Going by her videos, you get the feeling she lives her life as if she’s starring in one of their films anyway. On “Kinda Outta Luck”, she swigs back a bottle of Jim Beam and brags about how her dead lover is in the trunk of her car. In “Video Games” she sings, “I heard that you like the bad girls, hunnny”, as clips of Jessica Rabbit and Paz de la Huerta flash up. B-side “Blue Jeans” features AWOL boyfriends, white churches, hot denim and a large dose of unrequited love. It seems that wherever Lana Del Rey goes, melancholy, heartbreak and danger are quick to follow.   “I think I started singing because I hoped I would meet someone like me,” she says. “But the further along you get, you realise that you are not terminally unique in your pain or misery. Everyone is confused. You know, the pendulum swings and the darkness comes with it. But I don’t live my life in a dark way. I think I was just lonely for ages, and didn’t really have that…” Her voice trails off and she inhales another lungful of Marlboro Country. “I don’t know if all my songs are about doomed love affairs. But it’s usually about love. Pretty simple.”   What makes Del Rey’s love songs so refreshingly different is that they bear little similarity to anything else that is going on right now. It’s like she’s jumped straight out of a Jim Thompson pulp fiction novel from the 1950s and decided to call bullshit on the dirge plaguing the charts. After all, instead of announcing her arrival with an identikit club banger, her opening cultural statement is a string-laden, five-minute ballad that is so down-tempo it’s basically beatless. Yet everyone who comes across “Video Games” becomes instantly entranced. Her radio plugger has had to turn down requests for it to be released early, which is unprecedented for a new artist in an age of plunging profits, leaks and immediate MP3 gratification.

“I am genuinely fucking surprised about how everything is going. You would be too!” she exclaims. “I’ve always had stuff up on YouTube but didn’t really plan for anyone to see them, because they didn’t see them. No one ever told me that they liked anything of mine and now all of a sudden everyone says they love it and I have no idea why. I didn’t change a thing and my style is the same – same influences. Maybe the angels decided I could have a break. Out of the frying pan, into the fire. I guess I prayed for a break. I pray every day. You have to pray.”   

It took a long time for her prayers to be answered. Long before Lana Del Rey, a girl called Lizzy Grant was born in “the coldest spot in the nation” – the town of Lake Placid (pop. 2,638), six hours upstate from New York City. Her dad, an internet domain investor, sent her to a boarding school in Connecticut at the age of 15. She didn’t enjoy the experience and has spent the years since trying to erase it from memory. After moving to New York at 18 to become a singer, she became a familiar face on the Lower East Side and Williamsburg open mic circuit, with all the trials and tribulations that come with the turf.   “I thought that I was good at writing songs from a very young age,” she recalls. “I thought that if I could be the best that would be fucking great, so I just kept singing and writing. The funny thing is that it’s always been really weird music, so I don’t know why I thought that was a good idea! It’s gotten prettier lately.”   Her talent was noticed and she recorded an album under her birth name. It never came out, and due to a shitty contract she was unable to sign another deal for three years. Dejected and bored of trying to make pop hits, she began writing songs that had a timeless, cinematic quality – her take on the dark side of the American Dream. She decided to reinvent herself and moved into a New Jersey trailer park, hung up Old Glory and some fairy lights, turned on her laptop and Lana Del Rey swaggered into the frame.   “It’s the exact same person, babes. Just with a different name,” she laughs as sunshine bounces off her golden knuckle-duster ring. “I prefer Lana, it’s pretty. I think the songs came first and then the name and probably a lot more hair and makeup after that. Lana Del Rey just sounded good coming out of my mouth – it was exotic sounding, and I like exotic places and I like really gorgeous things. It sounded like a gorgeous woman. And once you have a name, you expect certain things from it, so it was like something to aim towards. I could build a sonic world towards the way the name fell off my lips. It’s helped me a lot.”   Her search for new sounds took her from New York to Miami, LA to London. The breakthrough came when she hooked up with songwriter Justin Parker, who played her the piano chords that would become the backbone of “Video Games”. Producers Robopop embellished on the orchestration, adding harps, ominous church bells and a funeral march snare roll into the mix. At the same time, she was dealing with the fallout from two broken relationships, so she took Parker’s template and wrote down what was on her mind. The sombre mood of the minor chord progression quickly brought her rawest emotions bubbling up to the surface.   “The verse was about the way things were with one person, and the chorus was the way that I wished things had really been with another person, who I thought about for a long time,” she says, breaking into an acapella of the song. “‘Swinging in the backyard, pull up in your fast car, whistling my name’. That was what happened, you know? He’d come home and I’d see him. But then the chorus, ‘Heavenis a place on earth with you, tell me all the things you wanna do’ wasn’t like that. That was the way that I wished it was – the melody sounds so compelling and heavenly because I wanted it to be that way. The verse is more matter-of-fact because that’s how it was. It’s a mix of memories and the way I wished it could have been. Just because things happened a certain way doesn’t mean that that’s the way that they are. It really is what you choose to think about. Bad things happen every day but you’re not going to be any happier thinking about them. So I don’t think about them. I don’t have that luxury any more. Some people say that ‘Video Games’ stops them in their tracks; it’s that kind of song. It’s just really sad.”   Relocating to her sister’s apartment in uptown Manhattan, she recorded several performances of her singing it and gazing longingly into her MacBook camera, as if she was Skyping her aloof lover. She then trawled the internet for archive clips in which to tell her teary tale, from drunken celebs and orchestras, to skate slams and apocalyptic CGI landscapes. After editing the narrative together, she uploaded the clip to YouTube, then sat back and watched everything get weird. As the viewing figures hit 500,000, the video was banned from the site due to various legal disputes over her choice of found footage, stoking the flames of her bad girl persona in the process. A new edit has since been published.   Now, with Del Rey’s quest for recognition assured, it must have dawned on her that her dreams of becoming famous have finally started to come true. But does she still want them to?   “I did when I was young, but then I realised that that wasn’t important,” she says with a coy smile, pulling the arms of her stars and stripes jumper down over her hands. “It’s important to be a good person, so I stopped wanting it. It’s not what I want at all, not even a little bit. I’ve been doing it for so long that it’s just what I do; I wake up and I sing. It’s not any less romantic now, it’s just different. I’m going to keep living my life just the way I live it now. I know exactly what to do.”

Text © Tim Noakes 2011
Photography © Michael Hemy

PHIFE DAWG

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 11:36:01 +0100

The five-foot assassin on life inside A Tribe Called Quest

“My family is from Trinidad, but when I was growing up New York City was all I knew. Queens was it; there was no other place on Earth. I remember they wanted to move my dad to Seattle for his job and I told them ‘I’m staying in New York with my grandmother, I’m not going anywhere’. It wasn’t until I became a part of the group (1) that I really got a chance to see the rest of the world.

We started professionally back in ’89 and really thrived on doing something that nobody else was doing. I left the production to Q Tip and Ali Shaheed because I thought they were geniuses at their craft. Tribe’s productions were in a league of our own. Everyone else was still using James Brown loops. I felt blessed to be a part of that.

I wasn’t signed to the group on the first album – me and Jarobi had our own group. I can’t even remember the name of it. We were going to do our own album but he ended up going to school for culinary arts and so I became a fully-fledged member of A Tribe Called Quest in the process for recording The Low End Theory (2).

In a way Tip pushed me into becoming a performer, because at first I wasn’t taking it as seriously as I should, so he kept getting in my ear like ‘come on man, get in the studio’ but I was running the streets being silly. It wasn’t until we started doing shows for that first album that I understood where he was coming from. That’s why I was on so many more songs on The Low End Theory compared to the first album. He had a lot to do with it, definitely. Tip would be like, ‘Yo Phife spit the verse, what you got?’ I’d go in there and spit my verse. I’ve known Tip since we were two years old. We used to finish each other’s sentences, so when it came time to doing music that was absolutely nothing.

It was a good time. I never knew we were going to be that big; I was just doing everything I could to stay off the street and be positive. I didn’t want to break my grandmother’s heart or anything like that. There was a lot of times when I was selling my nickel and dime bags of bullshit or whatever, you know fast money always seems like good money but I had to get out of that as soon as possible.

At the beginning I had issues with my voice, but as long as Ali and Q said they were cool with it, I was cool with it. But deep down I hated it. I just went with it because they said it was different, they said it was cool. Once we were recording the Low End Theory I felt like I had found my voice, I was comfy with it by then. That was an important moment for me, just being embraced and letting my voice be heard. But on that first album – to this day I can’t listen to those four songs I’m on. I hate my voice on those tracks.

We didn’t want to be traditional. We could have failed but we went that extra mile to be a little bit different. We were A Tribe Called Quest. I mean, even the name was weird. Our friends were like, “that’s too long, the album title’s too long”. They teased us, but then as soon as we started making noise they all wanted to come on tour with us!

We just wanted to be hip-hop. Me personally, I didn’t like the clothes we were wearing. I understood it, but I didn’t want to wear the clothes. We were already giving out a different message and I felt like that was all we needed. But you live and you learn – everything happens for a reason so I really don’t regret any of that, but I remember not appreciating the garments. Not at all. Especially anything with a flower. It was horrible.

Success didn’t affect me – I was just happy I could pay rent. On the first two albums I was still living at my grandmother’s house. By Midnight Marauders (3) I finally got my own crib in Atlanta. You gotta leave the nest in order to grow as an individual.

A big moment for us was Lollapalooza (4). We were introduced to a broader audience and that’s really when Tribe became big, big, big. We were known and had a certain amount of fans, but by the time we were done doing Lollapalooza, we had somewhat of a cult following. I was nervous at first because I thought, they’re not going to like us because there were bands like Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, George Clinton, the Beastie Boys, there was a whole bunch of different groups from different genres of music. But I was totally wrong. It was a fun time.

I think that Tribe were successful for the simple fact that we were ourselves. We didn’t try to be nobody else but ourselves. At the start I was busy looking up to the BDPs (5) and the Public Enemies. It wasn’t even about your own flow at one point – it was like. “I want to be like those dudes!” But you quickly learn that in order to make a name for yourself, you’ve got to make your own language. So I’m still taken back when people call us pioneers.

From time to time you get tired of doing songs that you made when you were 18 years old, but that’s what the people love. This is what we wanted, so you gotta deal with it. I have a good time when I’m on the stage. I think that’s the best part of all of this, when you get on stage and you show people what you’ve created all these months, all these years. That’s when it all really comes to fruition. I do feel like we’re in a box that we’re never gonna be able to get out of, and sometimes it aggravates me, but at the same time it pays our bills, so what can you do? There’s nothing you can really do but give the people what they want.

It’s tough being a diabetic, but music has always been therapeutic for me. Diabetes is a 24/7 type of job, 365 days. So just being in the studio, hanging with the group, just the camaraderie in general – it took my mind off it as much as I could. It’s still not easy, but having been through what I’ve been through in the last 4 or 5 years, I’m grateful that I’m still here. My diabetes led to renal failure, so I had to get a new kidney. I got that in 2008, and since then everything’s been fine. Everything is cool, everything is balanced. I learnt a lot while I was sick, and I don’t wish that on nobody.

It seemed like the chemistry was a bit tarnished when I moved to Atlanta. But I honestly don’t think that my moving to Atlanta had anything to do with the beginning of the end, honestly. It was a combination of things – I don’t think it had anything with the guys both being Muslim, or me moving to Atlanta. But when we decided to call it a day, it was a dark moment. All good things come to an end, I knew that much, and you just have to grin and bear it, I guess. I thought it was all over for us after Beats, Rhymes and Life (6) to be honest, I’m surprised we even did The Love Movement (7). But I knew it was dead after that.

It was cool when we reunited – it’s like we never left each other. Q-Tip is my home boy. He’s a lot of things, but at the end of the day, that’s my brother. And you know, families are gonna argue, but at the end of the day he knows I’m gonna hold him down and vice versa. I got his back regardless. I don’t like the drama behind the documentary, but I do like the movie itself. I’m gonna support it. That’s just me. But the drama behind it I’m definitely not cool with it, I’m definitely not.

It wasn’t easy being in A Tribe Called Quest man– let’s not get it twisted. I mean I don’t regret anything that happen to me as being part of A Tribe Called Quest, but it wasn’t always tea and crumpets man. I think the film (8) lets people know that all good things do come to an end. We’re human at the end of the day, we definitely have faults, and when I say human, I’m talking health issues, I’m talking bumping heads, I’m talking being most creative. I mean it happens – we’re not the first group to go through this, we just happen to have the first true-blue hip-hop documentary about us. It just happened to be about us. And I’m grateful for it, but I don’t what people to think that that’s the only thing Q-Tip and me was about was beef. Because that’s definitely not the case. And that’s why, originally, the title – Mike wanted the title to be ‘Beats, Rhymes and Fights’ and we fought him tooth and nail for that not to happen. We hardly ever fought each other. It was misleading to our fans definitely.

Like I said earlier, we’re human. Things happen. From health, to beef, to loving each other. I mean it’s all part of life – that’s why the movie suits the title really really great, because you can’t have beats and rhymes without life, and through the travel with A Tribe Called Quest, and not even just A Tribe Called Quest but just travelling in general through life, you’re gonna have some bumps in the road, adversities and things of that nature, and you gotta find a way to overcome, that’s it. That’s basically what it boils down to.”

Text © Tim Noakes
Photography © Lauren Stocker

FOOTNOTES ON PHIFE DAWG

1) Comprising of Q Tip, Phife Dawg, Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Jarobi White, A Tribe Called Quest’s five albums re-wrote the hip hop rule book by placing emphasis on socially conscious lyrics and Afro-centric style over the gangsta posturing that was prevalent during the 1990s.

1) Released in 1991, The Low End Theory contained the anthem “Scenario” which introduced the wider world to the off the wall talents of Busta Rhymes. Phife learned he was diabetic a month after its release.

3) Containing the huge hit “Award Tour”, Midnight Marauders was certified platinum on January 11, 1995. The group took a short break after its release, with Q-Tip producing tracks for Mobb Deep and Phife appearing on TLC’s Crazy Sexy Cool album.

4) ATCQ appeared at the 1994 Lollapalooza Festival, alongside The Smashing Pumpkins, Stereolab and The Verve.

5) BDP is an acronym for KRS-1 and Scott La Rock’s group, Boogie Down Productions.

6) Beats, Rhymes and Life featured beats from J Dilla, who formed a production crew with Q Tip and Ali Shaheed Muhammad called The Ummah. Rolling Stone called it “near flawless”.

7) Before releasing The Love Movement in 1998, the group announced that it would be their last album.

8) Michael Rapaport’s documentary on the group Beats, Rhymes and Life has been the subject of much drama, with Q Tip in particular criticising it. However it has been widely praised with a 92% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

VYBZ KARTEL

Tue, 10 May 2011 17:54:45 +0100

The dancehall deejay on feuding, skin bleaching and sexually liberating Jamaica with his daggering riddims

“I grew up in a wooden house with a zinc roof in Waterhouse, the birthplace of dancehall. It was a pretty regular garrison childhood. When I was about 6 or 7 my family moved to Portmore City, which is just outside of Kingston, across the bridge. My father wanted a better life for his kids (1).

My mum always encouraged me to do music because I had some Uncles who were aspiring musicians but they never really made it. She always supported me to become an entertainer. At first my Father didn't really like it. As a matter of fact he hated it because he wanted us to be secure and to have stability in our lives – he wanted to give us the life he never had. So he wanted us to go to school, get the highest education possible and just to have a great career job. When I used to sneak out at 10 years old to go to dances, my father would lock me out, but my Mum was the one who would open the gate. She had a love for it because she's from Waterhouse and knows what the music can do for poor people.

At that time I started writing my own lyrics. I was like, ‘I can do it better than everyone else.’ My cockiness just came from the fact that I was from Waterhouse, where all the greats honed their craft, like Ninjaman (2) and Shabba (3). I wanted to show my parents that I could do it if it was the last thing they saw me do. Now even my Dad loves it! He’s like ‘yeah, okay, you’re serious son’.

Looking back, I was always the centre of attention, the class clown. My talent and my ego were childhood sweethearts. And, like all relationships, there was a lil’ bit of arguing here n’ there, when the ego tried to outdo the talent, but now they’ve learnt to live together in harmony. I wasn't involved in street gangs, but when people ask me if I’ve ever seen anybody get shot, I say ‘that's like asking me if I've seen the sun come up’. I’ve lived the Jamaican ghetto life. I knew I had to take measures to protect my life because, as corny as it may sound, I knew I was going to be a star.

I suppose I’ve got a Jekyll and Hyde ting going on. Sometimes you jump out of yourself for a minute and cause yourself a lifetime of regret. I personally think whatever must be will be because I believe in destiny. If I should call up to death tomorrow I know that is my destiny. But, looking back if I could go back and do some things differently I would, definitely.

I don’t regret leaving the Alliance though (4). They have a saying in Jamaica, 'Two Bulls can't reign in one pen’ and I couldn't be in a pen with Bounty Killer (5) and build my own empire. I was always loyal in my alliance to him because I believe in loyalty over royalty. Leaving the alliance was the hardest decision I’ve made because I went out on myself. I didn’t know if Jamaica would turn its back on me. I wasn’t scared of being hurt, I grew up with a lot of thugs and know the game so can’t be scared, I'm not that type of person to be afraid easily.

When the beef with Mavado happened, my ‘Mr Hyde' side came out again (6). But contrary to popular belief the peace wasn't organized by the government it was decided by Kartel and Mavado. Dancehall mirrors society so without a violent society you wouldn't have violent lyrics. The Prime Minister got involved for publicity. We just rolled with it. The war did more good than bad for our careers, because it made us the top two acts in dancehall. We now make the most money, so I know that he is appreciative of me as I am of him. If it wasn't for the feud we wouldn't be the giants we are now.

Apart from my kids, I love music more than anything else in the world. That is why I do it so well and that is why I command the money that I do. I don't say "Oh I'm gonna make this song to bring in a million dollars" I just say 'listen, I am going to completely destroy this riddim and it’s gonna be a hit" and when I get the hit, I get the money. Dance hall has made me rich, but if Bill Gates is still working why shouldn't I?

I am a provocative person. In my music I am outrageous, that is part of Vybz Kartel's persona, but it’s not like I sit down and think 'okay I'm gonna do something controversial' it just happens. For example, I haven't lost any sleep over people saying that I bleach my skin (7). I actually make my own brand of cake soap so I'm actually profiting off of it. It’s not a lie. I do me and they do them. If you wanna do me fine, more power to me. A lot of people try to psycho analyze why I did it but it just comes down to entertainment. Vybz Kartel has over 100 tattoos and I just rub on the cake soap to make my tattoos brighter, yet still people try to psycho analyze what I do and try and get inside my brain. They just make a complete fool of themselves and make me more famous. Vybz Kartel is the kind of person that creates marionettes from the public, I create puppets. Be outrageous and controversial and you will always be a trend setter.

I launched my own brand of Daggering condoms (8) because I do so many songs about sex, so it's only right I do something about having safe sex. I’ve got a lot of children. I live with three of them; I’ve got one in Canada and two in New York. I haven't seen the Canadian one since he was born and I haven't seen the ones in New York for like two years now. It's crazy, but that’s the life of an entertainer. Maybe the condoms aren’t working that well. Talk about a parody! I also make my own rum. So drink some of my Vybz rum, have sex using my Daggerin’ condoms all while listening to a Vybz Kartel CD! It's musical viagra!

Beyonce has just used the ‘Pon Di Floor’ riddim (9), which is good for me. Now every time her record plays I get money. I like her music, straight up, and I like how she flowed on the track too, it's all about empowering women. It's funny when people say that my songs are demeaning to women, because most of my fans are women. Women from the highest excellence to the bottom of the pit! Women love to have sex, so I don't see what the problem is with me just expressing my sexuality. All love songs are about love, all gospel songs are about gospel, so why cant all the Vybz Kartel songs be about sex? I am The Sexual Liberator of Jamaica!

I also sing about my experiences and my lifestyle. When I was doing the song 'Clarks' I wasn't doing it to get money from Clarks, I was doing it for artistic expression because at that time I had like 50 pairs of Clarks and everyone was always asking where I got them (10). I bought a Benz and I did 'Benz Punani'. I bought a bike recently and I did 'Bike back Bumpa' When I bleach up my face with da cake soap, I did “Cake Soap” and then I started selling my own cake Soap. I just do me. No subject is out of bounds

I sometimes worry about losing my golden touch because nothing lasts forever. If your life begins and ends, what is something as insignificant as a career in comparison? So of course I'm gonna lose the golden touch, it's just a matter of when. I don't see it happening anytime soon though.

And I would never leave Jamaica. Where would I go? I grew up in this system, I grew up in this culture, I'm used to the values I'm used to the culture so if change will come it will come through me and through the man in the street. I don't wanna leave Jamaica for nowhere.”

Text © Tim Noakes
Portrait photography © Ports Bishop

FOOTNOTES ON
VYBZ KARTEL

1) Adidja “Vybz Kartel” Palmer was born in Kingston on January 7, 1976. He has four sisters and one brother. He has many nicknames, including Addi the Teacher and Gaza Emperor.

2) At the Sting festival in 2003, Kartel’s pre-planned on stage clash with Ninjaman turned violent and a fight broke out between the two. They publicly made up four days later.

3) Mr Lover Lover himself, Shabba Ranks.

4) A heavyweight dancehall crew of deejays formed in 2003 by Bounty Killer. After Kartel left in 2006, he set up the Portmore Empire, also known as the Gaza.

5) Bounty Killer is a Grammy nominated dancehall legend who has collaborated with Wu Tang, Mobb Deep, Fugees, Robyn and No Doubt.

6) Following Kartel’s exit from the Alliance, Mavado and his Gully Squad issues a series of diss tracks against him. In December 8 2009, they met with Jamaican Prime Minister Bruce Golding in an attempt to end the feud, which had fueled mob attacks throughout Kingston.

7) Kartel has come under fire over whitening his skin with "cake soap", which is normally used for removing stains on soiled clothes.

8) Daggering, according to Kartel is “hardcore sex, just fucking. No foreplay, no sucking on titties, no love making, just fucking.”

9) Major Lazer’s 2009 club hit featured the deejay’s vocals. Beyonce just sampled it for her comeback single “Rule the World” (Girls)”

1) Last year, Kartel’s ode to his Wallabees, Desert Boots and Desert Trek boots started a buying frenzy for Clarks shoes, which lead to vendors doubling the price, gangs targeting shops to steal pairs, and counterfeit versions flooding Jamaica’s streets.

BEYONCE

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 15:04:12 +0100

Last year, Beyoncé Knowles came off tour and teetered on the verge of a major meltdown. As the R’n’B diva prepares to return to planet pop, Tim Noakes finds out how a break from the spotlight has changed her life and musical direction

Photography © Sharif Hamza
Styling Karen Langley

Parked up on a patch of wasteland in the heart of Brooklyn’s Navy Docks, Beyoncé Knowles stands outside a tatty Winnebago, cooking a slab of meat over a naked flame. The smell of singed steak and fire-lighter fluid hangs heavy on the Sunday afternoon breeze as she lip-syncs the words to Prince’s “Black Sweat” and swings her hips in time to the purple funk. In strict defiance of BBQ law, she forgoes a comedy apron and attends to the grill dressed in high heels, a shimmering Gareth Pugh silver snood, matching leggings and a leopard-skin bra. “This is the most glamorous handkerchief ever, it’s gangsta,” she giggles, nestling her nose into the shiny fabric. In a neighbouring apartment block, a bewildered granny stares at the surreal scene unfolding outside of her window. She disappears briefly, perhaps to check the dosage of her meds. After all, it’s not every day that a pop icon rolls into your backyard for a spontaneous summer cook-out – especially one dressed head-to-toe in bespoke outfits created by Tom Ford, Riccardo Tisci, Gareth Pugh, Haider Ackermann, Stefano Pilati and Marc Jacobs...

“That was fun! The juxtaposition was something I really connected with,” the 29-year-old singer says after the trailer trash fantasy shoot. “Grilling in Gareth Pugh and high heels, that’s an everyday thing for me… yeah right! But when I’m doing a shoot like this, I’m not at all shy about having the freedom to wear something fashionable, or something sexy, or showing more skin. I have no problem with being whatever character I need to be. I have my limits, clearly, but I think that’s the beauty of being a woman. We have so many different personalities and I love to tap into all of those.”
Sitting on a beige sofa in her other motor home, a $500,000 tour bus parked a few metres in front of the clapped-out camper van, Beyoncé seems quite petite compared to the bootylicious glamazonian on MTV. “I think it’s interesting because people think I’m a lot curvier than I am,” she says. “I’m definitely not like what people’s perception of me is. Every single day of my life somebody says, ‘You’re tiny!’ Every day! I guess everyone else puts more focus on it than I do.”
Quiet, considered and extremely polite, she sets aside the MacBook on which she’s been reviewing 12 hours of footage from the Mad Max inspired “Run The World (Girls)” video shoot, in which she plays the leader of an all dancing female army who take on a macho SWAT team in the Mojave desert. The quintessential multitasker, she’s been cutting scenes throughout the day in between modelling, grilling and getting her hair done and nails did. It’s this relentless, sleep when you’re dead approach that has kept Beyoncé ahead of the pack for a decade and a half now.
When she started out in Girl’s Tyme and then Destiny’s Child, she would always be the one practising her dance moves after the show, or reading the Bible rather than going out and partying. As she evolved into this millennium’s first solo pop star, selling 75 million records along the way, her anathema towards taking days off became even more ingrained. She used her spare time to create her own fashion and perfume lines, become a top flight Hollywood actress, serenade the Obamas at the Presidential Inauguration ball, marry the world’s most swagged-out rapper, set up a charity foundation for displaced families and, most exhaustingly of all, squeeze in some girl-on-girl action with Lady Gaga. It’s a miracle she didn’t get hooked on antihistamines, such is her allergic reaction to smelling the roses.
However, as her I Am… tour came to a spectacular end in Trinidad on February 18, 2010, the diva who once memorably sang, “Since fifteen in my stilettos been struttin’ in this game” realised that she needed to take a proper break – for the first time in her professional life. More than just fatigue from performing a high-energy two-hour show in 97 stadiums across the world, she yearned to experience what it was like to appreciate the regular things, like waking up every day in her own bed with her husband, instead of being alone in yet another soulless hotel room. So, after directing and editing the I Am… concert DVD, Beyoncé entered her TriBeCa apartment, kicked off her heels and disappeared from public life.
“I needed some time to live,” she recalls. “I’ve been signed to the same label since I was 12 years old and never had more than a month and a half off since I was 13. I’ve worked so hard for so many years and just felt like, ‘Well, why not?’ I learned a lot from the simple things in life, like picking my nephew up from school. Cooking. Going to museums. Seeing shows. Broadway plays. Going to restaurants. You know, living.”
Unable to fully shake the touring bug, she also hit the road with her Jigga Man, an experience that gave her the opportunity to be a bystander for once, to take in new cultures and, most surprisingly, to indulge her inner rock chick.
“It was really interesting being on a tour without working. I was able to go and see bands like The Dead Weather, Thom Yorke, Muse, and Rage Against The Machine. Seeing those audiences was a completely different culture for me. I really learned a lot from watching those shows. It’s such a different mindset from my audience. The mosh-pits, the fire, it was all just so soulful. I want people to be that free when they hear my music! I would love people to stage dive at my shows. It would be great. I mean, I say that, although if it happens at Glastonbury I’ll probably be like, ‘Oh, um, wait a minute!’”
Considering the wonder wall of indie-rock snobbishness that confronted her husband when he played Worthy Farm back in 2008, it’s testament to her mass appeal that no one has had a bad word to say about her headlining the Sunday night at this year’s festival. Not even Noel Gallagher.
“He (Jay-Z) really opened so many doors. I would have never thought about doing Glastonbury if I wasn’t there the night that he played. I guess it’s different with pop music as these songs are played at graduations and weddings. It’s definitely not as controversial or as hardcore as hip hop, so maybe some people feel more comfortable listening to pop. I am nervous though. But right now, this part of my life is all about embracing change and going to the next level, taking risks and showing my bravery. Not being safe. Not doing the song that everyone else on pop radio sounds like. Basically, what everyone else is doing, unless it’s something that’s natural for me, I want to do something completely different. I feel like I’ve earned that right. Risks excite me.”
Taking artistic chances has always marked Beyoncé out as an R’n’B renegade who revels in shaking up the mire of identikit supermarket pop with inspiring visions of future pop. From “Video Phone” and “Sweet Dreams” to the genre-defining “Crazy In Love” and “Single Ladies”, her ability to write unforgettable songs of love, hate and empowerment has cemented her place as a musical innovator. Industry bible Billboard has just given the singer their first Millenium Award, with Stevie Wonder, Michelle Obama, Bono, Gaga and Barbra Streisand all clearing their diaries to pay tribute. It’s fair to say that Beyoncé has surpassed her dreams of becoming the next Whitney Houston.
However, the business side of the show has also been put through the wringer of late. A few days before Dazed’s Brooklyn designer BBQ, the news wires hummed with reports that a video game developer was taking Beyoncé to court after she allegedly pulled out of a deal, and that she was no longer being managed by her father, the man who had steered her career from the outset. Combined with last year’s headlines about her ill-advised private gig for Colonel Gaddafi’s son and gossip columns about her sexy Heat perfume advert being banned from UK daytime TV, the timing of her prolonged vacation makes even more sense. So, did “the world’s most powerful musician”, as voted by Forbes in 2010, let unflattering press affect her creativity?
“Absolutely not,” the CEO of Beyoncé Inc says, without any hint of irritation when the subject is brought up. “I didn’t even know I’ve had negative press in the past three months! I didn’t. I think that’s one of the great things about living my life with my family and my friends and the people that I respect and I love. I kinda stand away from that madness. There’s always something negative about every celebrity if you’re looking for it.”
As she sits chatting about the pitfalls of celebrity culture, her legs cradling a big box of tissues, you get the sense that if she had to choose between setting her 6’8” Dutch bodyguard on a newspaper editor or the computer hacker who leaked her “Run The World (Girls)” single early, she’d choose the latter every time.
“I have no idea exactly how they got it. It’s scary, but what do you do?” she says philosophically in her warm Texan twang.  “It happens to just about everybody. It’s really unfortunate when it’s your first single and you’re not prepared. People have had to judge it without me presenting it to them. I shot the video early to pay attention to the details and not have to rush. Things happen that you can’t control. It’s disappointing but you can’t dwell on the past. I recorded that song nine months ago and it’s been really hard to keep it from leaking. In the end it leaked five weeks early. But that’s better than nine months, so I can’t complain!”
The unauthorised airing of the Major Lazer-produced track has meant that the self-confessed “control freak” has had to squeeze five weeks of work into just one, as well as preparing for her summer festival appearances, learning lines for Clint Eastwood’s remake of A Star Is Born, and finishing off her fourth album, which she calls “a gumbo of all of the things I’ve learned from my travels”. Coming out at the end of June, the album is a mix of big, almost retro, power ballads, and hyper hip pop tracks that pay homage to Fela Kuti’s afrobeats, Soca, and Brazilian rhythms. Entitled 4 – the date of her and Jay-Z’s marriage and both their birthdays – it’s packed with some of the rawest, emotional lyrics Beyoncé has ever written. The 16-time Grammy award winner has purposively not attempted to replicate what has gone before. In fact, her alter ego Sasha Fierce has all but been given the boot.
“I don’t want to hear about ‘Single Ladies’ or ‘Crazy In Love’. I don’t want to hear it. I believe that there are certain things that happen and they happen naturally,” she says matter-of-factly. “I killed off needing Sasha Fierce. I don’t need her anymore. I am Sasha Fierce. It’s interesting because now I’ve done it for so long it’s so easy for me to go into that performance mode. Literally, I go from being a country girl in the dressing room who’s laughing and being silly into, ‘Okay, it’s time to work!’ I don’t have to mentally prepare myself for it. Honestly, I’m much more interested in showing people the sensitive, the passionate, and the compassionate person that I am. More so than Sasha Fierce.”
It’s clear from how she carries herself both in private and on record, that her time away from the spotlight has given her a more mature approach to making music. After spending the day with her, it’s still hard to believe that a woman with such poise and elegance is not even 30 years old. How she maintains such calmness in the eye of a global media storm is anyone’s guess. For this shoot alone, there were three huge privacy screens, a rooftop bodyguard on paparazzi watch, a last minute change of location, two luxury tour buses, a coterie of assistants, a full time videographer and glam squad, and an umbrella to shield her on the three-metre walk from her Escalade to the tour bus. No wonder she covets normality.
“You want to know something that no one else knows?” she laughs heartily, as she has done throughout the whole day. “I get uncomfortable at a club when they play my music. When I go clubbing I end up dancing behind a wall of security guards. That’s not fun, right? It’s pretty sad. I don’t go to clubs very often because of that! Unless it’s an environment where people are not staring at me or trying to grab my hair, I won’t usually go to the dance floor. You know that Jim Carrey film, The Truman Show? That’s how it feels to be a celebrity.”
With her gap year nothing but a distant memory and 20-hour working days becoming the norm again rather than the exception, you can’t help but wonder if being a pop icon is really worth all the personal sacrifice.
“Being an icon is my dream,” she says as the MacBook blinks like HAL 9000 behind her. “It is the ultimate compliment and it has a lot of responsibilities. I take it very seriously. I feel like every time I take a picture and every time I perform onstage, I am conscious of my legacy. I’m conscious of the fact it’s going to be around even when I’m not. So I respect being someone that is able to be in that position. There are certain things that I just couldn’t do because I’ve worked so hard for my legacy and my career. Probably harder than anyone I know. So I respect it and I take it very seriously.”
But is she still as excited about making music as she was 15 years ago?
“Of course!” Beyoncé laughs. “Always!”

TEXT © TIM NOAKES 2011
PHOTOGRAPHY © SHARIF HAMZA 2011
DO NOT USE WITHOUT PERMISSION

RAEKWON

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 18:16:39 +0100

The Wu Tang slang master on a life spent hustling

“When I was a kid, I remember struggling; my mum was a single parent (1). I watched her go through so much. She was the type of individual who always told me, ‘I am your mother and your father.’ It was my aunt who told my mom to move to Staten Island when we were living in Brooklyn. Looking back, if I had never come to Staten Island, I probably would have never been a Wu-Tang member, and my dreams would have never come true. (2)

To a degree, I always wanted to be a gangster. I didn’t have any other opportunities. My neighbourhood, Park Hill Projects, was one of the worst in Staten Island (3). After a while I said to myself, ‘I gotta survive, I don’t wanna die out here with nothing’, so I turned to the life of crime. When you see a man come round the block with a brand new pair of sneakers, and you’ve got holes in your shit, you think to yourself, ‘I could make that money in a month or I could make it in 20 minutes.’ I learnt what the value of money was by paying attention to the winners and losers.

If you saw me in the street, I was never called by my Government name (4).
I had a problem with people calling me that at the time. Raekwon just fitted me to a T. It came from me being a five-percenter in the early to mid 80s. If you had a really great name that might mean you had some knowledge, some kinda smarts. I could have easily called myself Killer, but nah, that wasn’t my thing. I wanted a smarter name.

I remember GZA had a song “Life of a Drug Dealer” where he described a dealer’s mind-frame. I was like, ‘Oh, shit! I’m living that life’. It definitely influenced me to become a better writer, because I love telling stories and I’ve lived amongst a lot of crazy shit. I remember being in a house with crackheads, and people would come in and be like, ‘You want a buy this gun?’ and I would be like, ‘Whoa, shit, where did you get this from?’ So, with our music, it definitely was a reality for people living that life. And I was exposed to that life at fourteen, fifteen years old.

At that time, I was very wild. The music really motivated us, in a good way, and sometimes in a bad way. We would rather put on a Kool G Rap (5) album cos we got tired of hearing Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall. We wanted to hear some of that real hip hop like ‘Wanted Dead Or Alive’ because we were running with cats that were basically wanted dead or alive. When you’re on the streets, you don’t run from that shit, you say, “Yeah, nigger, you know where I’m at, you know how I get down.’ We had that mind-frame – if you don’t have nothing to live for you don’t have nothing to die for. We weren’t getting no fucking nine-to-five, we didn’t have no opportunites, we were always around a drug infested environment.

I did cross the boundary though. When I recorded the song ‘C.R.E.A.M’ (6), my eyes were red from getting high. I was a crackhead, but I had money. We would go get fresh and all of that, but we were still crackheads (7). When we got into smoking drugs it was the phase at the time. Back then, cocaine wasn’t a drug to make you look like you were struggling, if you had a cocaine habit it made you look like you had money, because that was an expensive drug. We were taking drugs and buying brand new sneakers every other day. We had a hand full of rings, chains and silk shirts. We felt like bosses. The drugs didn’t really deteriorate me.

When Wu-Tang signed a deal we changed our ways instantly (8). Once we started getting that fame where people started to check for us we had to make a decision to leave that lifestyle behind and move forward. It was a calling for us to get out of the hood and become legal. Once people gave us this celebrity status, we knew that we had to stop the shit that we were doing.

I definitely wanted to get away from that life, because I didn’t really enjoy it, it was just something that had to be dealt with at that time. I never liked the fact of getting up each day and having to run from the police, and selling drugs to my mother’s friends, and beating up people that we felt we just wanted to beat up because they did something stupid. I always wanted to be legit. A lot my friends went to jail for a long time, so I wasn’t able to see cats until later on, after being successful. I look at that type of shit and say to myself, ‘Damn, I could have been where he’s at.’ But maybe at the end of the day, it wasn’t my call to be there, my call was to be here. I’m definitely blessed.

When it came to our solo records, we had a plan (9). If my brothers had the right music at the time, I didn’t have a problem with them going first because I knew sooner or later I would get my opportunity to shine too. As a partner to your dude you don’t sit there and be jealous of it, you sit there and respect it and support it, because they’ll come and support you afterwards. Everything was all for the cause.

Around that time, we got into some friendly competition with Biggie (10).
It was never a beef, lets get that’s straight – it was just friendly competition with a little bit of attitude. But we respected Bad Boy because they were the only cats that were really successful like us, so it was kinda like Burger King going at McDonalds. I’ve always thought of B.I.G as one of the best MCs in New York. It wouldn’t be fair to not have a dispute with someone at the top of the game because everyone is competition, but it wasn’t a competition where we wanted to get into a fight, because that’s real beef.

Wu-Tang’s lyrical slang became famous, but it just came from growing up and saying funny shit that would make motherfuckers laugh. We’d go to another nigger’s town and have our own little code of words, and they’d be like, ‘Word. They call money C.R.E.A.M?!’ and the next thing you’d know they’d be saying it. Then we’d be like, ‘Look at those niggers over there using our word, yeah they love that shit.’ So we was already in a rock star frame of mine even back then.

The term C.R.E.A.M actually came from my cousin. He used to work for me back in the day, and that was my only way of getting him to do anything, because he always wanted to know he would be getting his money up top. But he called his money ‘cream’ because he felt like it was a piece of cheese for him to get. So we would laugh about it and ask him, ‘Why do you call it cream?’ and he’d be like, ‘Yo, it’s my spread!’ So it became funny to us and we would say, ‘We gonna get you your cream!’ The next thing you know it became a landmark word for money. As far as it being broken down into ‘cash rules everything around me’, that was something that Method Man’s man in the street came up with, which eventually became our song, ‘C.R.E.A.M’. It’s still one of my favourites, because in order to get money you have to struggle to make money – all we did was to define our struggle in another way because we grew up in a criminal atmosphere. When you come from the poor part and you get your hands on some money, you feel like it’s gonna be a better day. And that’s all we did, we were just trying to take care of ourselves in the best way we could, and we knew in order to do that we had to have cream man, we had to have money.

We definitely went from boys to men, and right now I feel like I’m at my finest as being an artist. Being in the game for a long time basically shows that I’ve still got the passion to make great music. All I’m doing now is living up to the standards of what people expect of me. I think it’s so important that the older you get the wiser you should get. I’m gonna rep Wu-Tang for life, that comes with me everywhere I go, it stands right next to me. And just because I’ve made an album called Shaolin vs Wu-Tang don’t ever think anything different (11). It’s always Wu-Tang for life. I’m Shaolin and I’m Wu-Tang. Don’t ever forget that.”

Text © Tim Noakes
Photography © Hugh Lippe

FOOTNOTES ON RAEKWON

1) Raekwon was born in Brooklyn on January 12, 1970.

2) He joined the Wu-Tang Clan, a nine-strong hardcore rap posse, in 1992. They released their bleak masterpiece, Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), a year later.

3) RZA, the founder of Wu-Tang, renamed the Clan’s home of Staten Island as Shaolin, to build on the group’s kung-fu mythology.

4) Born Corey Woods, Raekwon also goes by the names Lex Diamonds, Louis Diamonds, Rick Diamonds, and Shallah. He earned the appendage “The Chef” because he was the most fashion conscious member of the Clan. He can also whip up a serious spag bol.

5) Kool G Rap is often credited as the first rapper to include Mafioso content in his rhymes. 1990’s Wanted Dead Or Alive was also a big influence on Nas’s “NY State of Mind”.

6) Released as a single on January 31st 1994, “C.R.E.A.M” became famous for its chorus “Cash Rules Everything Around Me / C.R.E.A.M / Get the money / Dollar dollar bill y’all”

7) On “C.R.E.A.M” Raekwon raps: “But it was just a dream for the teen, who was a fiend / Started smokin woolies at sixteen.” A woolie is street slang for a joint mixed with PCP or crack cocaine.

8) Wu-Tang Clan signed to Loud Records, only after the label agreed that each member was allowed to sign a solo deal with any imprint of their choosing. This was part of RZA's plan for industry-wide domination, wherein "Each Wu member with a solo deal must contribute 20 percent of their earnings back to Wu-Tang Productions, a fund for all Wu members.”

9) Raekwon was the third Clan member to release a solo album, after Method Man and Ol Dirty Bastard. Only Built For Cuban Linx was released on August 1, 1995. To date it has sold 1.1 million copies in America alone. According to RZA the album “single-handedly ignited the Old School Mafioso mid to late 90s rap.” In 2009 he released Only Built For Cuban Linx 2. The albums have been described as hip hop’s equivalent to the first two Godfather films.

10) After Ghostface took B.I.G’s cover art aesthetic to task on a skit, Raekwon went on to rap: "To top it all off, beef with White (Frank White was Biggie's alias) / pullin' bleach out, tryna throw it in my eyesight.” Biggie responded on "Kick In The Door" by saying: "Fuck that, why try? Throw bleach in your eye."

11) Shaolin vs Wu-Tang is the rapper’s fifth solo album and features cameos from Ghostface, Method Man, Nas, Rick Ross, Lloyd Banks and other verbal hustlers. It’s out now on Ice H²O / EMI Records.

JAMIE SMITH vs RICHARD RUSSELL

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 10:58:47 +0000

In a rare interview, Jamie Smith, producer of the xx, and Richard Russell, boss of XL Recordings, meet Tim Noakes to discuss their love of UK bass culture, production and their work with the godfather of rap, Gil Scott Heron

Text © Tim Noakes
Photography © Tung Walsh

When the xx stood on stage accepting the 2010 Mercury Music Award, there were no crocodile tears or offal fashion in sight, just three humble musicians clad in black trying to process the craziness of the situation. Barely a year had passed since they had recorded their self-titled debut in a converted garage below XL Recordings, yet there they were; live on national TV, with Paul Weller sobbing into his soup bowl and the entire music industry giving them a standing ovation. Since that night at Grosvenor House, the trio have seen their album go gold, watched Shakira cover “Islands”, and grimaced as the Tories hijacked their music for political grandstanding. It’s been a weird ride.

Now, as their unforgettable year fades out, Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sims have retreated back into the shadows to take stock of the madness and to begin writing a follow up. Jamie Smith, the shy producer at the heart of their quiet revolution, has decided to go deeper underground.

Under the moniker of Jamie XX, he’s taken a sabbatical from the introspection of his day job to indulge his love of bottom heavy beats. So far he’s DJ’d on Rinse FM and at FWD, released a mix for Colette and a 12” on Numbers, warmed up mosh pits for OFWGKTA and, most excitingly, remixed the whole of Gil Scott Heron’s critically acclaimed comeback album, I’m New Here.

Scheduled for release in February 2011, it’s the 22-year-old’s love letter to sample culture and the history of the UK electronic underground. Against Smith’s booming backdrop of sub bass breakdowns, obscure samples, and 2-step rhythms, Scott Heron’s scarred poetic missives take on a more sinister edge. His spectacularly dense refix of “NY Is Killing Me” is as atmospherically menacing as anything Burial or Skream are capable of.

Early on during the sessions for the original Scott Heron album, Richard Russell, its producer and boss of XL Recordings, knew that he wanted Smith to remix it in its entirety, rather than farming out singles to the great and good of Hype Machine. No stranger to club culture himself, the man who created Kick Like a Mule’s 1992 proto rave hit “The Bouncer” felt that Smith’s textured production on xx and his dance remixes for Florence and Glasser would add a new dimension to his labour of love.

From Liam Howlett and Dizzee Rascal, to Jack White and M.I.A, Russell has always had a knack for spotting unique production talent. Since taking the helm of XL, the 39-year-old impresario has built an unparalleled reputation for spotting artists who will go on to redefine the cultural landscape. His belief in giving musicians total creative freedom has turned XL into one of the most influential independent labels in the world, with Vampire Weekend and Radiohead amongst their heaviest hitters.

Revitalized by the positive critical response to the sparse electronica he created for Scott Heron, Russell has refocused his attention on producing again and started releasing grime inspired blog beats under the pseudonym of WLD PTCH. He’s also one of the only producers in the world who can play a drum machine standing on his head. The man has mad skills, basically.
After weeks of trying to track them down, the famously publicity shy duo finally agreed to meet Dazed to discuss the importance of pirate radio culture, their evolution as producers and their experiences with the Godfather of rap.

Have you both always wanted to be record producers?

Jamie: My ambition was to DJ in a club, but it was a few years before I got to do that. I gave mix-tapes to people but I never really thought about where I was going.

Richard: I also started making mix-tapes and selling them. I had a stall in Camden market. That’s really what a record company is, apart from the fact it's not legal. You sort music, get the artwork done, do the manufacturing and then sell them. That was actually the most fun, visceral way of running a record label that I’ve ever been involved in, because you talk to every single person who buys something. It was nice to do that.

Jamie: None of this had been planned, I never had an idea of where I wanted to be and I didn't ever really think that I'd be able to do this as a living. Everything has been just out of this world. I didn't have any expectations, which has made the whole experience a lot better. None of us in the xx are performers. At school we were definitely the people who never put our hands up in class. So going from that to playing shows infront of a lot of people is pretty insane to think about. Two or three years ago we could never have fathomed it.

Richard: I definitely never had a plan either, but I did have a feeling of being bored and stifled where I was. I felt an intense desire to go somewhere else. Something about music and fantasy and escape just clicked in my head at a certain point. It had a lot to do with hip hop but also with the breakbeat side of rave as well. All the different things that happened were just ways of transcending Edgeware, where I grew up. I wanted something interesting and exciting to happen really. I wanted an escape from boredom.

Jamie: I lived in Greater London so it wasn't boring, but I've never really been good in social situations. Now I'm trying to be social and do things that most other people do normally. If I'm sitting at a dinner table with a bunch of people I usually find myself thinking that I'd actually rather be at home making music. I still find it very hard to actually make myself do anything musically, but when I think about it it's actually the most enjoyable time.

Richard: I'd agree with that as well, definitely.

Although you're quite a social person?

Richard: Yeah because there just isn't anything as good as that. There was a phase when I just stopped doing it and I was really unhappy but I never really put two and two together at the time. I was always compelled to make music in some way and when you're compelled to do it you get a release from doing it. If you don't express yourself a lot of stuff gets internalised and it could actually do you a lot of damage. I've got a feeling that everyone should be either painting a picture or writing a poem or singing a song or making a beat or something. I'm pretty sure it's part of being human.

Even if it's not appreciated on a wider scale?

Richard: That's not important, it's actually doing it which is important. Having success is complicated because it comes with plenty of downsides as well as upsides and it can stop people making good things. When I was very young I had a hit song with ‘The Bouncer’ and a lot of people didn’t really like it. Well, initially people liked it because it was a big pirate club song, but then it got into the charts and people decided they didn't like it. We did a deal with a major as well and it didn't work out so all these experiences weren't really conducive to what I was doing musically. It threw me. A big part of being an artist is how you navigate that stuff.

Jamie: I totally agree. I never really thought about it, but after DJing and seeing what people get into, I've been thinking about making stuff just to make people happy. But when you try and make something for other people instead of yourself it kind of messes with your happiness. When we made xx we were pretty naive in everything we were doing, which worked out for us because we didn't think about anybody else. Since then it's been hard to get back into that mind frame, but after playing a lot of gigs and DJing a lot, it has come full circle and we're all making an effort to make things for ourselves again. That's kind of the most natural thing you can do.

Richard: That's where success messes with people's heads quite a lot because once you know that all these other people like it you've got to make something for them; but who are they? And what do they want? That's just pure confusion really. I've always said this and this includes my experiences with having a label, I don't care about the public. Of course I care about their lives, but I don't care what they think of music. You can't be thinking about that, people have got to be strong at being themselves. Someone once said to me that they wanted to be me. I thought ‘that's just hopeless’, you've got to be like you and do a good job of that.

Jamie: One of the biggest things I think about while making music is progression. So I don't think I'm going to be trying to make music like we did, I don't think any of us are, it's a big deal for me because dance music is the music that I love and dance music is all about progression, I don't think we can make something that tries to sound like something we've done before. We'll make music because of the music that's influenced us since we made the last record.

Richard you once said on Twitter that people connect to the xx because of the space that they leave in their songs. How important is silence in music?

Richard: Well, it’s similar to sub bass, there's a sort of secret aspect to it, because it disappears if you listen to it on a laptop or radio speaker. There's nothing else in music that does that. I've always been a real believer in a sub bass breakdown. It's quite rare that records actually do that completely because the record disappears. Space is very important because everything is very cluttered now. There's such a tendency to do so many things at the same time at the moment and any psychologist will tell you that you should never do more than one thing at once. To me, the xx album felt a bit more calm than that. And there's a lot of space in my Gil record as well. It's very sparse; he used this word 'spartan' quite a lot.

Jamie: I hope not too many people do it though, because it would make it less special, there'd be too much of it. We were thinking about writing songs under aliases for other people where we'd make songs that we still like which would probably mean they’d be quite empty. It'd be nice to put out something really big that still has a lot of space in it and sounds quite different to most pop things but can still be as popular.

Jamie, what led you to make the Gil remix album so club orientated?

Jamie: I admired the original Gil album so much because it all fits so perfectly together. The lyrics and the tracks work so well together and I didn't want to lose that element in remixing it. I grew up listening to Gil but I wanted to put it to something that was more relevant to me, it just so happens that this is the music that is popular again now. It also allowed me to try something else, which was how I ended up finding samples that related to Gil.

With vinyl sales on the wane, do you think the digging in the crates sample culture is dying out?

Jamie: I don’t know, I just really enjoy doing it. I enjoy the idea of using something that was recorded 30 years ago and making it sound new. I love finding an amazing dusty groove.

Richard. Exactly. It takes a fair bit of audacity to sample something. I think a lot of people won't sample stuff because they haven't got the balls or they’re worried about how they'll be judged by other people. If you don't care about that then you're more at liberty to do what you want. I can't really think of that many times when I hear people sampling and I think it's not original.

Have you heard the new Black Eyed Peas track?

Richard: Okay, that's a different thing.

They sampled “The Time Of My life” from Dirty Dancing.

Richard: Yeah, that isn't the best approach.

Jamie, what did you make of Shakira's cover of ‘Islands’?

Jamie: Shocking. I'm very happy she did it and it was pretty amazing to be on the side of the stage at Glastonbury watching her play our song but I don’t think she should've sampled our record though. They sampled my drums on it but I think they would've been better off if they just completely redone it.

Was We’re New Here always going to be this bass odyssey?

Jamie: Yeah, because it’s what I was listening to at the time. All my DJ sets are progressions of rhythms and eras of music so I wanted it to represent a DJ set that I would like to hear. I didn't want it to sound like a DJ set because I would like to hear a DJ set that was fluid and didn't change as much as my record does. But I wanted it to be progression of sound. I had a concept for the whole thing to be like a good night at the pub and also to represent the music that I love and also to sound like. I wanted to show what I’ve been listening to on the radio for such a long time.

How much has pirate radio influenced you?

Richard: It's a massive influence for me and it's a massive part of the history of everything I've been involved in. It's always been a thread with the label from Prodigy through to Dizzee and everything else really. I always listen to pirate stations every weekend. There's a pirate radio music current that flows through British music, which is actually quite undocumented. That's one of the reasons it's got some magic because there's all these different genres, all this different music from lovers rock and reggae to speed garage, dubstep and rave. London pirate radio music is basically the best genre ever.

Jamie: Yeah I love it too. I was really happy to be able to play on Rinse before it got its FM license. I mean I'm happy that they got their FM license but it's nice to have been able to have done that. And I never really thought about it as a genre in itself but it's true, pirates play such a broad range of underground music that it does all kind of sound like one genre.

Richard: Nobody wants to be in a genre because then you get stuck to it, but that's not a bad genre to get stuck in because you can do anything. Maybe because it's happening for the right reason, they’re not on there to earn money.

Is it harder to make pop music than club music?

Jamie: For me, making a pop record took a lot more effort because it was a melding of three different people's ideas rather than just your own, which is why it came out sounding like that. It's not a conscious decision, at least for me, to make something hardcore and bass driven. It was harder and more conscious driven to make a pop record. When we started out playing clubs we made these kind of house tracks to play live… I'm glad they never surfaced! From seeing people's reactions in clubs to some of the bad music that we made compared to the other demos we made, it was obvious what our record should sound like. The Gil remix record is just what I wanted to do instead of having a collage of all three of our influences.

Richard, you once said that when pop music is weak it’s the best time to come through with something that's completely original. Is now that time?

Richard: People idealize different eras but in any given time there's a lot of stuff clogging up the airwaves and the supermarkets. I think people can get the wrong message from seeing what's out there and thinking 'shit unless I do something that's really like what everyone else does then no-one's going to hear me' but I don't think that's correct. I think if you do something totally unlike what everyone else does then people will hear of you eventually.

© TIM NOAKES 2011

DWAYNE OMARR

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 15:43:04 +0000

In 1985 Dwayne Omarr tried to change the world with his unique brand of Bible bass. But when his vocoder party jams failed to ignite the charts, he disappeared underground. Now, after more than 20 years in the shadows, Aphex Twin’s label has rescued the “Crown Prince of Electro Funk” from obscurity in order to funk up a whole new generation of bass cadets…

Text © Tim Noakes
Photography © Jake Michaels

Royal funk protocol dictates that when you speak to Dwayne Omarr, the fabled Crown Prince of Electro Funk, you must gratuitously pepper your conversation with the f-word as often as possible. For not a minute goes by when this man isn’t thinking about freaking the funk. To those in the know, Omarr is as much of a musical pioneer as Bootsy Collins, George Clinton, Roger Troutman and James Brown. Unfortunately, most folk have never heard of him. Having once teetered on the verge of 80s chart superstardom, Omarr has spent the majority of the last 25 years in the funk wilderness, when he should have been lording it up in the electro pop Hall of Fame with Mantronix and Egyptian Lover. Even worse, he’s had to stand by and watch as modern R’n’B jokers use his beloved tools – the 808 drum machine, synth bass and vocoder – to commit unforgivable crimes against music. But now, having signed with Aphex Twin’s Rephlex record label, the Crown Prince is back from exile and keen to reclaim his throne.

“I’m listening to artists now, like T-Pain, and they’re abusing what we started,” his funkyness says from inside his Californian castle. “That’s why in the late eighties we laid off the vocoder and voice box for a minute. We let it breathe, and then planned to come back and hit it again. That’s what I’m doing right now. I’d kill T-Pain in a vocoder battle. Murder him! And the bass synth? When they originally created that sound and put it in my hands, I felt like I was born with it! I’m just funky by nature!”
God may have made him funky, but when Omarr was born in 1966 there wasn’t a bass synth or vocoder in sight. It wasn’t until he was 12 that he first started making music when his mother’s uncle, a guitarist for BB King, gave him a harmonica. He quickly graduated to the bass guitar, which his father bought him from a local pawnshop.

“When I was a kid, the bass always stuck out in a song. It spoke to me. It had a language of its own. Sometimes I wouldn’t even know the name of a song but I could hum the bassline. I recall my mother asking me ‘why did I pick up the bass rather than the guitar or the saxophone?’ It was just that basslines in general – whether it was synthesized bass or upright bass – told a story to me.”

He also dabbled in a bit of tuba. But as anyone who has ever attempted to wring some funk out of its twisted pile of pipes will tell you, the chances of making sweet music with it are pretty slim. Omarr, however, embraced the challenge: “I was a little bored with the tuba’s sound,” he recalls. “So one year I brought in a wireless microphone and hooked it up to a Cry Baby Wah-Wah pedal, and stuck it inside. So I was playing ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ with a wah wah tuba! Everybody wanted to play it after that. I suppose you could have called me the Jimi Hendrix of the tuba.”

His natural musical dexterity didn’t go unnoticed, and when he was 14 he appeared on the NBC TV show, Superkids, which led to a meeting with Prince Charles Alexander of Prince Charles and The City Beat Band fame. Omarr’s parents hired Prince Charles to mentor him, and they travelled to New York to record “Bush Beat” for Slyck. In 1982, Omarr was introduced to Maurice Starr, a music impresario who made his name creating the boy bands New Edition and New Kids on the Block. Impressed by Omarr’s mastery of the bottom end, together they started kicking out the jams and his signature sound – an uptempo mix of 808 beats, vocoded vocals, synth strings and big electro basslines – starting bubbling to the surface. Around his 18th birthday the young producer was bestowed with the title, the Crown Prince of Electro Funk. “I wasn’t really confident in my vocal ability at the time, so I would relate the melodies and the actual tones I had in my head to the vocoder, and sometimes I would use a voice box. That way I could play it exactly as I heard it in my head. What separated me from everyone else was that I could actually play and understand melodies, while other guys just knew how to hold one key down and rap through the vocoder. They couldn’t make it talk like Roger Troutman or me. So I became the Crown Prince because of that and the fact that I paid homage to those that came before me. I mean, if they want to call me King, you know, I’ll put the crown on, but I’m cool with Crown Prince.”

Success came quickly for the young funkateer, with his Zapp-esque feelgood debut single “This Party’s Jam Packed” becoming a club hit. He then hooked up with Boston’s first rap star, Rusty “The Toe Jammer” Pendleton – a teen DJ who scratched with his feet – to produce “Breakdown New York Style” for his group The Sure Shot 3. Life was good, and the royal coffers began to sag with swag.

“I would finance my projects with the funds I would be getting from doing production on other projects and sometimes I would do anywhere from four to six songs a day. I bought my mum her first condo when I was twenty-one, and I went to live in the Bahamas for a while. I skipped the “going to college” section of life and went straight to the “let’s get some money” section. My Dad was an upholsterer and he loved what he did, but what he would clear in a year, a lot of times I would clear in a month – all by the time I was 21.”

His distinctive sound created so much heat that Critique Records offered Omarr his own album deal. In 1985 he released his funk opus – Holy Rock, an album that showcased his love of the Lord, electro rock and, in hindsight, questionable fashion sense. On the cover he wore a pink suit with a mirrored shoulder pad, gold crucifix earring and an afro mullet drenched with so much Soul Glow that people were warned not to smoke within a mile of the photo studio. But even though it contained the early techno anthem “Save the Children”, it transpired that the world at large wasn’t ready for a religious electro funk odyssey, and the album bombed.

“Holy Rock was definitely ahead of its time,” its 45-year-old creator says now. “I hear a lot of my riffs on other records from the Holy Rock album. They’ll probably never give me credit for it, but that’s okay, someone had to step out and do it first. I think anybody that tried to create a hybrid like that back in that era would have probably had the same result. I got banned on a lot of American radio stations because it was too demonic for the religious community and for the secular community it was too religious. Prince also had Holly Rock out when I released Holy Rock. If it was today I would do exactly the same thing because one thing that I didn’t do was become a clone of somebody else. I remained true to who I am. I am still getting requests and folks still consider that album a collector’s item. It’s selling on Ebay for like a $100 an album.”

Undeterred by Holy Rock’s lacklustre reception, in 1986 Omarr flew down to Miami and produced the single “Mr Gigolo” for his protégés, Omarr’s Girls. He didn’t have to look too far for lyrical inspiration. “My main reason for going to parties was to primarily find a cute girl that I liked and then leave the party,” he recalls, ironically a few days after discovering that his Dad fathered 31 children. “I wouldn’t even stay at the party. I’d be there for twenty minutes. Maybe not even that. They had already been seduced by my music before they even met me. I’m still dodging them now… but I had to put that crown down when I became a family man. My wife don’t play. If I ever stepped out on her it would be a wrap. I had many girlfriends simultaneously up until I met her, but these days I’ve had to hang up the G.”

Omarr spent the rest of the 80s cooking up hot funk for Luke Skywalker of 2 Live Crew, New Edition’s Ralph Tresvant, Betty Wright, and, most notably r’n’b singer Suave, who had a huge hit with a remake of “My Girl”. Five years later Suave was sentenced to life in prison after torching a crack house that killed a drug addict.

After touring with the Arsenio Hall farewell show in 1991, Omarr went underground, turning his hand to ghost-writing and building up a successful music consultancy firm as grunge took hold of the charts and electro pop morphed into rave. Then, one night in 1999, his life took a disastrous twist. “I dozed off on the way to LAX airport and hit a telephone pole. They don’t bend. The car folded up on me like an accordion and crushed my leg. That same weekend, my wife was in hospital giving birth to my daughter. So she’s in one hospital, I’m at another, and we had just moved out of our house but not yet moved into our new one, so basically I was laid up in the hospital with a crushed leg, unable to be with my wife and new baby and homeless – even though I had $700,000 in the bank. It was crazy.”

Doctor’s advised him that it was best to amputate his leg but Omarr refused, turning to his bible for pain relief instead. After months in a wheelchair, he started to learn how to walk again with a cane.

“One day I was at a meeting, and I left my cane there,” he remembers. “I had a nice one like Ronald Isley with a gold handle. I believe it was the Spirit of God that said, ‘If you can walk away from it you don’t need it anymore’. I haven’t walked with a cane or a limp since. No one would ever know my leg was crushed unless they saw the scar.”

Around the same time, thousands of miles across the Atlantic, Grant Wilson-Claridge, the co-owner of Rephlex Records, was stumbling upon the Crown Prince’s golden grooves for the first time. “I first heard ‘Jam Packed’ back in 2000,” the Braindance maverick recalls. “I grew up listening to Prince, George Clinton and Egyptian Lover so, being quite a spotter, I was surprised I hadn’t heard of it and I also couldn’t believe how few people knew of Dwayne’s tracks. To me, he’s like James Brown’s younger brother getting recruited into Underground Resistance. He always attempts to refresh and exceed his musical boundaries. When I found out that he was still making music I thought more people could probably do with hearing it. Me and my partner have a lot of respect for this dude.”

After more than twenty years away from the limelight, Omarr is relishing the chance of exposing his music to a new generation of bass heads with the release of Multi Funk, a collection of his classic tracks alongside some brand new cuts. Sadly, his taste in fuchsia fashion has remained a thing of the past.

“I don’t even know where the pink suit is!’ the Crown Prince laughs. “But it’s an honour to be coming back. Everything goes full circle and the good thing about it is that it gives kids an opportunity to see where some of their favourite artists like Snoop got their sounds from. They’ll be able to have a little history lesson and discover the contribution that was made by myself and others like me. Once upon a time I regretted not becoming a pop star, but now I don’t because what I gained in experience you can’t trade that for a few years of jumping in front of the camera. I prefer the route I’ve taken even though it wasn’t my intended one, because I’ve basically been still self-employed since I was thirteen. A lot of these artists who had their ‘big breaks’ were discarded as soon as the record companies had used them. Now they’re broke, and I’m not. Haha.”

© TIM NOAKES 2011

DAVID BYRNE

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 18:14:07 +0000

The New Wave icon reflects on a life of intense experimentation

“When I was younger, my family moved around a lot, so I depended on myself for entertainment. I had friends, but every time we moved I had to make a new set of friends, which in retrospect must have been a little disturbing, but at the time it just seemed normal. I needed a creative output to express myself, so I learnt how to draw and also how to play other people’s songs (1).

I was terrified of social interactions in real life, but somehow stepping on stage I realised that, intuitively, it was an artificial situation and I could blurt out whatever I wanted and sing, scream, do whatever I liked. After I stepped off stage, I went back to being the pathetic little guy I really was. There were always jitters before going on stage but there was no kind of terror, it was almost something that I had to do: an urgent need to communicate.

I was interested in art and science, but I looked at an engineering university and then I looked at an art school, and one just looked like a lot more fun than the other! It seemed like a better outlet for me. (2)

I didn’t really think that music was a serious pursuit, I did it as an amateur thing in high school, and then I would jam with friends in a band at art school. It was all fun, but I didn’t take it seriously; I didn’t think ‘this is what I want to do’ until Chris (3) said, ‘Let’s get together and have a little band, and actually try and play our own songs.’

We decided to form Talking Heads, although we didn’t really have a name at the time. We auditioned at CBGB’s (4) and performed to 20 people more or less. It wasn’t like a movie where every one stood up and cheered, but you could tell they kind of liked it. We were a support act for The Ramones, so it was nice that the same people who liked them liked us – we were miles apart musically but that was a nice moment, when people could like vastly different things. After that I started to take it more seriously. I wasn’t sure whether it would ever generate enough income to pay the rent, but it did. Even before we had a record contract we could make enough money playing clubs to quit our day jobs.

Back then I was a lot more wilfully eccentric, but a lot of that was genuine as well. There was a slightly scary intensity that now has turned in to something else – I don’t know if you would describe it as something completely mellow, but it’s not quite the nervous, edgy thing that it was completely 100 per cent then. Now I’m playing other psychological notes as opposed to the one thing all the time.

From the beginning, I thought I was making pop music. I just couldn’t quite hit the target, and I’d end up with something else. I was aiming to make my own kind of pop music within restrictions I set up for myself – I wasn’t going to try and look like a rock star that existed because that part was already taken. Even the songs that ended up being really popular, a lot of them I had no idea that they would be the pop hits. I’d just think, ‘oh, this other one is a little more tuneful’ –I couldn’t predict it. I thought, ‘Okay, you might not know what song it’s going to be, but something is going to hit at some point.’ You might just not be able to do it again because it may have been a bit of an accident in the first place.

Early on with the videos I thought, ‘Here’s a great way to integrate my art school interests and bring that into the music world I’m in now (5).’ At that point you could do these music videos and get them on to television within a couple of weeks after doing it because they were starved for content, unless it was really horribly done. Almost anything you gave them, they would put it out there. It’s the same thing now with people posting things on YouTube.

Drugs were around and I tried them, a bit. But it never really shifted over to where they became a big focus of my life. I felt like, you could get high and have a lost weekend, but you would have to get back to work on Monday morning. I had a little bit of that attitude where I thought, ‘I have to write stuff, I can’t destroy myself, I have a job to do here.’ So there was a little bit of a survival instinct in a sense, to not live beyond my means and not to buy lots of things I couldn’t afford.

Some of our sound was influenced by African pop. In the late 70s it was great to hear what those bands were doing with their electric guitars and drums. They were playing and using them in completely different ways than we were. It was exciting, and it made us realise that we were limiting ourselves to the way we used our instruments and the way we arranged our songs, and that we had a similar enthusiasm – when we started working together on My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts that became a little more overt (6). But we took the longest route possible to re-invent the wheel, and ended up with a fractured, bizarre sort of funk at the end. Some guys from Public Enemy enjoyed the layering and mixing stuff we were doing.

Early on I realised that if I started doing extra musical projects or projects outside the band, besides it being exercising other musical muscles, you ended up with something you could bring back – with some kind of inspiration of new excitement or energy, or enthusiasm that you could bring back to the band. So, I realised early on that even though it might not seem like it’s going anywhere, the detours are just as important as the main road that you’re going on. We had our animosities as bands do, but I think we were also ahead of other groups as we involved musicians that could play things outside of what we did. We were really interested in that, and I knew that that was going to take me somewhere else eventually (7).

Often when I sing the older songs, I go back to the frame of mind I was in when I wrote them, which may never be the way people hear them, but I go back to the place I was in when I wrote it. Occasionally something happens in the world that completely changes your perception. On an earlier tour, we were doing “Life During Wartime” and after 9/11 we dropped it from the set because we thought ‘this isn’t very tasteful’. But after a while, we started adding it back in, and of course it had a completely different meaning at that point, but it was good that it had a different meaning. Other than that, we had a couple of others, but I tend to re-create a mental space from the past when I start singing them. I don’t think I could write the same songs now as I wrote then, even if I tried.

Most recently I brought choreographers in to help ‘shake up the show’ for Ride, Rise, Roar (8). I’m not a great dancer but I love how different music makes you want to move in different ways. Besides being emotional it’s a very physical thing. I hope that people don’t compare it to Stop Making Sense (9) because I think what Jonathan Demme did is pretty hard to beat.

Music has always been a cathartic release for me. I guess I’ve changed a lot. Not as a songwriter, as a person. Some people think for better, some for worse. I just know that if I had kept everything bottled up, bad things would have happened.”

TEXT © TIM NOAKES
PHOTOGRAPHY © LINA SCHEYNIUS

FOOTNOTES ON
DAVID BYRNE 
1
David Byrne was born May 14, 1952 in Dumbarton, Scotland. He lived in Britain, Canada and America all before the age of eight. He taught himself to play the harmonica, guitar, accordion and violin.

2
Byrne attended the Rhode Island School of Design and then the Maryland Institute College of Art. Jeff Koons graduated a few years after Byrne had left.

3
Byrne dropped out of art school and formed a short-lived band called "The Artistics" with fellow RISD student Chris Frantz. The duo, along with Frantz's girlfriend Tina Weymouth, moved to NYC and in 1975 they formed Talking Heads, with guitarist Jerry Harrison.

4
Talking Heads played their first gig at the legendary NYC rock venue on June 8, 1975. CBGB’s sadly closed down in 2006.

5
The band’s experimental pop videos for “Road to Nowhere” and “Once In A Lifetime” helped to define the early lo-fi DIY aesthetic of MTV, alongside fellow new wave acts, such as DEVO and Blondie.

6
Released in February 1981, Byrne’s solo collaboration with Brian Eno is widely acknowledged as one of the first albums to use sampling techniques. It was heavily inspired by African percussion, funk and world music.

7
Talking Heads disbanded in 1991, with Byrne later citing musical differences as the cause of the break-up. Away from the group, Frantz and Weymouth enjoyed considerable success as Tom Tom Club, in particular the pop rap hit “Genius Of Love”.

8
Directed by Hillman Curtis Ride, Rise, Roar is a documentary film chronicling the Songs of David Byrne and Brian Eno Tour between 2008–2009. It has just been released on DVD, so check it out.

9
Widely regarded as one of the finest examples of the concert film genre, Demme’s documentary on Talking Heads was shot over three nights at Hollywood’s Pantages Theatre. The band raised the shooting budget of $1.2 million themselves. The film was released on April 24, 1984.

CLARE MAGUIRE

Thu, 16 Dec 2010 11:02:57 +0000

Epic pop inspired by broken dreams and surreal encounters
While Florence has been warbling her way to world domination, Clare Maguire, a singer with an equally powerful set of lungs, has quietly been preparing her own pop takeover. Under a shroud of mystery that Burial would be proud of, the raven-haired vocalist has spent the last two years working on her debut album with N-Dubz producer Fraser T Smith. Mixing poetic fragility, folk harmonies, epic production and, of course, Maguire’s thundering voice, Light After Dark evokes the raw pop power of classic Eurythmics and Kate Bush. N-Dubz, it’s not.
“I do actually quite like Dappy though. He’s funny,” she says during a break from shooting her album cover. “I’m coming from somewhere that is so opposite to Fraser, it’s not what people are going to expect from him or from me, but it works. I want my music to be big; I want it to be something that a lot of people like. I just hope it achieves what we want it to achieve, which is for as many people as possible to listen to it and appreciate it.”
While she shares the same commercial aspirations as Gaga and Katy Perry, Maguire is keen to downplay the OTT clichés associated with modern pop. Sticking to her distinctly un-showbiz name, Maguire refuses to write about getting crunk in the club. Instead, she finds musical inspiration in a different group of lost souls.
“When I moved down to London from Birmingham I used to go around a lot of old man pubs in Hackney by myself and sit next to 50-year-old men who’d tell me about their lives and lost dreams. That’s something that makes me really sad and makes me write. My family is Irish, so the Celtic tradition of sitting in pubs and listening to stories is something I grew up around. I think I’m just a really old person in a young person’s body. I didn’t even know what MySpace was until my dad told me!”
Ironically it was only after she uploaded her demo of “Strangest Thing” to the site that the world began to take notice of her talent. After an electrifying performance at Green Man in 2008, the former Topshop assistant found herself in the middle of major label bidding blood bath that led to Jay-Z buying her shots in New York, Rick Rubin taking her to a private Leonard Cohen concert in LA, and Lucian Grainge, the big boss of Universal Records, signing her for an “eye-watering” amount.

“I’m too normal for all this,” she laughs as a make up artist applies nail varnish to her toes. “My favourite thing to do is go into a Wetherspoons pub with all my friends from Birmingham. It’s just a surreal situation to be a singer with a record deal, because that just doesn’t happen where I’m from. When I got signed my friends just didn’t get it. I was like, ‘you know at the end of the X-Factor when they win that thing, well that’s what I’ve got’, and they were like ‘but how have you got a record deal without meeting Simon Cowell?’”

Text © Tim Noakes

BRIAN ALDISS

Thu, 16 Dec 2010 11:00:32 +0000

THE GODFATHER OF SCIENCE FICTION ON LIFE, SPACE, KUBRICK AND A £24,000 SENTENCE
“I’ve been writing stories since the age of three, although I've no idea what they were about (1). They've happily vanished with time. I was brought up in the middle of Norfollk in a dull town. It had a cinema but very few other cultural activities except the damn church. But my grandmother lived in Peterborough which was civilised city. It had beautiful swimming baths, libraries and in particular, a museum that my uncles would take me to. Thank God for my uncles. Inside, it had a full and perfect dinosaur skeleton that had been fished out of the mud of the river Nene, which you could see out of the museum windows. I cannot tell you how much I loved that creature, I thought it was so marvellous. Whenever possible I would go and see it, count its spines. My imagination caught fire.
Then the war came along. That seemed to catch everyone's attention. I left school and joined the army. I volunteered and went over to Burma, which was full of shit and flies, and then I went to Sumatra where they gave me a theatre to run. The idea was that we could entertain the locals, dance with the women, screw them if necessary, have film shows, all the rest of it. All that was very pleasant and sweet. I had a nice year there. At that time there was a general election in England, the one that got rid of Churchill and got Clement Attlee in instead. I wasn't allowed to vote because I wasn't 21. This turned me against England. I thought, ‘what a rotten shitty place’. I had been out here for four years, enduring God knows what, malaria, all sorts.
When I returned I got on a train to Oxford. It had bookshops and libraries and was a good place to be a writer. What I found out later was that there were all sorts of other benefits including the fact that when you submitted a story with a covering letter to a magazine in the United States, the word Oxford rang a bell. It wasn’t as if you were saying you were in Clifton Hampden or some fucking place like that. I tried to go to Oxford University and went to see a horrible little man in a pinstriped suit to get a grant so that I could go study there but he didn’t think I was intelligent enough, perhaps because I was writing Science Fiction.
My first wife was just impossible (2). I wrote Non-Stop (3) when I was in that dreadful situation. I was trapped in this tight-arse little world like the characters in the book. These people are trapped for several generations, in these spaceships, which they believe to be the world. That is the value of Science Fiction – it has a metaphorical quality, so one narrow thing can apply to a whole society.
By the time Hothouse (4) came out, I was really broke, between marriages and living in a one room in a little Oxford slum, which was quite fun. I was a friend of C.S.Lewis’s because he was very keen on science fiction. Lewis got hold of a copy of Hothouse and liked it very much and said ‘Oh Brian this is tremendous, I’m going to send a copy to my friend Tolkien’. Everyone in Oxford knew Tolkien, he’d walk about in suits with his Anglo-Saxon grammar and a very vague expression. So he read it and actually sent me a letter to say how much he’d enjoyed it and how much of a wonderful feat of the imagination he thought it was. Of course I was very chuffed with this, but then about a month later I got another letter from Tolkien saying ‘I’ve re-read your novel again and I don’t think I’ve praised it enough, it’s absolutely splendid.’ Two letters from Tolkien! I could live for a year on them if I had sold them, but of course I lost them in the slum, being drunk. Two letters from Tolkein and I lose them! God!
I wrote Super Toys (5) as a direct reaction to my formative rejection by my parents. I don't think I realised it at the time. Five years before I was born, my mother gave birth to a stillborn child. She so fantasised about that. I was never going to be as good as that wonderful child was. Without knowing it I drew from that and it gave my writing power.
If you don’t mind my saying so, I hate the term sci-fi. I write Science Fiction, or SF. Sci-fi is a slum, a nursery term coined by an American number one fan called Forrest Ackerman who later made public apology for coining it. I believe that secretly that the 'middle classes' think that SF is for the working class. Is this a viable theory? I've no idea. The number of times I could have been invited to do something on television or whatever and I'm not. Why? Because I write Science Fiction. The fact is, if you're still able to write that's a great thing because my life does depend on my writing. I would never be stifled.
One of the best SF films I’ve ever seen is Alien. When you get on that planet, oh God it really is awful! Ridley Scott knew what he was doing. But I thought A.I was a drivelling sort of movie (6). I once called Stanley the greatest SF writer the age, but I was probably pissed at the time. When we were working together Margaret said to me 'Oh God darling why are you putting yourself through this'. And I said' 'Well I always wanted to work with a genius'. I never thought it was going to be easy and it wasn't easy. But there were so many compensations, including Stanley's marvellous sense of humour. I mean many a time we were rocking with laughter. We spent all day smoking and drinking coffee, arguing about what was going to come next. His dedication was such he died of it. Come on, you have to be pretty fond of a guy like that.
Stanley couldn't finish A.I and in the end it came down to Spielberg. I wrote to Spielberg and said I had an idea how he could finish the film and wrote how. He came back immediately and said, “there’s one sentence in your story I would like to buy from you and for that I will offer you £24,000 pounds.” One sentence. The sort of advance I would've got for a novel. It was a good sentence. He paid up immediately. And so I am actually the only guy that has sold material to both Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg.
I still firmly think that we have to go to Mars. Homo Sapiens are only 45 million years old and it would just broaden people's minds. I think it's necessary. For one thing, who knows what catastrophes are going to overcome earth. There are now 7 billion people on earth. That’s far too many. But I'm too old to even go to the moon; I'm almost too old to go to Norfolk. I think that one reason to go to Mars is that it’s the stepping stone to Jupiter where there are 4 moons that are viable entities (7). They are very, very far away but there may be better modes of transport later on, who knows. Even now people are being terribly resourceful in finding all sorts of ways to make a car go. People will be using bird shit before so long.
Will A.I overtake human life? It doesn't seem to me that you could construct a machine that would have the equivalent of a mental stroke spiritual life. They wouldn't see the need of it. And so they would be totally alien from the human race from which they sprang. Perhaps they will, I don't know. But you know I’d never write a book where the hero was a big slug, for instance.
There was a time when I was frustrated that I was not a household name like my peers. It cut very deeply because I felt I had done better work than had been generally acknowledged. But I got over that, what the hell. I got an OBE and that was very good for me. 2005. I was very pleased with that.
I'm enjoying life tremendously at the moment while I'm well, or moderately well. So really my life is so fortunate, what do I have to complain about?”

Text © Tim Noakes Photography © Paul Herbst

FOOTNOTES

1: Born 18 August 1925, to date Aldiss has written 41 novels, 40 anthologies, 26 volumes of stories, 18 small works, 13 non-fiction books, and 8 volumes of poetry. He is also a keen painter and recently held his first exhibition, entitled The Other Hemisphere.
2: He married Olive Fortescue in 1948 and they divorced in 1965. Later that year he married Margaret Manson. He has four children and six grandchildren.
3: Non-Stop was published in 1958 and told the story of a small tribe in a very strange jungle, who make unsettling discoveries about the nature of their world.
4: Published in 1962 Hothouse was set in a far future, where the earth has stopped rotating, the Sun has increased output, and plants are engaged in a constant frenzy of growth and decay. Humans live on the edge of extinction, beneath the giant banyan tree that covers the day side of the earth.
5: Written in 1969, Super-Toys Last All Summer Long is a short story about a robot boy who has the unique ability to love, but whose love is never reciprocated by his human family.
6: Aldiss and Kubrick spent over 14 years trying to adapt Super Toys into a film. In 1995 Kubrick handed A.I. to Steven Spielberg, but the film did not gain momentum until Kubrick's death in 1999. A.I. Artificial Intelligence was released on June 29, 2001.
7: The Galilean moons are the four moons of Jupiter discovered by Galileo Galilei in January 1610. They are the largest of the many moons of Jupiter and derive their names from the lovers of Zeus: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.

OH LAND

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 10:56:17 +0000

Physically unable to move, Nanna Øland Fabricius stared vacantly at the ceiling wondering how to piece her life back together. For 18 years she had dreamed of becoming a prima ballerina, practising every day and moving to Stockholm from her home in Copenhagen to attend the city’s world-famous dance school. It was all going to plan – then she fractured her spine. “It was horrible,” she says, six years later. “It’s such a black time in my memory. It’s very hard to have an idea that you are meant to do something and suddenly find out that you can’t. Especially when you’re young and think that you’re immortal. All the things that I couldn’t do physically, I could do in my head. It felt like I lost my whole identity.”   Lying on her kitchen floor for three months, Fabricius had no choice but to retreat into her imagination. Drawing on a childhood full of classical and secular music (her dad is an organ player and her mum an opera singer), she began composing her own spiritual harmonies.   “With melodies you can express a lot without even moving a finger, so I filled my own little snow globe with music. It was the one thing that I held on to. Music has always been there for me, but it was only when I stopped dancing that I realised it was what inspired it all in the beginning.”   As her body began to heal she also started learning how to make beats, eventually recording an album’s worth of material. Calling herself Oh Land, a hybrid of her middle name, she released Fauna in 2008. Critical acclaim in Denmark followed, but Fabricius wanted to make an impact away from home. So she booked herself a ten-date sofa-surfing American tour. Climaxing at SXSW 2009, her striking Nordic looks, Björkesque experimental electro-pop and surreal stage show charmed Epic Records boss Amanda Ghost who snapped her up instantly.   The two years since have been a blur, with Fabricius relocating to New York to write and record her eponymous second album with Beyoncé and Depeche Mode’s pal Dave McCracken. Along the way Pharrell flew her down to Miami to record a session, Rihanna begged her for a song, Elton John invited her to his Christmas party, and Shakira offered her the opening slot at her recent Madison Square Garden extravaganza.   “It’s crazy but I didn’t feel ready for something like that,” Fabricius says with a grin, barely suppressing an almighty OMFG. “If I start out at Madison Square Garden where am I going to end? I need to take one little step at a time to make sure that there can be a next step. And when you work with superstars like Pharrell and John Legend, people will automatically focus on that, so I decided not to include any of those songs on my new record. I want to show people that I’m an artist who can stand on my own legs.”  
Text © Tim Noakes
Photography © Marcelo Gomes

DANNY TREJO

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 10:39:53 +0000

How a prison badass became one of Hollywood’s most iconic killers

“Where I grew up, you were either going to be a construction worker, a drug addict or an armed robber. There weren’t too many choices so I started using drugs pretty early and hanging around with my Uncle Gilbert. He was my Willie Mays (1), my Pancho Gonzales (2) – he was my hero! He also happened to be an armed robber. He also used to be a boxer and when I was 8 years old he used me as his punching bag. So I either had to learn how to fight or get my head caved in. I got to be a pretty good fighter. Then when I was 14 years old he handed me a pistol and said “Come on you need a career!” He showed me the ropes. In the neighbourhood I grew up in you were judged by the size of your gun.

I saw people working hard, sweating and not being able to pay the bills. And then there were people dressed like pimps with a pocketful of money. As a kid you don’t realise that fast money gets you into trouble, and fast money goes quick when you’re on the run. I can remember having $13,000 and it lasting just a week. I spent it on wine, women and song. And when I spent too much I just stopped singing! That was my motto when I was 14.

I dreamt of being a badass gangster. When you go to juvenile hall it’s the biggest test of testosterone that there is. Prison and jail is a place where you’re either predator or prey, the choice is yours. You wanna be predator? Prove it. If you wanna be prey don’t worry they’ll prove it. It’s that simple.

In prison your reputation precedes you. So when you’re coming into a joint they know a week before you get there. They’re already waiting for you. Being a boxer got me through the penitentiary. I was the lightweight and welterweight champion at every penitentiary I was in. The funny part is they used to bring some of the army and navy and some of the pros into San Quentin (3) to box with us. It was supposed to be like an exhibition bout, but I had 3000 Mexicans betting money on me. So I had to tell each guy coming in “Hey look, they got money on me so you better go for what you know”. We had some pretty good fights.

I had no idea back then that I was going to become an actor. I was kind of resolved to my life. My uncle did 20 something years. I have a little cousin right now who’s just finishing up 31 straight. That was our lives; we went in and out of prison. But in 1968 I had a revelation. It was alleged that me and two friends had started a prison riot where a Lieutenant got hit in the head with a rock and two other people got hit badly too. Drawing blood from an officer – you’re dead. It’s either life in prison or the gas chamber.

I went into the hole (4) with about three gas chamber offences and remember saying “God if you’re there it’ll be alright. If you’re not I’m fucked”. That was my prayer; I couldn’t really muster up anything else. I sat in the hole from 5th May till August. When I got out the charges had been dropped because Lieutenant Gibbons said he knew one of the three of us did it but he couldn’t say which one. That let us off the hook. It was a miracle we didn’t go to the gas chamber. When I came out of the hole I can remember thinking, ‘Okay, you’re there, so now what do I do?’ So I stopped drinking and I stopped using drugs. When I was in the hole I kicked my heroin habit.

I stayed clean and sober a year. I went to AA and started an NA meeting. I just stayed out of trouble. When I went to the parole board they said, “Well, we’re gonna give you a chance to spread your wings. We’re gonna let out of this motherfucker and bring us back a life sentence.” They let me go free because they knew I was coming back. And if I came back again I’d bring ‘em more time and they wouldn’t have to bother with me ever again.

I decided to dedicate my life to helping other people wherever I could. This was 1969/1970 and in my neighbourhood I used to take the old people’s trash cans out. People would be scared to death that I was coming in their yard. I used to terrorise everyone in my neighbourhood but I would get their trashcans and put ‘em out and not expect anything. Good things started happening. I realised that everything good that has happened to me has happened as a direct result of helping someone else, everything.

I got into the movies through being a drug counsellor. I was about 41 years old then, trying to make ends meet working as a drugs councillor. I was counselling this kid and one night he called me up in tears and said, “I know it’s late but I think I’m gonna use, there’s so much blow here at my job, can you come and hang out with me?” I really didn’t want to, Johnny Carson (5) was coming on and I loved Carson, I absolutely loved him. But I went down to hang out with him anyway and he turned out to be a PA on a movie called Runaway Train with Jon Voight (6) and Eric Roberts (7).

It was the first time I’d been on a movie set. It was the cutest thing I’d ever seen because all these youngsters were dressed like little convicts and I kept smearing their tattoos – I was like “oh shit, I’m sorry I didn't realise that it smeared”. A guy came up to me and said, “Can you act like a convict?” I said, “I’ve been in every penitentiary in the State of California, I’ll give it a shot.” So he gave me a shirt like the other convicts but I took it off. The minute I took my shirt off (8) this guy I knew in the penitentiary walked over and said “Hey, you’re Danny Trejo! I saw you in the lightweight welterweight title in Quen.” It was Eddie Bunker (9). Then he said, “Danny we need someone to train Eric Roberts how to box”. When he told me that it paid $320 a day I said, “Eddie, how much do want this mother fucker beat up? For $320 give him a stick!” I’d have done if for 50 bucks. So I just kept on training Eric three weeks daily and ended up making more money on my first cheque than I ever did on a robbery or a drug deal.

A light bulb went off in my head – people wanted me to play a mean looking, tattooed Mexican. I could do that! When people ask if I’m afraid of being typecast I look at them and say, “What? A mean-looking, tattoed Mexican? That’s not typecasting, that’s who I am!” I don’t look like the kid next door. I damn sure don’t look like Ricky Schroder. And there’s no way you’re gonna mistake me for one of the Beatles.

All I saw was the work. I just kept on getting paid, I didn’t give a shit. I was doing what I’ve done all my life, standing on a prison yard going, “Kill those motherfuckers!” but with cameras around. A director once said to me, “Danny I want you to kick in this door, rob a poker game and hold a shotgun.” So I kicked in the door, pretended to hit this lady with the shotgun, and this big white boy jumped up and I put this shotgun right in his mouth and said, “I’ll blow your motherfucking head off.” Afterwards he said, “Danny, where did you study?” And I said, “Safeway” Typecast that!

SherryBaby (10) was one of the only films where I haven’t killed anybody. I did not wanna do that movie. There was no action and everyone was fucking her but me. I had to be the nice guy! But I learnt more on that movie about acting and feelings than I’ve ever learnt on any films. It’s not that hard for me to be an armed robber and a bad motherfucker. But all of a sudden I had to be this sensitive character that wants to help. There were scenes where I had to think what would I do if this happened to my daughter. It was really hard for me to think that way.

I have no idea how many times I’ve died on screen. But in Machete (11), I get even! I even use someone’s intestines as a rope. When Robert Rodriguez (12) told me about that scene I said, ‘Robert, I’ve got to get you into therapy, I have to. Where did you come up with these ideas?!’ Robert is crazier than me. He has these ideas, and he makes me do ‘em, like, ‘Okay, Danny, let’s jump out the window now…’

When Robert De Niro showed up on the Machete set he came up to me and said, “Man, Danny I’m so proud of you I knew you were gonna make it. You had everything it took on Heat, you were the bomb. I’m really proud to be in your movie. You’re the man.” I looked at him right in the eyes and said, “Can I get you some coffee, Mr. De Niro?”

I wake up some mornings and just start laughing. Then I say my prayers, “God thank you for all you’ve given me, all you’ve taken away and all you’ve left me.” It’s pretty hard being badass because you have to be a badass all the time. You gotta remember people that try to be a badass are girls. I try to tell all these rappers, either you got your credits back in the day or you’re a businessman. I’m a businessman not a badass, but don’t fuck with me.”

Text © Tim Noakes
Photography © Lauren Dukoff

FOOTNOTES

1 – Many consider Mays to be the greatest all-around baseball player of all time.
2 – Gonzales was the World No.1 professional tennis player for an unequalled eight years in the 1950s and early 1960s.
3 - Opened in July 1852, San Quentin is the oldest prison in California. Since 1996, executions at the prison have been carried out by lethal injection.
4 – Slang for solitary confinement.
5 – From 1962-1992, Johnny Carson presented America’s most popular chat show. He died in 2005.
6 – In June 2010, the Washington Times published a letter by Angelina Jolie’s Oscar winning Dad in which he called Obama a liar and promoter of anti-Semitism. Voight also happens to be a Republican.
7 – After getting an Oscar nomination for Runaway Train, the film career of Julia Robert’s brother descended into a blizzard of blow, weed and run-ins with cops. He’s now a TV soap star.
8 – Trejo’s chest tattoo of a woman wearing a sombrero is the most recognizable tattoo in the world, as voted by International Tattoo Magazine.
9 – At 17 Bunker was the youngest ever inmate at San Quentin. He went on to become a writer and played Mr. Blue in Reservoir Dogs. In Trejo’s opinion Bunker’s Education of a Felon is the best criminal novel ever. Care to argue?
10 – Laurie Collyer’s 2006 film starred Maggie Gyllenhaal as a recovering heroin addict who struggles to take care of her young daughter.
11 – A revenge drama about a knife toting Mexican renegade, Machete started life as a fake trailer for Grindhouse. It is also Trejo’s first lead role.
12 – The director is Trejo’s cousin and they first worked together on Desperado in 1995. In most of their films together, Trejo’s character is named after a knife.

PHILIP SELWAY

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 11:04:22 +0000

The Radiohead drummer on Oxford’s Pegasus Theatre  “In Radiohead, anything we do outside of the band feeds back into what we do as a band. It brings in a whole range of other experiences. Over the past year I’ve become an ambassador for music projects at the Pegasus Youth Theatre in Oxford, which has just had a big revamp. It’s a real melting pot and very exciting to be a part of. Their remit is their location, which is in the heart of a very ethnically diverse area. They provide a strong educational basis that can feed back into the community. Kids can come in and get hands-on experience in music, acting and dance. I just love the fact it’s a very inclusive set up – there aren’t auditions or interviews. Kids just need a commitment, an openness to ideas and to be prepared to work in groups. From there, they have inspiring tutors who shape the performances. It’s a hugely supportive environment and a very egalitarian place to be. It doesn’t foster any, for want of a better term, star culture. It’s all about the collective experience of putting a production together. It’s a very inviting place to be.”  
As the musical heartbeat of Radiohead, Philip Selway is widely regarded as one of the world’s most innovative and versatile drummers. From the grunge rock timekeeping on Pablo Honey to the drum machine electronica of Kid A and Amnesiac, Selway’s rhythms have always been admired for their precision and subtlety. Yet there is more to the former English teacher than just beats. Having toured with 7 Worlds Collide and guest starred in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, he has just released his debut solo album, Familial. A downtempo, deeply personal collection of songs, Selway sings and plays guitar throughout, with hardly a snare in sight. “I took the 40-minute drum solo out,” he says. “I didn’t feel it was quite in keeping with the mood.”

Text © Tim Noakes
Photography © Philip Sinden

DAVE SITEK

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 10:41:57 +0100

Moving from New York to LA has mellowed Dave Sitek out, with his trademark claustrophobic productions being replaced by sunshine pop. Tim Noakes meets the fabled producer at his hillside retreat to discuss his mysterious Maximum Balloon project and life after Williamsburg 
Text © Tim Noakes
Photography © Asger Carlsen

Dave Sitek has created a sound and mystique that even Phil Spector would kill for. Occupying a weird pocket between the underground and mainstream, his instrumentation and productions for TV On The Radio, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Liars, Holly Miranda, and Telepathe have given him an almost untouchable aura: hyped bands, Hollywood actresses and legends like Bowie and Byrne are all queuing up to be blessed by his golden ears. Over the last decade, he has played a pivotal role in giving young New York its alternative edge back, mixing fuzzy post-punk, dark electronic hip hop, densely layered folk harmonies and afro-centric brass into a radical mass Only James Murphy could claim a similar level of influence over the same period.

When Dazed last met Sitek, he had just got back to Brooklyn after producing Scarlett Johansson’s Tom Waits cover album and was in the middle of constructing Antidotes by Foals. He told the band that he wanted to make music to “shoot grannies and fuck strippers to”. They went with it, playing drums in Williamsburg alleyways and getting stoned through his vaporizer. He threw their label bosses out of his beloved StayGold studio because they didn’t play instruments and were ruining the vibe. His close friend Katrina from Celebration called him a “decisive cocky dictator” which he agreed with, saying, “I have a crazy massive ego, but even that comes second to the actual sound that is coming out of the speakers – that’s all I care about.” After returning home to Oxford, Foals trashed his mix because it sounded less like Foals and more like Sitek. A few months later, he wrapped up work on Telepathe and Holly Miranda’s debut albums, vacated StayGold, and went on the road for TVOTR’s Dear Science world tour.

While in San Francisco Sitek had a revelation, in the form of a grapefruit. He had never tasted anything like it. He felt that he had been lied to. He wanted to eat produce like it every day. He was tired of working 21 hours days without a window to look out of. So after the tour finished he bought James Dean’s old house in Beverley Hills. He moved everything over from New York, learned how to bake fruit pies, cook gumbo, and began playing golf with businessmen. He bought a BBQ and a BB gun and started shooting at empty medical marijuana vials that he had scattered through the adjacent wine valley. The New York hipster era was officially over. Sitek’s sunshine period had begun.

With TVOTR taking an extended post-tour break, he had time to start exploring new musical avenues and different pie recipes. First off came his sublime cover of The Troggs' "With a Girl Like You" for the Dark Was The Night charity album. Sounding like a Cocteau Twins cover of TVOTR, it became the most talked about song from the album and marked the first time he had stepped up to the microphone without Tunde and Kyp for backup. Slowly he began to move away from the dark sonics with which he had made his name, starting with Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ new synth-pop direction for It’s Blitz! In February 2010, he produced “AAAAAAAANGRY”, a comedy rap song for Aziz “Raaaandy” Ansari that targeted everyone from Justin Bieber to Jay-Z. Hitting the blogosphere like a nuclear holocaust, the mixtape teaser showed a side to Sitek that had previously been reserved for his friends and family – that he was capable of being hilarious.

In June, a video of Daisy Lowe dancing in lingerie to a song called “Tiger” started doing the rounds. Produced by Maximum Balloon, it sounded like Justice remixing The Gap Band, but actually turned out to be another Sitek side-project featuring Aku from Dragons of Zynth on vocals. A summer club anthem of the highest order, it was the clearest signal yet that the melancholic angst that had permeated his New York years had been purged with Californian sunshine.

Eager to find out more about his happy new disposition, Sitek agreed to let Dazed into his LA retreat to hear the self-titled Maximum Balloon album. Set high up in the Hollywood Hills off Mullholland Drive, his studio is an entirely different setup to his NYC lab. These days, he’s more likely to encounter coyotes on his doorstep than crackheads, and his famed PA system, the “lease breakers”, are no longer living up to their name – there’s no one near enough to complain. His studio itself is split between two adjacent houses, but his main control room looks out onto a terrace populated by two grills, a hammock and a punching bag. It was in here that he embraced his inner Nile Rodgers and created Maximum Balloon, a 10-track retro pop monster that features vocals from “his friends”, Karen O, David Byrne, Holly Miranda, Little Dragon, Aku, and most strikingly, Theophilus London, on the future foot-stomper, “Groove Me”. Even his old TVOTR pals sound mellower, with Kyp Malone channeling his inner Marvin Gaye for the sassy Neptunes-esque “Shakedown”. It’s one hell of a funky ride, and unlike anything Sitek has crafted before.

Outside the studio window, a stone painted with a smiley face is inscribed with the mantra, “Always Follow Your Dreams”. It seems appropriate considering that Sitek once earned a living selling cars in Baltimore. After eating some homemade Blueberry pie and shooting a few BB rounds into the surrounding countryside, the 37-year-old producer sits on his weathered decking to discuss what happened after he closed StayGold for the last time and exactly why he ended up making pop in LaLaland…

When we last met one of the Foals said you wanted to make music to fuck strippers and shoot grannies to.
DAVE SITEK: I actually said music to fuck grannies and shoot strippers, but you could twist it around (laughs). I was eating a lot of meat and drinking a lot of Whiskey back then. I’ve calmed down. It’s a different way of life now. There’s no more fucking grannies or shooting strippers.

What happened with that Foals record? It seemed to be going so well…
I don’t know what happened with that. I told them that I was the wrong guy 30 times and that it would be the most expensive mistake to hire me. Then they were like, ‘Oh, he made it sound like the Grand Canyon.’ I was like, ‘Duh… listen to every fucking thing I’ve done prior to that.’ To criticise me for using reverb would to be like saying, ‘I wish Jordan wouldn’t make any jump shots.’ It’s crazy. I didn’t do disservice to the actual songs on the record, because they are good songs, and it’s a good record. It’s just not how I heard it.

What is your reputation like in the music business?
I’ve got a really bad one! It goes either way. But I don’t generally work with bands now, as a result of that. I’ve talked a lot of people out of working with me, more than you can imagine, like in the thousands. I tried to talk the Yeah Yeah Yeahs out of working with me, but Karen and Brian insisted.

Why do bands come to you then?
I have no idea. Plenty people are better at recording bands than I am. Millions. I think with me, everyone just wants to crank up the barbeque. That’s the only reason to work up with me because… It’s hilarious.

You bonded well with Scarlett Johansson…
Yeah, I love that record. It’s like Serge Gainsbourg when he did Melody Nelson, because everyone was up in arms, saying, ‘He can’t sing, and she can’t sing!’ But then it wound up being so significant compared with everything around it. With Scarlett, people were like, ‘Oh, an actress and a fucking weirdo producer,’ but we made it for us. She started working for me because I have weird sensibilities. I would rather work with someone who was trying to do something totally different. If you know what you want, then you should do what you want, you should believe in yourself. Don’t believe in me more than you believe in you. That’s a mistake.

How have you changed since leaving New York?
I’m eating a lot more vegetables and baking pies. It’s opened me up more creatively but it was an unintended consequence that I calmed down a little bit. Your back is up against the wall in New York. I was paying for an apartment and a studio, and the price of our neighbourhood tripled in two years. It was stressing me the fuck out.

But you’ve left your whole musical support system back there
I just thought, ‘Why mess around when you can fuck around?’ Yeah, they were two minutes away and now it’s a six-hour flight. But no one minds coming out to the vineyard to have a barbeque, it’s an escape from the New York grind. It’s just a different environment to create in, and I have a bunch of people out here that I’ve worked with before. It turns out that a drummer I used to be in ska band with is now Cher’s drummer in Vegas and he lives two miles down the road.

You’ve got Cher’s drummer on your record?
Yeah, I’ve got Cher’s drummer on my record! The other thing about New York is that I couldn’t progress anymore – I fell into a routine. Now I live in nowhere land and you have to unpeel the onion of your own mind. It forced me to step my own game up, and as a result I’m trying to make ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun‘ and ‘Let’s Hear It For The Boy’.

Everyone says your music is so dense and dark, but Maximum Balloon is the complete opposite. It’s a dance record.
Well, this is where environment plays a role in what you’re doing. I feel that when you’re in the grind, like in New York, you don’t see the sun. I lived in a place with no window for ten years and that can’t help but make everything claustrophobic. This is the first time in a long time that I’ve worked on music and driven around listening to it. That’s a part of the equation that I had forgot. Most people are not living in a studio or listening on a big sound-system, so I was producing for a world that didn’t exist.

So you’ve relaxed your style of production?
Yeah, there’s that Lee Hazlewood song, ‘My Autumn’s Done Come’ where he says, ‘Let those I don’t care days begin, I’m tired of holding my stomach in.’ I’m 37. I don’t have the weirdo fantasies I did when I was in my 20s about music. Now it’s just about being around good friends, coming up with a tribe and erasing cynicism. I think I had cynicism stewing in my system living in New York. There’s just this competitive, mean, cynical thing that permeates the city. You have to be that way for survival, and I just realised that there was no real use for that.

Is Dave Sitek different now he’s made a couple of bucks?
No. I still spend almost everything that I make getting bands that no one has heard of to make records. This place is not cheap, but it’s worth working really hard to have somewhere where there’s no neighbours bitching about you. I’ve been thrown out of almost every place I’ve ever lived! I lived in a warehouse that smelled like dead fish for seven years, with questionable flooring. You could pretty much see the apartment down and above you. Then all of a sudden the neighbourhood changed and we had people complaining about the noise, and we’re like, ‘But you live in a warehouse! We live here because we don’t have any credit. Why do you?!’ I understand every neighbourhood goes through changes, but rather than just sit there and complain about it and talk about the good old days of Williamsburg I’d just leave, whereas a lot of people I know are still there and it’s the dominating conversation. It sucks.

Isn’t that a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, though, that if you make all these records that appeal to a hipster demographic people will always come to the source?
I prefer not to take responsibility for all the people and all the Thai restaurants. When I lived in New York I lived in the coolest neighbourhood ever and people would ask me where to go and I would be like, ‘Well, I have no idea.’ I never left that building. Moving to California, the only difference was really the sun, as far as I was concerned.

Now you’ve had a chance to get a bit of distance, can you reflect on the work that came out of StayGold?
I’m not a very nostalgic person. I’m trying to stay in the eternal present. I did have a great time, definitely, hands down, some really magical stuff happened in that building, and I was really lucky, but it had a beginning, a middle, and an end. Now we’re inside the next book, and who knows what that will be.

So, what is the story of Maximum Balloon? Why this alias?
Well, if I called it Dave Sitek it would feel wrong. I’m not singing on it. It really fits with the principal that is Maximum Balloon. I made this giant thing, and it’s just going to float away.

A lot of producer albums are vanity projects at best. Why did you do one?
Selfishness. I wanted these singers to sing this kind of music. Even calling it a solo record is goofy because it’s not, it’s just a side project with my friends. None of us felt like we had to go through the prism of a band, we could just bring a song to life and not have to worry about what happened to if afterwards.

It’s very different to the politicised themes of TV On The Radio
Well, I think that TV On The Radio was a lot more adept at addressing gender politics and racial politics, but this wasn’t the arena for that, I think that it would sound corny or disingenuous. On Maximum Balloon you can go deeper if you want, I’m not cutting you off, singing about cell-phones or forcing some stupid new dance move down your throat, but it’s not wrapped in secrecy. I still feel like it’s got enough complexity to separate what I don’t like about it in more recent pop stuff.

What’s with your fascination with balloons?
I’ve always been fascinated with stuff that people get attached to and then disappear. Deflating balloons was one of my favourite images when I was a kid, I would hold them prisoner and watch them shrivel up into little prunes. I like the idea that it was ‘joy’ and then it would become trash. I like the idea of balloons going off and you have no idea where it’s going to land, and with this project, I don’t know what it will turn into. I hope people will check it out and love it, or they’ll ignore it, and that’s certainly in the realm of possibility. There’s no feedback loop like there is with the bands. I’m kind of handing my music over to the rest of the world and they can do with it what they want.

Maximum Balloon has a strong pop vibe to it
I wasn’t trying to make smarty-pants music or being a smarty-pants about it. This has got to be bright and optimistic and loud and fast and immediate. Working with pop singers, no one cares if you’re using tube equipment, they just want it to sound awesome. If they can picture themselves singing it in a shower then it works. I know Smokey Robinson and Al Green felt that way but for some reason the indie-rock thing became real cynical and no one wanted to be a star on the outside, but they still wanted to be a star on the inside. Well, there’s no denying it, I wanted to make something that could be in a break-dancing scene of a movie. I think I’ll always have Molly Ringwald dancing around in my head somewhere.

This is all a long way from selling cars in Baltimore…
Selling cars certainly had its advantage, it was a direct predecessor to all the other things in my life. If my time was monopolised, I valued it extremely. I perpetually feel like this will all go away, I’ll go back and I’ll get fired. It’s a mystery to me that I even have a job. I consider myself unemployed. I’m not addicted to what this has brought into my life. I’ve had two house-fires. I lost everything twice. So to me, nothing really sticks around. Miraculously, my Telecaster made it through both fires, but I’m not attached to the lifestyle. The lifestyle? I sound like I’m on cribs or something. As far as I’m concerned I beat the system. I got to work with David Bowie. I got to work with someone like Karen. I far exceeded my goals. So if this all goes away then it’s actually okay.

Some critics have called you a genius…
(Laughter) When I worked at Dominoes? But then you have people who hate it, and they’re like, ‘Oh, your stuff is wack, bro!’ To me all of those things have equal merit, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with what I do. My time is better served making a drumbeat. To me, by reading a load of stuff, I won’t arrive at any conclusion, I’ll probably just confuse myself. My version of great is John Coltrane. So you could never convince me that I’m even skating close to that. I’m suspicious of everything. I’m just winging it.

You still feel like you’re winging it?
Oh yeah, of course, totally. You’re always going to be winging it. What does it matter what I did before? If I had gold records and hung them up, that would be like a death sentence. You’d be stuck in this past place. I feel like you should be winging it.

Do you feel like you’ve sold out?
Oh, God no. No way, man, I’ve bought in. If I sold out, it would be a lot more crass.

Like Britney Spears or something?
Oh, I might do that.

Really?
Why not? That’s kind of what I figured. I’ve already hung around with all the perky snobs, I may as well hang out with the pop kids. I think if anyone is allowed to sell out, it’s me. I’ve intentionally moved away from all the young people and the cool kids. I just wanted to get some space from that and let my imagination run wild.

Maximum Balloon is out on Interscope on August 23

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. Sumach, 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 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

DEVO

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 22:30:08 +0100

As art rock antagonists DEVO hit the studio to record their first LP in nearly 20 years, Tim Noakes talks to 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 TV

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.

Finally, 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