The Vine interview: Brett Mitchell of Jebediah, 2011
An interview for The Vine. Excerpt below.
“Jebediah’s apparent strategy is simple,” I wrote in December last year; “Take to the stage and kick several shades of shit from any lingering doubts about their ongoing aptitude.”
At the time, it’d been a while between drinks for Perth quartet, who rose to national prominence off the back of their 1997 debut, Slightly Odway. During the ensuing years, their high-energy alternative rock – occasionally intercut with slower, ballad-like singles, in ‘Harpoon’ and ‘Feet Touch The Ground’ – was on a par with Silverchair, Spiderbait, You Am I et al in terms of both triple j airplay and frequent festival appearances. The foursome – frontman Kevin Mitchell, his older brother and drummer Brett, bassist Vanessa Thornton, and guitarist Chris Daymond – took a breather after the so-so chart performance of their independently-released fourth album, Braxton Hicks (2004), Kevin Mitchell pursued (and found) success with his solo project Bob Evans. Jebediah would continue to play sporadically, but by and large, it seemed as though the group weren’t in any hurry to return to the studio.
Now their fifth album is being released on April 15 via Brisbane-based independent label Dew Process. Kosciuszko was recorded on-and-off over several years with Dave Parkin (Snowman, Sugar Army) in a Perth studio, whenever the four members could find the time. Bar now-Melbournite Kevin Mitchell – the only member able to support himself as a full-time musician – the other three still live in Perth. Mitchell senior works for a logistics company, Daymond works at 78 Records, and Thornton recently completed a Bachelor of Science, between playing with Felicity Groom & The Black Black Smoke.
I spent a couple of days with the band in early December last year, while they played a short run of shows and shot the video for ‘She’s Like A Comet’ – their current single, which is receiving heavy airplay on both alternative and commercial radio – in Sydney. With those experiences still fresh in mind, TheVine connected with drummer Brett Mitchell.
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You’ve been in this situation before, where you sit down and do a bunch of phone interviews to promote the new record. How does it feel this time around?
It’s coming back to me. Promo is one of those things which – as I’m sure you know – ranges from genuinely painful to genuinely enjoyable. So it’s a bit of a mixed bag for me. It’s always nice to have the chance to talk about things in a meaningful way, or in a way that you think is going to be relevant to people. But that doesn’t always happen. What can I say? I’m just kind of going with the flow, and trying not to be too cynical about it.
At this stage, which sensation is more accurate: painful, or enjoyable?
I have to say, it probably has been more enjoyable than I would’ve anticipated. Maybe that’s because the commercial [success] is happening with the single (‘She’s Like A Comet’). Plus there’s that [band] history there, which a lot of people seem to be familiar with. I guess people have got a couple of different angles to approach us from, and maybe that’s helping me smooth it over.
The single has been doing well, hasn’t it?
Yeah. I’m certainly spun out. It’s very strange to me, that after all this time, we get this song pretty much across the board on radio. It’s certainly never happened before. It’s awesome because it’s giving us a springboard, which I’m sure we did need. But it’s still a shock. It probably doesn’t bear anything, really; it’s one of those things that’s just happened, and perhaps it’s a random event. We just have to capitalise on it.
I have to ask about the album title, Kosciuszko. Is there a significance behind it? Can we draw some parallels between it being the summit of Jebediah’s musical career so far, or some such?
I was actually a bit worried about the symbolism that people might interpret in that. It seemed like it might be a little bit grand, or arrogant, or something. But in actual fact, that doesn’t exist at all, and I’m still at the point now – speaking of promo – where I’m actually telling the truth about most things. So the truth with [the album title] is that it was Kevin’s baby.
Apparently The Beatles were going to call The White Album Everest. He must have read something about it. Obviously it never happened, and I don’t know if anyone else has ever gone down that path. But the appealing thing to me about it, is that it’s essentially a nonsense word. It doesn’t even look like a word, when you see it written on the page. We’ve always had a lean in that direction, so I think it kind of fits. As for the symbolism – I don’t know. People can make of it what they will.
Interview – JebediahFor the full interview, visit The Vine. For more Jebediah, visit their website. The music video for their song ‘She’s Like A Comet‘ is embedded below.
Elsewhere: ‘Jebediah Return From Hiatus’ news story for Rolling Stone, February 2011
A Conversation With Yannis Philippakis of Foals, 2010
I interviewed Yannis Philippakis [pictured right], singer/guitarist of the British pop act Foals, for Scene Magazine in late December 2010, ahead of their Australian tour as part of Laneway Festival 2011 (which I reviewed for The Vine).
Our interview originally ran in condensed form as the cover story of Scene Magazine #811. Here’s the full interview transcript.
Andrew: I’ve got a confession to make. [Foals' second album] Total Life Forever is one of my favourite albums of 2010.
Oh, thank you very much.
I discovered [Foals' 2008 debut album] Antidotes a couple of years ago, but Total Life Forever sounds like an entirely different band. I like this band more. Do you?
Yannis: It’s not a different band…
I know it’s not, but the sound definitely has changed quite a lot.
Yeah. I mean, I don’t really like the idea of making albums adversary to each other. I find the whole ranking, hierarchy that happens every year kind of repellent and equally… I don’t really have the same perspective on it, obviously, as an externalist, but to us in the band it’s a very linear progression. It never really felt like we had a break, even after we finished Antidotes. I think the production is a hell of a lot more fully realised on Total Life Forever. At least to me, I still have a fondness for a lot of the songs on Antidotes, but I don’t listen to that record largely because of the production. I think that it’s great that people are acknowledging the progression, but to us it is one linear thing. We want to make a body of work. It’s not us trying to eradicate our past, as such.
Was there any self-doubt within the band, when your style of song writing started shifting after Antidotes?
There’s self-doubt every day. Of course. Not to do with writing new things, but there’s just… most of them comes from a wish to complete something that isn’t whole. Self-doubt is part of the game. It’s been there always and unless we write ‘Symphony No. 3’ by Gorecki – which we can’t, because it’s already been written – I don’t think we’re ever going to feel sated or complete. It’s just part of the fun as well, the masochistic element of it.
The moment we stopped recording Antidotes, we started doing b-sides for Antidotes, it started to change a lot, and there was much more experimentation. We started to implement a lot of the things that we learned from Dave Sitek, and make stuff that I think actually bridges the two albums quite closely. There are some b-sides; one in particular called ‘Gold Gold Gold‘, and another two called ‘Titan Arum‘ and ‘Glaciers‘. That’s what I mean; it felt linear. It didn’t feel like we ever stopped, we just always worked on stuff.
All that really happened was that, at the beginning when we started the band, there was a very definite and conscious process. It was a conscious aesthetic, that we wanted, and it was to do with techno, it was to do with a style of guitar playing, a visual aesthetic. Everything was very conscious and we wanted to have parameters on it. We were in love with the idea of bands like Devo that had a distinct world that they occupied.
Everything since then, once we felt like we attained that, everything now is about undoing that process and getting to a point which is kind of the reverse of that, where nothing is conscious and if I had the choice, I’d have a lobotomy and cut out the conscious part of my mind, so that I could just make music direct from the gut. I don’t know. Did that answer your question?
For sure. You mentioned the style of guitar playing the band has. I’ve always been fascinated by those little needly, palm-muted riffs that you guys come up with. Were there any particular artists that inspired that style of playing?
I think it was just something that we heard. I think there are a lot of bands, a lot of styles of guitar or even just playing strings [instruments], everything from string players in a classical piece, to ['math rock'] bands like OXES and Don Caballero, and African Senegalese guitar. I think the main thing, at least personally for me, there was something about that way of guitar playing that just attracted me. I was never that fascinated by chords, and I actually neglected to learn how to work chord sequences and stuff. Instead, everything became about these ‘guitar tattoos’. It was more I had a lot of different types of music and different types of bands and wanted to cannibalise it and make it our own.
That’s always been a main bit of the band. We start playing stuff lower down the guitar. We play with chords sometimes now, but I think that will always be part of the sound because that is just the way that I play, naturally. It’s become muscle memory, now.
It’s certainly one of the band’s most distinctive elements. Did you always intend that to be the case, or did it arise when you started playing together?
You kind of progress, but yeah, it’s always been there, it predates the band. It’s how I learned how to play the guitar. I used to mimic and ape the guitar lines I liked, and they usually were like staccato, tight little phrases, that’s how I liked it. As I said, I was never really attracted to chords, or distortion pedals. I like the idea of a transparent guitar sound; a guitar sound that’s unashamed to be a clean guitar. I think that you can get as much power out of a clean guitar as you can out of a distorted guitar.
You’ve been touring pretty heavily this year, as we discussed. You’ve played a lot of shows. I’m interested to know how you keep it sounding fresh and feeling fresh night after night.
Just do loads of drugs, basically. That’s pretty much it. [laughs] Do you mean like the shows, or the actual lifestyle, or my body odour? What do you mean?
The music. If you’re playing the same songs each night, does it feel like you’re doing the same thing over and over?
It depends. I definitely think there’s a point at which bands stop touring and sometimes you can’t tell when that point is going to be, and you have to keep on playing for a bit longer. But that rarely happens. Each show is different, and we don’t play exactly the same set every night. Even if we were playing a similar set, we have quite a lot of room to improvise… well not improvisation, exactly, but we have negative space that we’re allowed to do different things. We allow space for chaos in the set, so that it’s not so tightly rehearsed, that it’s mechanical. It’s not choreographed, in that way.
I think that helps keep it fresh. I get tired of touring sometimes, but it’s not really often to do with the shows, more to do with the kind of… I don’t know, I’d probably be able to answer that question later on in the year because we’ve still got two more tours [note: this interview was conducted in mid-December 2010]. At the moment I feel pretty good about playing. I’m starting to feel restless about writing new things. I’ve been writing so many things and I think the more that appetite opens, the more pedestrian touring seems in comparison. The further we get away from the completion of the last record, the more difficult touring becomes, I think. Not because of playing the same stuff, just because there’s a new appetite that emerges, of wanting to do things.
When I was researching for this interview, I was surprised to discover your age. You’re two years older than I am. Was it a challenge to get people to take a bunch of teenagers seriously when the band first started?
How old are you?
22.
What do you mean? For who to take us seriously?
People in the music industry, as you were getting introduced to labels, and so forth.
I don’t know. I think that for a lot of young bands, that’s when the prime is, sometimes. I think people are savvy to that in the music industry. They kind of want to feed off young blood. You have a naivety. You’re not jaded in any sort of way. I think, if anything, it wasn’t an issue of persuading them, it was more like trying to have them not suck our blood. I’m the youngest, but I wasn’t that young. We’ve all been playing in bands for a long time. I don’t know, I didn’t really feel that. I don’t feel as young as I used to, though.
Do you feel that as you get older you’re being taken more seriously?
It depends on what you mean. Are we talking about people that listen to records, are you talking about critics?
All of the above.
Yeah, I think so, in some way. I think the critics, there is something that make critics recoil if you seem like a young, cocky upstart. When we started doing interviews and stuff, I really didn’t have that much of a filter on my brain. A lot of time I really didn’t know where I was, in terms of how things would be relayed in the press. I think that with time comes an understanding. I understand myself better now. I think as you get older – what were you like when you were 19?
I was a dumbass.
[laughs] Things change. I think it’s not just to do with age. It’s to do with the fact that we made the second record, and hopefully it didn’t stink, and the people believe in you that little bit more because you’re not just putting out a hype record that, in theory, is a one-hit wonder, and also a compilation of songs that you spent 10 years to write. I think that we’ve conducted ourselves, at least since the beginning, in a way that we feel proud of, and hopefully people have a belief in a certain type of integrity – or an attempt at integrity – which will mean that we gain some respect in that field.
Yeah, sure. Before we finish up, I wanted to ask you about Oxford briefly. Earlier this year I came across a documentary called Anyone Can Play Guitar, which I note you’re involved with. I’m particularly interested in Oxford because I love both Ride and Swervedriver.
Right.
When you were growing up in the city, was there a sense of wanting to follow in the footsteps of other Oxford bands like those two perhaps?
Yeah, it wasn’t those two, but there were other ones. There was a band that was pretty much our contemporaries, but a little bit older: Youthmovies. Oxford definitely was like a big factor in the way we started to think about music. I obviously knew about Radiohead and Supergrass, but Ride and Swervedriver in particular, I wasn’t that aware of. When I was growing up I paid attention to local fledgling bands. Those bands [Ride and Swervedriver], I don’t think they were really playing Oxford when I was growing up, so I wasn’t that aware of them. A band called Youthmovies had pretty much the biggest influence on Oxford in general and people my age, and it’s still being felt now. I think it’s a very interesting place to live, if you’re not an academic.
Is there a sense of being able to give something back to the scene that helped foster Foals, now that you’ve got some attention?
Yeah, we take bands that we like on tour with us, and I try to talk about them in interviews. But not really out of a sense of… there’s nothing magnanimous about it, it’s just that we like the bands and a lot of them are our friends. I’d rather talk about my friends, because it’s more personal to me.
Last question. A friend asked me to say “pretty please, will you leak the Dave Sitek mix of Antidotes?”
[laughs] Ehh, maybe.
Okay, good. Thanks for your time mate.
A pleasure. Thank you.
++
For more Foals, visit their website. The music video for their song ‘Blue Blood‘‘ is embedded below.
Elsewhere: a review of their 2010 album, Total Life Forever, for The Vine.
Mess+Noise album review: Nova Scotia – ‘Nova Scotia’
An album review for Mess+Noise. Excerpt below.
After two EPs and several years spent gigging at every Brisbane venue imaginable, this self-titled album is indie rock quintet Nova Scotia’s first full-length. Released via Lofly Records and mixed by label co-founder Andrew White (Mr. Maps, restream), Nova Scotia is just as demonstrative of the band’s songwriting abilities as their previous discs (2007′s Bear Smashes Photocopier and 2008′s Maritime Disasters), but the sonic differences here are instantly noticeable.
As great as those EPs were, the recording and production – or lack thereof – left a lot to be desired. Here, the instruments can each be heard clearly in the mix, but they haven’t lost that sense of five dudes jamming in a room, which has always been a big part of Nova Scotia’s charm.
Two re-recorded tracks from Photocopier (‘Second Sun’ and ‘Everything’s Perfect’) appear early in the piece, and while they sound better than ever, here’s where nostalgia ends. There isn’t a bad idea on Nova Scotia; if anything, the songs get better as the record progresses. Instrumental opener ‘Teeming With Voices’ is seemingly intended as the band’s theme song, and they frequently open their live sets with it too. Three different guitar tones sit atop clattering percussion. More than once, you get the feeling that it’s all about to cave in on itself. This sense of tension pervades most of the tracks here, and crucially, it’s an asset, not a distraction.
For the full review, visit Mess+Noise, where you can also stream the album’s final track, ‘The World Is Not Enough’. For more Nova Scotia, visit their Myspace.
Rolling Stone story: ‘Jebediah Return From Hiatus’, 2011
A news story for the March 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. Click the below scanned image for a closer look, or read the article text underneath.
Jebediah Returns From Hiatus
Much-loved Perth rockers prepare for fully-fledged comeback with fifth LP
By Andrew McMillenInstruments in hand, four Perth musicians glance nervously at the ceiling as debris falls around them. Overhead, a Godzilla-like monster trades blows with Comet Girl, a costumed vigilante who’s fighting a losing battle. All looks lost until another superhero arrives: Jebediah! The two heroes join forces to vanquish their foe.
Embedded deep in the realms of fantasy – a warehouse in Sydney’s inner suburbs – the real Jebediah, Perth’s celebrated alt-rock outfit, are shooting their first video in more than six years. “She’s Like A Comet” is the second single from the band’s fifth album, Koscuiszko, due in April. Between takes, drummer Brett Mitchell laughs about the “contrived” nature of music videos. Earlier, he was attempting to drum along to the song at a precise speed of 145 per cent in order to capture some slow-motion footage. A few hours into the shoot, as frontman Kevin Mitchell sings into a microphone placed just inches away from a camera, one of the crew expresses his surprise that the singer is so willing to be filmed: he’d heard of Mitchell was camera-shy. ”They must have been being sarcastic!” bassist Vanessa Thornton laughs.
Amid a worldwide climate of once-popular acts reforming for cash, Jebediah – completed by lead guitarist Chris Daymond – are different: they never broke up. Though their last release was 2004′s Braxton Hicks, they’ve played a handful of shows per year, and 2010 was no different: the day after their video shoot, they played to a packed Annandale Hotel, before doing the same at The Zoo in Brisbane. With a seven-year gap between albums, the band is relishing the new material.
“This one’s easily the most fun I’ve had making a Jebs record since the very first one [1997's Slightly Odway], and I also think it’s the most playful we’ve been in the studio,” says Kevin Mitchell. “It’s the closest thing to the first album, where we made a record without considering anyone except ourselves.”
For more Jebediah, visit their website. The music video for ‘She’s Like A Comet‘ is embedded below.
The Vine interview: Adam Franklin of Swervedriver, 2011
An interview for The Vine. Excerpt below.
“In their nine years together, Swervedriver released four startling albums, ranging from storming guitar experimentalism to mind-blowing psychedelia – all dedicated to the nihilistic joys of the open road.”
That’s a line from the band’s 2005-released two-disc compilation, Juggernaut Rides: ’89-’98. It’s an entirely apt description of the sounds and imagery summoned by this British four-piece, whose core duo consisted of singer/guitarist Adam Franklin and guitarist Jimmy Hartridge. Formed in Oxford in 1989, they soon prospered in a time when interest surrounding guitar-led alternative rock and the nascent genre of shoegaze was at an all-time high. They were signed to Creation Records – home to My Bloody Valentine – and released two genre-defining albums within two years: 1991’s Raise, and 1993’s Mezcal Head. Despite their British upbringing, Franklin et al were fascinated by American muscle car culture, and sought to provide the soundtrack to imagined high-speed jaunts across the States. Their first single, ‘Son Of Mustang Ford’, sums up Swervedriver’s ethos in four minutes of scorching guitars and breakneck percussion.
Label woes and band instability eventually brought them to a halt in 1998, following underwhelming sales for Ejector Seat Reservation (1995) and 99th Dream (1998). As it turns out, the band’s final shows took place in Australia while supporting Powderfinger, ending in December 1998 with a last show in Margaret River, outside of Perth (or “self-destruction on a desert highway just outside the world’s most isolated city,” as the Juggernaut Rides liner notes dramatically put it).
In the intervening years, Franklin continued to record and tour as a solo artist, also under the name Toshack Highway, as well as under Magnetic Morning, a collaboration with Interpol drummer Sam Fogarino. Swervedriver reformed in 2008, and three years later – ahead of their first Australian tour since 1998’s ill-fated expedition – TheVine connected with Adam Franklin.
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To begin, Adam, I want to quote a song lyric. “And the photographs of God I bought have almost fade away”. [A line from The Jesus and Mary Chain’s ‘Snakedriver’.]
Oh, yeah. That’s a good line.
I mention this because I read your Magnet Magazine guest editorials, and I was particularly interested in what you had to say about that song. You said it’s one of the greatest lines ever in a rock and roll song, which is pretty high praise.
Yeah, I think it is. Like I said in that blog, the lyric is a surreal sort of thing, and I wonder how it crossed Jim and William’s mind to have that lyric in there. I guess they might have thought of all these things that could happen that’d really suck, and one of them would be if you bought these photographs of God, and then they faded away. I thought it was a great tune, as well.
I’ve got a favourite Swervedriver lyric: the opening two lines to “Last Train To Satansville” (“You look like you’ve been losing sleep’, said a stranger on a train / I fixed him with an ice-cold stare and said, ‘I’ve been having those dreams again”). To me they’re a wonderfully evocative couple of lines. Are you particularly fond of those lyrics?
We probably were at the time, because I think that those lyrics were reproduced in full on the [Mezcal Head] album sleeve. But it was inspired by this song ‘They’re Hanging Me Tonight’ which was a song by a country singer named Marty Robbins. They both have a similar sort of narrative. The key line in that song was “They bury Flo tomorrow, but they’re hanging me tonight.” He’s in a prison cell, waiting to be sentenced. That song just seemed to have that twangy sort of vibe.
Speaking more broadly, what do you think when you look back to some of the material you recorded as a younger man?
Well, I think most of it stands up pretty well. I haven’t really listened to the recordings that much. We’ve been searching around for slightly more obscure b-sides and album tracks to play live, and there are some good things tucked away. There is quite a good catalogue for Swervedriver, really. I’m quite impressed by how many songs were written in that short two years, or whatever, because I think we released four EPs that all had four songs on them, and a nine-song album [Raise] as well. It’s actually quite a lot of stuff. And that stuff was written – it wasn’t like we had songs lying around for five years before. They were all pretty much written around that time.
We got quite prolific. It’s quite different now, because now I have songs I’ve had lying around for two, five, or ten years. And it’s good having those things, because every now and then you think “Oh, actually, I finally found a way that this song might work”. Our recent albums are sort of a mixture of new songs as well as things that can be up to 10 years old.
I came across the compilation Juggernaut Rides. I had to order it off eBay because there’s pretty much no other way to get it these days. It’s great, I love it. It’s a really good summation.
People ask me what my [Swervedriver] favourite album is, and people think you shouldn’t say compilation albums, but to me it’s a good selection of everything, really. It doesn’t have all the best stuff on it. I quite like the fact that it’s not chronologically laid out, so you just jump straight into the middle.
What does it mean to you to know that songs you guys recorded together are still extensively a part of peoples’ lives?
Oh, it means everything. It’s great. The music proves it has longevity. In the early nineties, you’d get little snipes in the press sometimes and people talk about the bands that supposedly were more important that I suspect aren’t still being played by anybody 20 years later. It never ceases to amaze me when people say this song or that song moved them in a way, or helped them through a period of time, and all that kind of stuff. Or that they sort of rocked out to it or whatever. It’s great.
For the full interview, visit The Vine. For more Swervedriver – highly recommended – visit their website. The music video for their song ‘Son of Mustang Ford‘ is embedded below.
Rolling Stone Q+A: Rob Swire of Pendulum
A Q+A published in the January 2011 issue of Rolling Stone, which featured in the ‘Sounds of Summer’ music festival guide. Click the below image for a closer look, or read the article text underneath.
Pendulum – Heavy Dance
Leading the Perth-born, U.K.-based drum-and-bass act Pendulum isn’t all Rob Swire has been doing recently: he also co-wrote and co-produced Rihanna’s “Rude Boy”, which meant double platinum in Australia. Pendulum have just wrapped up an Aussie tour ahead of their appearance at the Future Music Festival tour in March, and we caught up with Swire on the eve of their show in his hometown, Perth.
Onstage you rely on around a dozen computers – that’s a lot of trust in technology.
Well, the point of having 12 computers is so that if one of them goes down, the rest are relatively alright. We do get the central computer resetting sometimes, because that thing’s being raped, to be honest.
When you were younger, do you remember watching particular artists or bands and thinking, “that’s what I want to do”?
I was fairly heavy into electronic music, so I never really saw that many bands. I think the first band I saw was Spiderbait and the second was The Prodigy. We were in a band before, a sort of metal band and that was just sort of inspired by death metal bands, but I think watching Strapping Young Lad and Muse pretty much inspired us to get a band together.
Your background is in metal, yet you’re now in the biggest electronic rock act in the world. You’ve also co-written with Rihanna. Do you get bored easily?
I do, yes. I’m totally ADD in terms of writing music. I just get bored of whatever I last did, and if I do something too long I get bored and do something else. The Rihanna thing is something different and it’s far, far removed from the Pendulum stuff. It’s good.
Do you see yourself pursuing more co-writing in the future?
I can, yeah, but it’s such a different thing to the way we’ve done things in the past. With Pendulum, we have 100 percent creative control. With the stuff like Rihanna, you pretty much do what they say. If they don’t like a bit of a verse, they fuckin’ take it out. If they don’t like a vocal, that’s not the vocal they use.
With Pendulum, you’ve been performing your ABC News remix as the encore of the current tour. That song’s become something else entirely for you, hasn’t it?
Yeah, in fact, it’s a very scary thing. I think the slight weirdness of the Sydney show might have been a lot of people were solely there to see that tune. They’d heard it on the radio and thought we might be a sort of electro, DJ group or some shit like that, and they came along and there’s a band playing metal-infused drum and bass. There was a lot of chanting of “ABC!” throughout the set. It was a bit weird.
For more Pendulum, visit their website. The music video for their track ‘The Island‘ is embedded below.
The Vine interview: The Naked and Famous
An interview for The Vine with Thom Powers of New Zealand pop/rock act The Naked and Famous. Excerpt below.
Interview – The Naked and Famous
Throughout their long musical history, the island nation of New Zealand couldn’t lay claim to a single blog-worthy buzz band. Split Enz? Pre-internet, by a long shot. Shihad? They’ve been mining the same hard rock territory for 20-plus years, and they’re unlikely to extend their influence beyond anyone who’s not already a fan. Cut Off Your Hands? A contender, sure, but they’ve not released new music since 2008. Die! Die! Die!? Amazing band, but probably too punk-niche to be retweetable. Flight Of The Conchords? More of a comedy act than musical, I’d argue.
Formed around the creative partnership of Thom Powers and Alisa Xayalith, The Naked and Famous took their name from a Tricky song. Soon joined by electronic whiz Aaron Short and then David Beadle and Jesse Wood, The Naked and Famous’ fortunes took off with the release of ‘Young Blood’ in May 2010, much to the delight of music fans with an urge to scratch the same itch first disturbed by Passion Pit (and earlier, by MGMT’s debut). A divine slice of electro indie-pop, ‘Young Blood’ – 900,000 views and counting – is a monster single that taps right into the vein of naïve adolescence (for real: its first line is “We’re only young and naïve still”). The September-released album, Passive Me, Aggressive You, shot to #1 on the New Zealand off the back of that single and its equally addictive follow-up, ‘Punching In A Dream’. (Interestingly, first single ‘All Of This’ was released in November 2009, nearly a year before the album’s release. It failed to chart.)
Despite their neon-glow, both singles betray the band’s true sound. Influenced by acts like Nine Inch Nails and Tool, Passive Me, Aggressive You’s non-singles exhibit more of a fascination with walls of shoegaze-like guitars and electronic sequencing than bright synth-pop. This is promising; it suggests that The Naked And Famous have a plan that extends much further than a couple of hypeworthy singles. Ahead of their appearance on the 2011 Big Day Out tour, TheVine connected with the band’s co-founder, singer, guitarist and producer, Thom Powers, to talk hype, remaining independent, and Reznor.
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I’ve seen the word ‘hipster’ getting thrown in the band’s direction a bit lately. How do you respond to that?
Dissing us, are they?
Sometimes it’s positive, sometimes it’s negative. The connotation of ‘hipster’ tends to shift a bit.
I don’t know. Hipsters are always going to exist, I think, and then they move out of home and grow up I guess. [laughs] I’m not sure, I don’t know. I don’t really know what to do about it. I’m not one of them, so I can’t really relate.
Good answer. Do you read your own press?
Sometimes, yeah. I skim through it. I try not to take it all too seriously. But it’s really hard unless you’re some sort of Zen Buddhist to actually detach and not become emotional about things, so it’s more to protect yourself. Don’t read the good ones, and don’t read the bad ones either. I do skim through them. I take it at face value, really.
Do you care about what people think about the band?
It’s a weird question. Yeah, I think I do, but at the same time if all I cared about was what people thought about [us], it would be superficial. I think that’s a pretty complicated question to ask, because I would care about what people thought if they thought it was destroying the world. But if some hipster thinks that I’m not cool enough, and he wants to call me a ‘faggot’ on the Internet, then I don’t really care about that. I can’t quite answer that question because there are too many social levels to answer it on.
For the full interview, visit The Vine.
More of The Naked and Famous on their website. The music video for their song ‘Young Blood‘ is embedded below.
The Vine interview: The Stooges
An interview with The Stooges‘ guitarist James Williamson for The Vine. Excerpt below.
Fact: The Stooges are one of the most influential rock bands of all time.
Fact: Raw Power is one of the most influential rock albums of all time.
Released in 1973 to sparse acclaim and an underwhelming commercial performance – Raw Power peaked at #182 on the Billboard charts – the album eventually spread like a virus throughout the next generation of rock musicians, many of whom would introduce their own fans to The Stooges. Among them: Kurt Cobain, who named Raw Power his all-time favourite; Johnny Marr of The Smiths (and, more recently, Modest Mouse and The Cribs); Henry Rollins (who has the words ‘Search And Destroy’ tattooed across his shoulder blades); and Steve Jones of The Sex Pistols, who says he learned to play guitar by taking speed and playing along to Raw Power.
Of the album’s guitarist, James Williamson (main pic, far left – 1972), Johnny Marr said: “I’m his biggest fan. He has the technical ability of Jimmy Page without being as studious, and the swagger of Keith Richards without being sloppy. He’s both demonic and intellectual, almost how you would imagine Darth Vader to sound if he was in a band.” Williamson first joined The Stooges in 1971 as second guitarist, but the band was dissolving before his eyes. Only a recording offer from David Bowie to Williamson and vocalist Iggy Pop got them back together for one last stab at rock stardom as The Stooges. With the Asheton brothers in tow – Scott (drums) and Ron (bass at the time, but he’d later play guitar during more recent incarnations of the band, up until his death in 2009) – Williamson co-wrote Raw Power with Iggy and played all of the guitar parts. Despite Bowie’s involvement, though, the record didn’t perform commercially, and the band again split. Williamson went on to collaborate with Iggy as a writer and producer for a couple of Pop’s solo ventures (1977’s Kill City and 1979’s New Values), but after falling out with the singer over Soldier’s recording methods, the pair remained estranged for 16 years.
What happened next is one of rock music’s strangest tales: James Williamson gave up on music entirely, graduated from California State Polytechnic University with a degree in electrical engineering, and went on to work for Sony Electronics for 25 years. Most of his colleagues had no idea of Williamson’s involvement with The Stooges, despite Iggy Pop doggedly working himself into a position of international notoriety as one of rock’s most outlandish performers. The Raw Power guitarist wanted nothing to do with it. It took a university essay written by Williamson’s son, entitled ‘Coffins In The Corner’ – in reference to his father’s guitar cases sitting up against the wall, unopened all throughout his childhood and adolescence – to provoke the guitarist to finally accept Iggy’s offer to reform the band in the wake of Ron Asheton’s death last year. It also helped that Sony offered him a generous early retirement package from his role as Vice President of Technology Standards. Now Williamson, aged 61, is touring the world, playing The Stooges’ celebrated catalogue to a new generation. The Vine connected with the guitarist ahead of the band’s appearance on the Big Day Out tour in January and February 2011.
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Andrew, how are you doing?
I’m very well, thanks. It’s 7 a.m.
7a.m.? [laughs] I’m sorry to put you through that, but I guess we could find the time we could both do it.
Absolutely. It’s an honour, mate. I found your website while I was researching for this interview. I was intrigued by a couple of things. First, what’s the origin of your nickname?
Oh, Straight James? After The Stooges had split up, Iggy came out with an album called The Idiot, and he had a song on there called ‘The Dum Dum Boys’ (link). In that song he talks about “Ron did this,” and “Scott, he did that”, and then “What about James? He’s gone straight”. So after that, I tongue-in-cheek named my publishing company ‘Straight James Music’ and it kinda stuck from there. I’ve had it ever since.
For the full interview, visit The Vine.
For more of The Stooges, visit your local record store / online outlet and immediately buy/download their three albums: The Stooges, Fun House, and Raw Power. Thank me later.
Mess+Noise EP review: Bleeding Knees Club
An EP review for Mess+Noise. Excerpt below.
Bleeding Knees Club – Virginity
The approach for Gold Coast duo Bleeding Knees Club is disarmingly simple, and on Virginity, their first release – five tracks, and barely 11 minutes in total – they sound simultaneously loose and confident. It works so well purely because there’s nothing else to get in the way of Alex Wall thrashing away at a shitty old drumkit while singing about his offsider being 20, him being 21, them both being drunk, and about how guitarist Jordan Malane “found my cigarettes” and “took three”. Throw in an incessantly-shaken tambourine and a harmonised vocal melody and you’ve got everything you could possibly want from a simple, dumb, awesome indie-punk tune.
There’s a killer middle-eight in ‘Truth Or Dare’ that sounds like the wheels are about to fall off. This same sense of barely-contained enthusiasm propels Virginity along like Wall and Malane have nothing to lose.
For the full review, visit Mess+Noise, where you can also stream the track ‘Bad Guys’. For more Bleeding Knees Club, visit their Myspace. Live footage of their song ‘Camp Out‘ is embedded below.
Rolling Stone story: Halfway
A story for the October 2010 issue of Rolling Stone on the Brisbane-based alt-country/rock band Halfway.
Click the below image for a closer look, or view the article text underneath.
Halfway: Between Alt-Country and a Rock Place
Brisbane collective embrace pared-back approach, Forster wisdom on third LPby Andrew McMillen
Three albums into a ten-year career, Brisbane alternative country act Halfway have hit their stride with An Outpost Of Promise, released in July through +1 Records. If you’re unfamiliar with their earlier work, fear not: their latest is “definitely a good place to start,” according to Halfway’s John Busby, who alongside Chris Dale forms the band’s core duo. “It’s the least country record that we’ve done before, so maybe that makes it more accessible.”
Put Dale and Busby in the same room and you’ll soon find them finishing each others’ sentences. Both in their late 30s, their friendship was forged in the central Queensland city of Rockhampton in the 1990s before they relocated to Brisbane and formed Halfway in 2000. But while the pair are the heart of the band, they are bolstered by an extended family – all Halfway’s eight band members meet twice a week at ‘Halfway House’ (a room underneath Busby’s mother’s house) to “have a beer, play music, and just talk,” says Busby. “It’s never really toil. I love hanging out; it’s the best part of being in the band.”
The country tones that coloured their first two albums – 2004’s Farewell To The Fainthearted and 2006’s Remember The River – are marginalised on Outpost, which features 10 songs played “straight up, with tension and drama,” according to its producer and former Go-Between Robert Forster.
Forster’s wisdom triggered a shift in the pair’s approach to songwriting. This time, the pair ensured that every song worked with just guitar and vocal first, before soliciting embellishments from their bandmates. Busby suggests Forster gave them confidence by exposing each song’s acoustic core; “rather than just trying to make a lot of racket”. “That’s how we ought to go forward,” Dale concludes.
“Just let the songs do their thing.”
For more Halfway, visit their MySpace. I reviewed An Outpost Of Promise for Mess+Noise earlier in the year. It’s ace!
