More than 2,200 bands play Austin’s SXSW festival each year, so it takes something pretty special to cut through the margarita fuzz and stand out from the melee. Last year, four unassuming teenagers from the tiny town of Lititz, Pennsylvania managed it. Anyone who witnessed The Districts’ incendiary live show came away raving about their fully-formed rock’n’roll epics, and in particular fresh-faced lead singer Rob Grote whose voice sounded like it belonged to a man who’d been headlining festivals since Woodstock.

Nine months on The Districts find themselves in London after a year spent spreading their gospel around the world. Their reputation as the band who conquered SXSW could have weighed heavy, but they shrug off the idea that they’ve felt under pressure to live up to the hype. “When you’re playing a show you’re in you own little world,” shrugs Grote. “We don’t think about anything else.”

Originally published in New Bands of 2015 issue, 10 January 2015. Continue reading at NME.

Shamir greets me with a hug. He’s just finished soundchecking at London’s intimate Courtyard Theatre, where later he’ll play his first ever UK show in front of an audience peppered with label heads, music journalists and radio DJs. Armed with the bouncy, Technicolor rap of his breakthrough hit ‘On The Regular’ and the soulful strut of ‘I Know It’s A Good Thing’, one of NME’s Top Tracks of 2014, there’s a gathering consensus that Shamir just might be The Next Big Thing.

Originally published in New Bands of 2015 issue, 10 January 2015. Continue reading at NME.

This year, over a million vinyl records were sold for the first time in the last two decades. Meanwhile, HMV posted a £17 million profit just a year after going into liquidation. In other news, up is down. Black is white. Cats and dogs are living together.

Continue reading at NME.

When Bobby Keys died last week, aged 70, Keith Richards said he’d “lost the largest pal in the world.” Keef got that right: the sax player was larger than life itself.

Even if you’ve never heard his name you’ll have danced to his tunes. He’s on the best Stones records, blowing his heart out on ‘Rip This Joint’ and giving ‘Brown Sugar’ its signature solo. Originally that song had a guitar part until Keys jammed on it at his own birthday party with Keith, Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Ringo Starr and Keith Moon. Mick Jagger and producer Jimmy Miller were watching. They realised on the spot they needed Keys on the record.

Aside from his defining work with the Stones, Keys also played on a pile of great records by the likes of John Lennon, Harry Nilsson and Warren Zevon. That’s him you hear wailing on Lennon’s ‘Whatever Gets You Thru The Night’, recorded in one take.

Not bad considering he’d once feared rock’n’roll would end his career. When he first saw The Stones in 1964 he said he “saw the death of the saxophone unravelling before my eyes” because none of the new bands used one. It was Keys’ playing that helped it become part of rock’n’roll’s sound. He made sax cool.

It didn’t hurt that he and Keith got on famously. Shortly after they met they realised they’d been born on the same day: December 18, 1943. “Bobby, you know what that means?” Keith told him. “We’re half man and half horse, and we got a licence to shit in the streets.”

And shit in the streets they did. Together they basically invented the myth of the rock’n’roll star. Anyone who ever fills a bath with Dom Pérignon and dives in with a model will know that Keys got there first. It cost him all the money he made on that tour. “Kind of dumb,” he said later, “but, you know, man, I’d do it again.”

Or picture the most archetypal rock’n’roll image of all: throwing a TV set out of a hotel room window. It was Bobby and Keith who invented that, giving inspiration to decades of rock stars and extra work to generations of TV salesmen when documentary director Robert Frank asked them to provide a bit more chaos for his film Cocksucker Blues.

Keys’ drink and drug consumption was prodigious, and he was there along with Nilsson, Starr and Moon during John Lennon’s infamous ‘lost weekend’ which ran from 1973-75. Keys went to prison several times throughout his life, usually for crimes he didn’t remember committing. He was once caught with heroin and syringes while attempting to fly out of Hawaii and avoided a serious stretch behind bars when he was bailed out by a local pineapple magnate, who just happened to be the father of a girl he’d just slept with.

So while his death is sad, Bobby Keys will live on. Not just through his music or the tall tales told about him, but through the debauched spirit of rock’n’roll that he helped to mould. Every time a young band trashes a hotel room or empties a can of lager into a bidet, they’ll be carrying a small part of Keys’ monster spirit with them.

Originally published in NME, 13 December 2014.

From NME, 29 November 2014:

Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alekhina were mobbed by reporters and fans when they visited the UK last week for the first time since their release from prison at the end of 2013.

The pair spoke to the media outside the Ecuadorian Embassy after meeting Wikileaks founder Julian Assange as well as speaking at Parliament. Earlier, the pair exclusively told NME that they’re working on new music and videos in collaboration with former Le Tigre musician JD Samson.

The Russian feminist protest art activists came to international fame in 2012 when they were imprisoned after playing 45 seconds of their “punk prayer”, ‘Mother of God, Drive Putin Away’, at a guerrilla gig in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.

While visiting London, Tolokonnikova said their new creative project represented a different sort of challenge for the band. “It’s new for us because we’re artists, we’re not really musicians or from the music world,” she said. “[In 2012] we just decided that we should do a punk band, and we got our friends together and tried to do a song. We did what we were able to. It wasn’t brilliant, but it was enough for a political music video. Now we’re working with some real musicians, including JD Samson, on some creative stuff.”

Asked whether the intention was to produce a Pussy Riot album, she said: “Our goal is not to make an album, but the form of our statements is very important to us and the video clip form is one we like. Maybe at some point in the future we will do an album, but right now we want to make videos.”

After visiting Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy, where he has claimed asylum, the pair told NME that they “had more in common with him than we expected.”

Asked to clarify what those things in common are, Alekhina said: “It’s basically universal things about freedom of expression, if we’re talking about us, and freedom of information, if we’re talking about him.”

Tolokonnikova added: “I believe that everything about a state should be transparent to its citizens, including the issue of surveillance. Its legality and justification should be explained to citizens. We are under constant surveillance by the FSB (the Russian internal security services) in Russia, and we’re trying to protest against this, question its legality and ask why they’re doing it. We naturally would not want Western states to follow the bad example of Russia, where we’re trying to fight exactly the same things that Assange is fighting against here.”

On whether they saw any problem with members of a feminist collective such as Pussy Riot openly supporting Assange, a man who is wanted in Sweden over sexual assault allegations, Tolokonnikova said: “We did not review this charge that has been directed at him. We do not think it is in relation to the things that he is doing right now.”

Alyokhina added: “We also try to see the direction of one’s intentions in the future, what he is trying to do and is doing right now.”

The visit to Assange came just hours before the two women appeared at Parliament to speak at an event organised by Russian opposition politicians to support the introduction of a ‘Magnitsky law’. Such a law, named after Sergey Magnitsky, a Russian whistleblower who died in police custody in Moscow, would punish the Russian officials responsible for his murder by freezing their assets in the UK and restricting their visa rights.

That event came at the end of a busy week of public appearances, which had also seen Tolokonnikova and Alekhina speak at an Amnesty International event in London attended by the likes of Django Django, Viv Albertine and Jamie Hince.  Asked by former Slits guitarist Albertine whether they’d inspired a new generation of girls, Tolokonnikova said: At the end of the day, we inspired people to be less afraid. A lot of people started their political activity because of our involvement with the law. There’s different value to someone going to a political rally in England than in Russia, so even if we’ve only inspired a few 100 people that has tremendous value in modern Russia.”

While in the country they also spoke at the Cambridge Union and addressed a sold-out 450-capacity audience at the Greenwood Theatre at King’s College London.

From NME, 20/27 December 2014:

Knee high boots with six inch heels. A calf-length black sequin dress with the words ‘Free Pussy Riot’ picked out in white. A bejewelled balaclava. “I ran three miles in a charity race dressed like this,” says the bald, rangy man waiting patiently in the bracing south London night for his heroes to appear. “I’m a gay guy from Slovenia and these girls inspired me so much.” When Masha Alyokhina and Nadya Tolokonnikova finally emerge for a cigarette from the lecture hall where they’ve been speaking they burst into filthy giggles. “Very nice!” says Nadya, mimicking Borat. “Sexy time!” chimes in Masha before they send him away with the selfie of his dreams. They’ve gotten used to this kind of attention. Pussy Riot are rock stars.

Not bad for a group whose live career lasted all of 45 seconds, but then Pussy Riot were never a band in any real sense. When they were arrested on February 21, 2012 less than a minute into making a video for their punk protest prayer ‘Mother of God, Drive Putin Away’ inside Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour they weren’t exactly hoping Simon Cowell was going to offer them a record deal off the back of it.

“We’re not really musicians or from the music world,” laughs Nadya, after we head to the pub. “At that moment we just decided that we should do a punk band, and we got our friends together and tried to do a song. We did what we were able to. It wasn’t brilliant, but it was enough for a political music video.”

While they were awaiting trial the music world came to them. Björk and Paul McCartney voiced their support. Madonna wore a balaclava during a concert in Moscow and told the audience she was “praying for their freedom.” This solidarity meant a lot to them. Masha is the sort of music fan who describes David Bowie as a “big inspiration” and says she “bought every issue of NME” when it was published in Russia. “I went to see Muse in Moscow in 2001,” she remembers. “I was 13 and a big fan, so I was very excited. They were giving away the first copies of NME there. That’s really how I started listening to music. It was kind of a guide for me. I didn’t have anything except NME.”

When the pair were released, just before Christmas last year, they were international icons. In February they travelled to New York for an Amnesty International Concert and Madonna was there to welcome them. Away from the bright lights, Nadya and Masha say they were much more interested in meeting their riot grrrl hero Kathleen Hanna and her former Le Tigre bandmate JD Samson. “We met JD just after we arrived in New York,” says Nadya. “She was very interesting and we had a really fruitful discussion. Now we’re working together on some creative stuff, music stuff.”

Nadya and Masha have spent the year since their release engaged in a host of political activism: they were horsewhipped by Cossack police while protesting at the Sochi Winter Olympics, brought their case to the European Court of Human Rights and founded both an organisation, Zona Prava, and an independent news service, MediaZona, which campaign for the reform of Russian prisons. They haven’t previously shown interest in making music again, but Nadya clarifies that their first thought is always their political message. “Our goal is not to make an album,” she says, “but the form of our statements is very important to us and the video clip form is one we like. Maybe at some point in the future we will do an album, but right now we want to make videos.”

They want to make something else go viral?

“Yes,” she smiles, “Something like a virus.”

The day after my interview I’m invited to meet Pussy Riot again at the Ecuadorian Embassy, where Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has been holed up since June 2012. A man hiding from sexual assault charges in Sweden may seem like a strange bedfellow for avowedly feminist activists, but outside the embassy Nadya tells reporters simply that they didn’t discuss the charges because they don’t think “it is in relation to the things that he is doing right now.”

Instead, Masha says they found common ground in their work to support prisoners and whistleblowers, particularly Wikileaks source Chelsea Manning, whose case they describe as “one of the most important in today’s world.”

Masha tells me that while their own time in prison was “difficult”, she saw reasons to be optimistic: “I had conversations with guards and other prisoners which really influenced me. When a normal, common Russian girl who is completely outside of politics and civil society life tells you that she understands what you’re doing, she appreciates it and wants to fight for her rights now – that’s a real shock and that’s what I’m focusing on now because it’s inspiring for me.”

That evening we head to Parliament where Nadya and Masha are speaking in support of a proposed ‘Magnitsky law’. Sergei Magnitsky was a Russian accountant and whistleblower who was beaten to death in Moscow prison. The proposed law, which has already been introduced in America, would prevent those responsible for his death from spending their ill-begotten wealth in Britain. Despite the gravity of the situation, Nadya can’t help cracking jokes. “We think it’s a brilliant idea to invite punks to Parliament,” she says by way of introduction. “It’s the nicest idea since you invited Ali G here.”

Despite everything that Vladimir Putin has thrown at them, Nadya and Masha have kept laughing in his face. That’s seen them venerated in the West, yet when I visited Russia last summer to cover Subbotnik Festival I met Moscow hipsters who dismissed Pussy Riot as troublemakers who don’t represent young Russians. I ask Nadya whether there’s any way of getting though to them. “What you’re talking about is a question of courage,” she says. “The reaction to us was really polarised between the West and Russia because in the West we were treated like heroes but in Russia we were witches who were against religion. The Russian media just wanted to paint us black and not provide realistic information.”

The way that Putin controls and manipulates Russian media leads to an uninformed populace – especially, Nadya argues, when it comes to feminist art movements. “I bet only a very small number of those Russian hipsters know what the riot grrrl movement is, or who the Guerrilla Girls were,” she says. “There’s a huge tradition of those sorts of groups here, but for some reason it seems that Putin doesn’t want people to be really well educated. Educated people tend to ask questions.”

She suggests that Putin’s eventual undoing will likely be as a result of his own hubris, and doesn’t entirely rule out the idea of running for office herself one day. “Actually in the next 10 years I’m not allowed to do it, because under Russian law convicted criminals can’t run for office for a decade. After 10 years? I have no idea. Maybe! I wish I had more education to run the country. I have some suggestions, of course, but in a few years my picture of reality will be more clear. I couldn’t continue my education in jail because I had to work so I lost two years. I’m a 25-year-old with the education of a 23 year old… but with the experiences of a 40 year old.”

Away from the maelstrom that’s accompanied their trip to London, taking in sold-out public lectures, meeting celebrity dissidents and speaking at Parliament, I ask Nadya to reflect on the past year. This time 12 months ago she was still in prison. Now she and Masha travel the world as celebrities and everybody they meet seems to expect them to have the solutions to oust Putin, bring peace to the Ukraine and end international totalitarianism while they’re at it.

“That’s the strangest thing,” she agrees. “We’re not gods. We don’t have answers to everyone’s questions. But, you know, it’s a miracle of solidarity that so many people want to support us. Immanuel Kant wrote about something that happens sometimes when political changes take place. It’s something like a miracle. When we have the power and the ability of all the people working together, we can get what we want.”

She thinks for a moment, then says: “When I was 16 I said to my schoolmates that I wanted to lead the craziest life that I can, and that if I can’t do that I may as well just live in garbage.” She nods towards a pile on bin bags on the side of the road and laughs.

Putin himself would have to agree she’s succeeded. Nadya and Masha have two of the craziest lives on the planet. They’re the prisoners who became punk icons. The rock stars of dissidence. Does that burden weigh heavy?

“The only pressure I’ve felt in the last year was when I came out of prison and realised that so many eyes were looking towards me,” says Nadya. “I realised that I have a really big responsibility. I used to talk a lot of bullshit, but now I don’t have that option anymore. So many people don’t have a voice, like those in prison in Russia and around the world. We have to speak for them.”

Back in July, when TV On The Radio singer Tunde Adebimpe announced that his band’s fifth album ‘Seeds’, he said: “We’ve been through a lot of stuff in the past few years that could have stopped the band cold…”

Despite the critical acclaim heaped on 2006’s ‘Return To Cookie Mountain’ and 2008’s ‘Dear Science’ (second in NME’s album of the year list, behind MGMT’s ‘Oracular Spectacular’), by the time of the release of 2011’s ‘Nine Types Of Light’ the band seemed to be fracturing apart. The band spoke openly about their unhappiness on the 18-month long ‘Dear Science’ tour, with bearded multi-instumentalist and songwriter Kyp Malone comparing it to “going to war. Or being in prison”. They parted ways with their label, Interscope, and guitarist/producer Dave Sitek left the band’s Brooklyn homeland to move into a studio in LA where he became better known as producer for records like Bat for Lashes’ ‘The Haunted Man’, Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ ‘Mosquito’ and Beady Eye’s ‘BE’. But then, to throw all their other troubles into sharp relief, on April 20, 2011, bassist Gerard Smith died from lung cancer at the age of 36, just nine days after the release of ‘Nine Types Of Light’.

It’s no surprise then that the Adebimpe, Sitek, Malone and fourth member Jaleel Bunton felt that they needed to slowly feel their way back into being a band. Their most high-profile engagement in the last few years was as curators of ATP Camber Sands in May 2013, where they were asked whether they would be recording together again. “We’re trying to approach it as casually as possible so as not to scare it away,” said Malone. “It’s like trying to catch a rabbit without a net or a weapon. We’re just trying to sneak up on whatever happens next.”

Now that they’ve caught the rabbit and the album is being pressed into vinyl, Sitek points out that TV On The Radio are the sort of band whose status is always hard to confirm unless you’re directly observing them, like Schrodinger’s cat. When I meet the band in West London and ask whether the band ever came close to breaking up, he says: “I personally feel like there’s a perpetual question of ‘Should we do it? or ‘Should we not do it? Our band is constantly in a state where we’re not sure what will happen. We all accept that we’re on this giant rock flying through space and that none of us are in control, and that permeates everything that I do. We’ll do it until we just don’t do it anymore. We’ve never anticipated stopping, but if we stopped we wouldn’t be shocked. We’d just go, ‘Oh, this is the part where we stop.’ We’re healthily in the present.”

He stops and thinks for a second. “Until one of us gets a crippling gambling addiction and we have to come back…”

They laugh, and Adebimpe chips in: “We each have a red button in a case that we can press and it says: ‘I need this money.’”

Over their decade long career TV On The Radio have built a reputation for being among rock music’s most lucid and eloquent commentators on politics, and they’ve been particularly outspoken when it comes to discussing our culture’s disastrous impact on the planet’s ecology. ‘Seeds’, perhaps unsurprisingly given the circumstances of its creation, turns the band’s forensic gaze inward.

When I suggest that this is the band’s most introspective work to date, Sitek immediately agrees. “I think that’s accurate,” he says. “I think with ‘Return To Cookie Mountain’ there was a lot of reconciling of how to be human within this giant mix-up, and although nowadays there’s certainly as many or more mix-ups to try to reconcile, I think the broad stroke [on ‘Seeds’] was to deal with the personal with the same fervour. Let me unpeel the onion of my mind, even though it’s going to make me cry.”

That idea of knowing yourself and how your own brain ticks is central to the record, particularly when it comes to how we deal with trauma, bereavement and loss. Lead single ‘Happy Idiot’ discusses shutting out pain to enjoy the bliss of ignorance, while the refrain of standout track ‘Trouble’ runs: “Everything’s going to be okay / I keep telling myself / Don’t worry be happy / you keep telling yourself.”

Sitek says the song is about the self-delusions that are sometimes necessary for surviving modern life. “The ‘I keep telling myself…’ line means that it might not be true,” he says. “Everyone goes through that, on multiple levels. There’s a lot of doubt floating around. What has modern living and its greatest aspirations lead to? ‘Trouble’, at least for me, is about putting your helmet on. Light bulbs were invented to be perfect and last forever, and it was only when they realised that they couldn’t keep selling them that they made them only last for so long. For a species that makes the conscious decision to support that, and to forget that it used to be different, set us up for a new paradigm. There’s psychic consequences that we feel. We’re realising where all this convenience has led. Being in touch all the time has led to an underlying anxiety, because we’re not supposed to be in touch all the time.” He grins. “We’re not supposed to be connected to all of the filth at one time.”

Adebimpe adds that the idea of how we mentally adapt to modernity is one that’s fascinated him since he was a child: “I grew up around people who were experiencing a lot of mental health issues and anxiety because my father was a psychologist and a social worker. I’d go with him to work and I’d see people who’d had a psychic break and they just weren’t present in the way that we are. Their reality is not the same. I saw all of that stuff pre-internet, and I wonder how much the internet has affected that. I feel like if I’d have had this much connection to strangers as a teenager, I don’t think I would have made anything. I know people are still making things, but I think about how much alone time I had and how formative that was. There’s that quote about how all of man’s misfortune in life stems from not being able to sit in a room quietly by themselves. I can see that, but the other part of that is there’s so much room to destroy your mind. People are very sensitive, and if you already have that sensitivity then technology [like a smart phone] is like falling into a portal. You just need to flick your thumb. It’s the easiest thing in the world.”

“Who knew your thumb could drive you mad?” chips in Sitek. “Wi-fi can stop a plane, your thumb can stop your brain.”

Back in that first ‘Seeds’ announcement about how they almost ‘stopped cold’, Adebimpe added that the record is “1,000 percent, without a doubt, the best thing we’ve ever done.” The rest of the band are more circumspect, but Malone does say that the singer’s passion is catching: “I don’t have favourites, but the fact of Tunde’s excitement about it is very exciting to me. If any of us are standing on a chair and shouting that this is the best, then that kind of enthusiasm is very valuable, and very contagious.”

As for Adebimpe himself, he seems particularly proud that the band are continuing to forge their own path. Although musically they’ve softened their harder edges since last time out, creating a polished, synth-laden record that’s more upbeat and accessible than ‘Nine Types of Light’ ever was, it’s clear the changes they’ve made have been on their own terms. “Figuring out how to make work without compromising, and have that float me, and do it with my friends, and to do it for this long with my friends – it’s an intensely special and rare thing. Especially in our arena you’re always making concessions to go forward or ‘keep up with the times’ or whatever, and we haven’t really had to do that too much.”

He shrugs: “I mean, we were going to make an EDM record… but then it just fell through… we couldn’t find the drop…”

Beside him, Sitek mimes knocking over a glass. “Spillex… oh shit!”

Adebimpe can’t help but crack up: “Oh, there’s the drop.”

“We don’t drop beats,” grins Sitek, “we just drop drinks.”

For a band that a few years ago were showing stress fractures, TV On The Radio find themselves in a position to crack jokes as they launch an album that sets to music Antonio Gramsci’s definition of the challenge of modernity: “To live without illusions without becoming disillusioned.” Somehow they’ve ended up about as mentally well-adjusted as anyone could hope to be in this year of our Lord 2014. For Sitek, that’s all down to their fervent belief in throwing away their old templates and starting anew. “Commercial success has eluded this band from the start, but it was never really part of our goal,” he says. “There’s still varying degrees of shock when we’re playing in front of 30,000 people. Why do 30,000 people know this band? It’s beyond me, but the only reason we got here is because we’ve been reckless. So let’s stay reckless.”

Originally published in NME, 22 November 2014.

“There’s a cancer of indifference in a lot of contemporary guitar music,” says Bad Breeding frontman Christopher Dodd. “I mean that in terms of lyrics but even in terms of intensity and attitude. It’s a bit too jangly for our liking. Our attitude comes from being aware of our surroundings. Not everything is great at the moment, and you can feel that when you live in a place like Stevenage.”

Full piece in NME, 15 November 2014.

Things always get interesting whenever Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and Cedric Bixler-Zavala join forces. The pair have been bandmates since 1989, and despite both At The Drive In and The Mars Volta burning out, they’re now working together once again as Antemasque.

Full piece in NME, 15 November 2014.

When J. Spaceman, Mick Jagger’s son and the Ramones’ old manager all turn up to your party, you’ve gotta be doing something right. Radar took over Williamsburg’s Glasslands venue to serve up the most anarchic show of this year’s CMJ festival: a night which featured sinister topless gyrations, a death-defying balcony leap off and someone inexplicably performing in a full penguin costume.

Before all that dangerous weirdness it was Girlpool who opened the night with a set of whip-smart songs that crackled with their own brand of subversive wit. On the stand-out ‘Jane’, LA duo Cleo Tucker and Harmony Tividad tell the tale of the eponymous hero punching a boy called Tommy in the mouth. They’re just an indie film soundtrack away from becoming cult heroes.

There’s a decidedly 90s feel to the next part of the night, as Peterborough’s The Wytches channel Nirvana and those early Radiohead recordings where it still sounded as if Thom Yorke and co. thought they were a grunge band.

London three-piece Happyness are that rare band who manage to mix a genuinely absurd sense of humour into their lyrics, while musically they rifle through the best of Pavement and Blur.

There’s something gleefully absurd about seeing a guy dressed as a penguin announce that his band are “here to play some rock’n’roll,” but it didn’t seem to ruffle Twin Peaks’ Cadien’s feathers. The Chicago band drew one of the best receptions of the night from the moshing crowd, with tracks like ‘Making Breakfast’ sounding like a band full of Mac DeMarcos playing at full pelt.

You can’t get more of a homecoming show than Public Access TV playing here at Glasslands. The New Yorkers used to live within the venue’s warehouse space, so they’re delighted to be back before it closes its doors at the end of the year. They’ve grown in stage presence since their first UK shows back at The Great Escape earlier this year, and their perfectly crafted indie rock ear-worms like ‘Monaco’ and newie ‘In The Mirror’ will be rattling around the audience’s skulls for days.

Surely wary of tonight’s headliners’ fearsome live reputation, Bo Ningen pull out all the stops. While guitars whirl around the stage behind him like chainsaws, frontman Taigen Kawabe plays his bass above his head, ‘stabs’ himself with its neck and then climbs up the speaker stack to a balcony which he leaps off into the crowd.

Even that crowd-baiting anarchy can’t quite match the Fat White Family for sheer evil stage presence. Frontman Lias looks like a man possessed during a ferocious opening salvo which includes ‘Is It Raining In Your Mouth?’ The band dedicate it to former Ramones manager Danny Fields, who had been spotted backstage taking photos of the band. If the Americans in the crowd were in any doubt that they were witnessing the birth of something ungodly on their shores, the grinding ‘I Am Mark E Smith’ will surely have ripped the scales from their eyes. Lias introduced it as a song about “nobility”, but theirs is a strange new British Invasion.

Originally published in NME, 1 November 2014.

When DMA’s swaggered onstage like six mini Gallaghers at Baby’s All Right in Williamsburg for their debut New York show they may have looked like Britpop revivalists, but they’re more than lairy boys with guitars. “There’s definitely a lad-rock thing,” says guitarist Matt Mason, “but songs like ‘Delete’ and ‘So We Know’ are ballady as fuck. We’ve played shows where groups of girls come just to hear them. They dance around and leave. Probably because dudes are spilling beer on them.”

Full piece in NME, 1 November 2014.

For many bands, the offer of a record deal is so exciting that they don’t stop to read the small print – and the path to glory is littered with bands who’ve signed over more of their rights than they’d want to. Chvrches to the rescue: though they only have one album to their name themselves, the Glasgow trio set up their own label, Goodbye Records, at the beginning of the year to help new acts onto the first rung of the ladder.

Full piece in NME, 18 October 2014.

Usually when you visit Mexico City’s Corona Capital, you’re more concerned about sun cream than wellies. 2014 was different. Fans this year had to overcome a thunder storm, deep mud and a seriously waterlogged site. Still, on the bright side, that does mean the festival is more like Glastonbury than ever.

Continue reading at NME.

For any serious live music junkie, there’s no hit quite like walking down Sixth Street in downtown Austin when its in full flow. The broad street is splattered with the town credo: ‘Keep Austin Weird’ and lined with bars. Every single one seems to have great bands playing both upstairs and downstairs. The result is a glorious cacophony which hints at why Austin has become America’s live music capital.

Full piece in NME, 11 October 2014.

75,000 music fans may have converged on Zilker Park last weekend for the first weekend instalment of the Austin City Limits festival, but the truth is some of the best shows were taking place in the same place they do all year round: the bars and venues of Austin itself.

Infamous haunts like Beerland, Stubb’s and Red 7 around the Sixth Street/Red River area are just the beginning of Austin’s thriving scene. East of the I-35 there’s another treasure trove of great venues, and The Scoot Inn on East 4th Street and Navasota is an archetypal example of a classic Austin venue.

It was here at SXSW earlier in the year that Tyler, the Creator played the show that later saw him arrested for allegedly inciting a riot, and this weekend it was Tyler’s pal Mac DeMarco’s turn to play an anarchic late night set that captured the spirit of what live music can be in a city that really embraces it.

Continue reading at NME.

“He’s a penny pincher.” Ask a Toronto taxi driver how their crack-smoking, stupor-drunk mayor Rob Ford ever gained so much support and he’ll give you a simple answer. He’s known as the man who cuts waste. You can’t escape austerity anywhere, yet Canada’s music scene is thriving. I came here to find out why.

The next morning, before the award of the annual Polaris Music Prize, I have breakfast downtown with founder Steve Jordan. In Award Show years, the Polaris is only a baby – Jordan started the award in 2006, inspired by way the Mercury Prize shortlist introduced him to a host of obscure and interesting new British music each year. “A lightbulb went off,” he says. “I was thousands of miles away, but I was discovering records through them.”

He wanted to do the same for Canadian music, so he rounded up 190 Canadian journalists to vote for their favourite home-grown albums of the year. Unlike the slightly murky, label-led Mercury submission process, the journalists were given free reign to nominate whichever records they wanted to. Then each year a new ‘Grand Jury’ of 11 is drawn up, with each record on the 10-strong shortlist having its champion. Like the Mercurys the winner is decided on the night of the award, so when we meet Jordan has no idea who will win. “The only thing I know for sure,” he says, “is that whoever wins, half our audience will be shocked and the other half will tell us we’ve been too predictable.”

Continue reading at NME.

The prayers of Manic Street Preachers fans have been answered: the band have confirmed they’ll be playing ‘The Holy Bible’ in full for the first time ever. The band will perform seven dates in four cities to mark the 20th anniversary of the record – the last to feature contributions from lyricist and guitarist Richey Edwards, who disappeared in 1995. “We’ve taken a long time over the decision, but we realised that we’ll never have another chance to celebrate ‘The Holy Bible’ and what we did with Richey again,” says singer James Dean Bradfield.

Full piece in NME, 27 September 2014.

Scandinavians speak perfect English, they’re blessed with Viking genetics and if their wide-ranging musical output is any kind of yardstick they’re into everything from Abba to black metal. This should make them the world’s best festival hosts. Sadly they live in a place where it’s reasonable to charge £8 for a beer. It’s a steep price to pay, but if you’re willing then Norway’s Øya is ready to welcome you with open arms and a four-day line-up to rival anywhere on the planet.

Wednesday afternoon is kicked off by Philadelphia teens The Districts, who recently lost guitarist Mark Larson to a crippling education addiction. New guy Pat Cassidy slots right into a band that still sounds as ferocious as a hurricane on a cattle ranch.

Next was sleepy LA-based stoner Jonathan Wilson, who was just missing a fug of weed smoke to engulf his languorous jams. Norwegian crowds are just so well behaved. Fortunately nobody told Queens of the Stone Age, because no sooner had Josh Homme turned up than he started chanting: “Nicotine, Valium, Vicodin, Marijuana, Ecstasy and Alcohol… C-C-C-Cocaine.” If you open a festival headline set with ‘Feel Good Hit Of The Summer’ then you’ve basically already won. When Homme hollers: “We came from a long way to get shitfaced and have a party with y’all”, we’re happy to oblige.

On Thursday night the festival is invaded by future funk from Atlanta, Georgia. Janelle Monáe’s flawless live show is furiously energetic and expertly choreographed but still flashes with human moments – like when she introduces ‘Cold War’ by asking: “Do you believe women should  be paid the same as men? Are you tired of what’s going on in Israel?” or when she closes her set flagrantly contravening the numerous ‘No Crowd Surfing’ signs.

There’s only one band in the world that can really follow her, and fortunately they’re here in Oslo. Monáe’s mentors Outkast play a dream set: opening with ‘B.O.B’, punctuated by ‘Rosa Parks’ and ‘Ms Jackson’, featuring solo spots for ‘GhettoMusick’ and the still peerless ‘Hey Ya!’, then closing with a run of ‘Roses’, ‘So Fresh, So Clean’ and a version of ‘International Players Anthem’ which features André 3000 stood on a turntable getting a full-blown case of the giggles. It’s moments like which banish any thought that this is a cynical milking of the anniversary cash cow: they’re clearly having a ball.

Friday sees Neutral Milk Hotel play an exuberant, ragged set which while light on introspective moments clearly thrills their substantial Norwegian fanbase. Speaking of local heroes, Röyksopp play a ravey headline set. They’re clad in neon yellow like kids on their cycling proficiency test but sound like Scandinavia’s answer to the Pet Shop Boys. They tag-team out for Robyn, who could teach the likes of Miley a thing or two about graphic stage-show foreplay, before Röyksopp reappear and the trio blast through their collaborative ‘Do It Again’ EP.

While the pop half of the Norwegian musical dichotomy is on the main stage, over in a venue that looks uncannily like an abbatoir another huge crowd is getting their fill of Black Metal. Mayhem deliver on every count: they’re fast and heavy; their frontman is grasping a human skull; and a hapless roadie struggles manfully to set alight a pig’s head in true Spinal Tap style.

Saturday saw Norway’s usually coy dancers finally lose their shit – and it was Syrian Wedding singer/techno wizard Omar Souleyman who brought out the most uninhibited dancing of the weekend.

After finally cutting lose, the Norwegian crowd were more than ready to get Oslo, down and dirty with Mac DeMarco. Mac and his band rock up direct from Gothenburg having not slept for two days and with new guitarist Andy White, once of Tonstartssbandht, in tow in place of Peter Sagar who’s left the band to work on his Homeshake solo project. Andy gets his most prominent moment early on when he’s left to play an epic guitar solo while Mac and bassist Pierce shotgun beer cans. “Now it’s a rock n roll show…” Mac belches. “Or at least it’s a redneck white trash show.” The band brings out the Norwegian eccentric streak: a girl thrusts a whole cabbage into the air when he opens with ‘Salad Days’ and the crowd are more than happy to surf him almost back to the sound stage, where he has to join Janelle Monáe on the naughty step. Even more than the reformed Slowdive or local headliner Todd Terje, who both play later, this is Mac’s day. He celebrates by spending the afternoon doing flips off a backstage diving board. Salad days indeed.

Originally published in NME, 23 August 2014.

Ryan Adams’ 14th studio album could have been an entirely different beast. A couple of years ago he wrote and recorded a different record with producer Glyn Johns, who worked on 2011’s ‘’Ashes & Fire’. Then he sat down and listened to it. “It was just slow, adult shit,” Adams remembers now. “I’m just over that.”

So he scrapped the whole thing, leading to an awkward dinner with his manager and distributors. “I had to say: ‘By the way, I just spent $100,000 dollars or more on this record, but I’m shelving it,’” he laughs.

The thing was, his mind was elsewhere. While he’d been recording at Sunset Sound’s famed Studio B, construction had finished on his adjacent personal studio Pax Am. He says: “The whole time we were recording at Studio B I was thinking ‘I should be next door. I should be experimenting. I should just be writing for a whole year.'”

So that’s what he did. “They must have thought I was completely fucking mental. More than normal,” he says. “But I did it. 75 songs and numerous bags of weed later I have a record and enough singles to last me forever. I’m on the writing streak of my life. Things could not be cooler.”

The resulting self-produced album is scrappier and punkier than much of Adams’ previous work. “The records I like sound more like this record,” he says. “I love bands like The Wipers, Homestead Records bands like Antietam and New Zealand bands like The Verlaines, The Chills and The Clean.”

It still retains traces of Los Angeles AOR like Tom Petty and Fleetwood Mac, although Adams credits this to geography. “Well, I do live in LA. It would be weird if it sounded like a North Dakota album. I’d be like: ‘Damn, I gotta change what kind of weed I’m smoking.’”

The album’s eponymous title reflects how personal it is. “This seemed like a less pretentious way of saying that I recorded it myself at my own studio, rather than calling it ‘On My Own Time’ or ‘Both Sides, Now, Both Of Them Me’,” he says. “Eventually I just said ‘Let’s put a picture of my face on it and call it my fucking name.’”

Adams is adamant that whether or not people like his new direction is none of his concern. “I’m too old to care who likes my records,” he says. “It’s all bullshit anyway. People make judgements about records but the music is eternal. I like ‘Be Here Now’. I don’t even care if Noel Gallagher doesn’t like it because you know what? I will take two bong hits and that record will blow my mind. I’ve never spent a day hating something. You don’t get a do-over. If you make it to 80 and you’re dying they don’t say: ‘Remember that day you spent blogging about hating Pink Floyd? We’re giving you a 24 hour rebate. It’s a special on life. You get the time back you spent being a useless fucking computer blogger.’ I haven’t heard about that happening. I don’t give a fuck what somebody else likes because I’m busy being passionate and being creative. I will say though… it is funny as fuck when Noel Gallagher doesn’t like something. He can really sum it up, man.”

Originally published in NME, 16 August 2014.

Some guy in the crowd was heckling us the other day,” says The Garden’s bleach-haired
drummer Fletcher Shears with a grin. “That’s cool, I’m into that. It’s a challenge. He was shouting ‘Fuck you!’ and ‘You suck!’. I ended up throwing myself onto him from the stage. He didn’t say anything after that. The crowd loved that shit. It was one of our best shows. So aggressive and raw. No bullshit.”

Body-slamming audience members isn’t the usual way new bands go about making friends, but Fletcher and his twin brother Wyatt don’t seem too concerned about that. Here is a list of things they do care about: 1) not being a boring live band; 2) defying any effort to slot them into a pre-existing genre.

Full piece in NME, 9 August 2014.

In June, Death from Above 1979 singer, lyricist and drummer Sebastien Grainger joked to NME that if the press don’t like their new record, it’s their own fault because they’ve been “fucking asking for it.” Today, speaking from his home in Los Angeles, Grainger wants to clear something up. “We didn’t make this record because people wanted us to or because we saw some sort of commercial opportunity,” he says. “We made this record because it felt right.” The duo may have taken their time waiting for the opportune moment – it’s been 10 years since the release of their only previous album, cult classic ‘You’re A Woman, I’m A Machine’ – but ‘The Physical World’ comfortably delivers on a decade’s worth of expectations. It’s a dance record for punks and a punk record for dancers, marked by bassist Jesse F. Keeler’s muscular riffing and Grainger’s subversive lyrical wit. Their combination of powerful, complex musicianship and great rock’n’roll song-writing continues to mark them as a band. “When we started out we were coming out of a scene that was about math-rock and various subgenres of hardcore,” explains Grainger. “We wanted to be as straight-ahead as possible. We wanted to be the AC/DC of hardcore. That’s still one of our goals.”

Full piece in NME, 9 August 2014.

Big Star’s name is kind of a misnomer. The Memphis band released three albums of introspective, melancholic power pop in the Seventies to widespread critical acclaim – but barely anyone bought them. Their 1972 debut – the equally ironically named ‘#1 Record’ – sold fewer than 10,000 copies, in part because of their label’s distribution issues.

“It was frustrating and depressing,” says their producer John Fry, of former Stax subsidiary Ardent Music. “We could see the very favourable reviews for both ‘#1 Record’ and ‘Radio City’, but in 1972 Stax had an ill-fated transition to distribution by Columbia, which never worked for Stax or for us. ‘Radio City’ came out in 1974 and Stax officially declared bankruptcy in 1975. It was a pretty quick series of events, and yes, it was discouraging.”

However, there was something about those records that wouldn’t let them die. By the 80s and 90s those three albums, plus the solo material of songwriters Alex Chilton and Chris Bell, were being name-dropped by everyone from The Flaming Lips to Elliott Smith and the entire Creation Records roster. Primal Scream flew to Memphis so they could record ‘Rocks’ at the Ardent Music studios. “It was like a pilgrimage to go there and record in the same studio that Alex Chilton and Big Star had [used]” said Bobby Gillespie later. “[They were] a huge inspiration to Primal Scream when we started.”

Now a new documentary, ‘Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me’, delves into the story of rock’n’roll’s original cult band. Despite their initial lack of commercial success, director Drew DeNicola says it’s a mistake to think of Big Star as having squandered their potential. “People usually want to know why it didn’t happen. What was the problem?” he says. “I feel like the seeds of their own destruction were in the making of that band. I don’t feel like they were ever intended to be a road band. I don’t even think Chris Bell and Alex Chilton could have spent more than six months together. That’s what I like about this story. The story of this band is really just the story of the artefacts, which are the records. Moments and feelings can be captured in the studio, and that’s what happened with Big Star.”

Drummer Jody Stephens is the only member of the original Big Star line-up still alive, and he says he has no regrets that the band didn’t sell more albums first time around. “The most gratifying thing was the creative process of making those records. That was an end in itself,” he says. “I was really thrilled to be a part of that. All these years later I’m still getting to play the music, so no, it wasn’t frustrating.”

The band finally enjoyed a resurgence as their reputation grew among musicians – particularly in the UK. The band reformed in the 90s for occasional shows, including headlining a stage at Reading Festival in 1993. Stephens says it’s gratifying when bands as diverse as Primal Scream, The Flaming Lips and Hot Chip pay tribute to their records. “They are all people I have a tremendous amount of respect for. I’m grateful that the music took the path it did and got to them, and that they enjoy it. Being in Big Star has built a lot of bridges for me. It’s been pretty cool.”

Originally published in NME, 2 August 2014.

It was Björk who spotted Michel Gondry’s talent as a filmmaker. He was still the drummer in French pop band Oui Oui when she saw a music video he’d made for them and hired him to direct her own ‘Human Behaviour’. Since then he’s shot videos for everyone from Daft Punk and The White Stripes to The Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney, while also becoming the director and Oscar-winning screenwriter of films like ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ and ‘The Science of Sleep’.

All Gondry’s films have a playful, surrealist visual language which the director traces back to the movies and books he loved as a child, including Boris Vian’s 1947 novel ‘L’Écume des Jours’. It’s fitting that he’s now had the chance to adapt the book for the big screen as he says it was Vian’s ideas that were in his head when he first started directing for Björk. “That’s what’s great about him as a writer: every adolescent in France reads him and it sparks your creativity,” explains Gondry. “It shows you that literature can be really free but at the same time romantic and modern. It’s on the border of surrealism, which really inspired me. Those ideas about using dreams, juxtaposing different images, showing constant creativity and also sometimes nonsense – all of that was in me when I started to direct.”

In English, the film will be called ‘Mood Indigo’ after a Duke Ellington piece which underscores the film’s story of a newlywed couple forced to face an unexpected crisis. Ellington’s music holds particular significance for Gondry. “I grew up listening to Duke Ellington,” he says. “He was my dad’s God. The day he died in ’74, my dad was so devastated that we didn’t speak all night at the dinner table. Later on, when I learned more about jazz I realised just how unique Duke Ellington is. He took the same orchestra on the road for 50 years, and his was one of the only swing orchestras to survive the 60s and 70s. He was an innovator throughout his whole life.”

While Gondry is now the veteran of seven feature films, he believes he’ll always return to directing music videos. Earlier this year he shot Metronomy performing ‘Love Letters’ inside a hand-painted rotating set. “It’s very important to me,” he explains. “It’s where I come from and I don’t want to renounce it. It’s how I form my building blocks to tell stories in feature films. It refreshes my creativity.”

He doesn’t have his next music video shoot lined up yet, although he says he’s a fan of Belgian pop artist Stromae. “Most of the people I want to make videos for are dead, like Serge Gainsbourg,” he says. “I really wanted to do a Michael Jackson video but it never happened. I wasn’t famous enough when he was alive.”

The inventiveness and wit that Björk saw in Gondry’s work is still there, running like a red cord through ‘Mood Indigo’, ‘Eternal Sunshine…’ and his music videos. “Each video I’ve done I’ve tried something different,” he says. “When I grew up I wanted to be an inventor or a scientist or a painter. To be able to just have an idea and then put it into the real world and materialise it is really exciting.”

Originally published in NME, 26 July 2014.

I’ve spoken to some of NME’s resident Libertines scholars and we think that the last time Pete Doherty, Carl Barât, Gary Powell and John Hassall all took to a stage together anywhere in mainland Europe was most likely 20 February 2003, at Loppen in Copenhagen. As with much Libertines lore the truth is clouded with uncertainty and a fog of drugs, but in any case it was certainly over a decade ago.

The most surprising thing about their return to continental gigging in Lisbon was that they turned up not just on time but even fractionally early – starting into ‘The Delaney’ promptly before quarter past midnight, after the strains of Vera Lynn’s ‘We’ll Meet Again’ had died away from over the tannoy. While The Libertines turned up, it’s worth noting that not a lot of Portuguese did – the crowd was smaller than it had been for Arctic Monkeys and The Black Keys, and very sparse indeed compared to the more mainstream likes of Bastille and Imagine Dragons. Of the hardcore who did turn up, most seemed to be British exiles enjoying a weekend in the sun with their heroes. What the Portuguese missed was a predictably ramshackle set, but it shone in brief flashes like pearls in muck. Here’s a motley handful:

Continue reading at NME.

You must have been pleased with the pretty much unanimous praise for Lost In The Dream?

“Obviously, you know, making the record I wanted to make the best thing I thought I could make, and the thing that represented the band and my friends the best way, and also that I could be like this is a step up for me. I don’t know, I feel really humbled by the whole thing because it has taken off. I feel like it’s given us so many opportunities in terms of making the band better. At the end of the day all anyone wants to do is be in an awesome band. That’s all we ever really wanted to do: play music together.”

Have you started working on the next record yet?

“I have a few songs that I’ve kinda been working on. I don’t really write with like an acoustic guitar and a pen and paper. I’ll have some ideas and I’ll put them in my phone, play them into my phone, and then I’ll listen to them and work on some lyrics. I’ll sometimes play them in soundcheck and get some sounds going and sometimes play them in rehearsal.”

How was playing Glastonbury?

“I grew up with a lot of my favourite bands playing Glastonbury. All the music mags I would read… Reading and Glastonbury… so to play it, on the Pyramid Stage, the main stage, was amazing. We played early in the afternoon, and it was pouring. It stopped raining before we played, and then right when we were about two songs in the sun came out. It was awesome. It was one of those magical things.”

Did you run into anyone you’re a fan of at Glastonbury?

“Well, on YouTube I watch this thing called Rig Rundown, by Premier Guitar. Most of the time they’ll talk to the techs. They’ll do like Dan Auerbach’s guitar rig, explained by his guitar tech. I’ve watched all of them. Eric Johnson’s is the best one. Everyone should watch the Eric Johnson one. His pedal board is like… all these guys now have these big crazy pedal boards which are MIDI controlled. Eric just has a couple of pedals on a slab of wood that he made and two tape echoes. It’s great. On the Dan Auerbach one, his guitar tech is backstage changing the pedals with his hands. There’s one with Josh Klinghoffer from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and his guitar tech is this old British guy who’s probably guitar teched for like 50 million guys, and he goes through his whole rig. They just find the whole thing hilarious. He plays through all these old Marshalls and Hiwatts, and the guy’s saying that these things are ready to explode at any moment. I like watching them. Billy Corgan actually does his own, and it’s amazing. There’s so many great moments, in so many different ways of it being great.”

– Filmed at NOS Alive 2014 for NME.

There’s something about watching small planes land on one runway of Gdynia’s Babie Doły Military Airport while you’re watching The Black Keys headline a festival from the other which lets you know that Open’er is not like other festivals. Located on a sprawling airfield in northern Poland, things don’t tend to get started until gone 6pm – which is pretty civilised for those of us who are staying in the nearby beach resort town of Sopot. The festival site serves hundreds of gallons of Heineken each year but frowns on spirits, giving it a reputation as the sort of place serious music fans come to watch music, not just get out of their heads. That could be part of the reason they attract some of the world’s biggest bands and most exciting new artists here to entertain 60,000 Pole dancers over four days.

Continue reading at NME.

Back in 1931, proto-anarchist writer Emma Goldman told the world that if she couldn’t dance at the revolution, she wanted no part of it. “Free your mind… and your ass will follow”, as Funkadelic put it. This year’s Glastonbury is shot through with this kind of righteous anger and ass-shaking, and Kate Tempest ignites that passion on Thursday night at the Rum Shack. Anyone who doubted that there would be an audience for socially-conscious poetry set to hip-hop beats should have seen the crowd massed outside the tent. They should have heard the cheers go up when Tempest rapped that “wages are fucked and rent is outrageous” or said of city boys buying coke that it’s “meant to be hard times, right / a recession / but these guys are buying more than ever.” The message is clear: we’re very much not all in this together. After her set Tempest said the night was “magical”, and gave a nod to the Left Field, Glastonbury’s political heart. “I think it’s really important that it’s here,” she says. “It creates a space for people to be confronted by people talking about interesting ideas. That’s fucking cool.”

The Left Field itself opens on Friday morning with a heartfelt tribute from Michael Eavis to the great old Labour politician and orator Tony Benn, who died in March. Turning that energy to practical action, a discussion on food banks immediately followed that concluded that the best way to fight the food poverty which affects a million people in this country is to remove the Conservative party from power as swiftly as possible.

Proving that chopped’n’screwed beats can still speak truth to power, that evening on the West Holts stage tUnE-yArDs’ Merrill Garbus rapped about the “blood-soaked dollar” that “still works in the store” as she talked about inequality and the travails of Haiti on ‘Water Fountain’. Two hours later on the same stage was arch provocateur MIA, who Garbus has called an inspiration. Her set is a no holds bar rave punctuated by middle-finger salutes to authority like: “Cause it’s not me and you / It’s the fucking banks!” on the pounding ‘Bring The Noize’. As Tony Benn said: “There is enough energy in this field to change the country for the better.” He’s gone, but his spirit lives on.

Originally published in NME, 5 July 2014.

Before she was a sweary, capslock-bashing feminist icon and the undisputed Queen of Twitter, Caitlin Moran was a music journalist. Writing for the now defunct Melody Maker from the age of 16 left her with a barrel-load of rock’n’roll stories, many of which she’s now worked into her thinly-fictionalised autobiographical novel ‘How To Build A Girl’.

Holding court in a backroom at London’s Groucho Club, she reels off many of these tales – including her dad picking her up from a Manic Street Preachers gig and wanting to tell Richey Edwards to “cheer up”, and going to a deserted funfair in Milan with the Beastie Boys where they all got “caned out of our tiny fucking minds.”

One story stands out above the rest, and that’s the “seven or eight hours” she spent talking to Courtney Love for a feature on Hole in 1994. “During that conversation she told me about losing her virginity, the first time she fucked Kurt, the first time Kurt took E, all this stuff,” says Moran. “I left pretty much everything off the record apart from this one bit where she said Billy Corgan was a really great fuck. Two weeks later, Kurt killed himself. Everett True from Melody Maker rang me up and said: ‘The rumour I’m hearing is that Courtney was fucking Billy Corgan while Kurt was in rehab. He saw your interview about Billy being a great fuck and that’s why he skipped going back to rehab and shot himself.’ I was hearing this on my 18^th birthday. I’d turned 18 and killed the spokesperson for my generation. Soz!”

The Smashing Pumpkins had been the first band Moran ever reviewed live – an occasion which makes it into the novel, in which her dad tells Billy Corgan that the grunge icons are “a tight little unit.” A few years after Cobain’s death, she ran into Corgan again. “I told him that Courtney had said he was a really great fuck,” she says. “He paused for a bit and then he said: ‘Well if Courtney says I’m a great fuck, I probably am.’ He looked at me, and I’ve never fancied him in my life, but the way he looked at me made it very clear he would know his way around a vagina. I went very red and very stuttery. Eventually I blurted out: ‘You look like [80s children’s TV puppet] Mooncat. We had to wrap up quite quickly after that.”

Beneath the tales of rock’n’roll excess, ‘How To Build A Girl’ is really a bildungsroman that deals with the awkward way in which teenagers come to terms with their own sexuality. “I wrote this book because I’d read ‘50 Shades of Grey’ and it terrified and annoyed me in equal measure,” explains Moran. “One in three women in this country have read that book, which has a teenage girl protagonist, which is rare, and yet the plot is her being spanked on the clitoris with a hairbrush in exchange for an iPad from a shady, fucked-up pervy billionaire. Ladies! Let me tell you a story about what would really happen if you were a teenager and went out with someone who is powerful and into pervy sex. It was mainly to stop women going out with fucking asshats that I wrote this book.”

Originally published in NME, 5 July 2014.

Hurl a guitar anywhere in LA these days and you’ll hit at least three musicians. “It’s an awesome place to be in a band, especially a rock band,” says Together Pangea’s singer and guitarist William Keegan. “All of our peers are doing great things,” adds bassist Danny Bengston, from under a thatch of bleached-blonde hair. “Bands like The Garden and Cherry Glazerr are new to the scene but they’re coming in and doing amazing things really quickly. The kids are going bonkers. When we played our first headline show at The Echo we were barely even able to be onstage because of the amount of kids jumping up.”

Full piece in NME, 14 June 2014.

The problem with being a cool as fuck guitar band from New York is that people can’t help but make the obvious comparison. “You can’t get away from it!” says Public Access TV frontman John Eatherly. “All we hear about is The Strokes. We liked those records when we were young but it’s been so many years. We’re already almost halfway into a new decade and we’re still hearing about the same old shit. Fuck that.”

Full piece in NME, 17 May 2014.

When US singer-songwriter Elliott Smith died in 2003, aged just 34, he left behind him not only a beautiful and introspective body of work stretching over five albums and including the Oscar-nominated ‘Miss Misery’, but also a host of unreleased demos and song ideas.

Full piece in NME, 17 May 2014.

The birth of the Mick’n’Keef songwriting partnership

“1960 was pretty boring and 1961 was boring,” Keith Richards told NME’s Brendon Fitzgerald, casting an eye back over the Sixties in a 1995 interview. “1962 I started playing with the Stones and things started to get interesting…”

By the time The Stones released their debut LP, 50 years ago in April 1964, things were getting very interesting indeed. Their manager in those early years was dynamic impresario Andrew Loog Oldham, and he says now that the record represented everything the band had been working towards. “I think the fact that the band had been able to make an album at all was a wonderful surprise,” he says.

“Your recording career went in increments: First the singles, then the EPs, then if it was all going well you were allowed to do an album. It was a highpoint for The Stones – we did not know what a marketing tool was in those days. Recording an album was just a wonderful validation of the work they’d put into being The Rolling Stones.”

That debut self-titled album, which was recorded at London’s Regent Sound Studios over five days in January and February 1964, was mainly made up of covers of songs by American R’n’B and blues artists like Jimmy Reed, Willie Dixon and rock’n’roll pioneer Chuck Berry. It was Oldham who encouraged the band to start writing their own material, locking Jagger and Richards in a kitchen until they came up with something original. “The R’n’B barrel of songs was getting lighter every day,” Oldham explains. “I had thought about the band trying James Ray’s ‘If You Gotta Make A Fool Of Somebody’, then somebody told me Freddie & The Dreamers had just done it. I knew they had to write and I was lucky that Mick and Keith went for it. A group that doesn’t write is like a plane without a parachute.”

Further encouragement to start writing for themselves had come in 1963, when Oldham had made use of his former role as The Beatles’ publicist to arrange for Lennon and McCartney to give The Stones a song they’d just written. “I bumped into John and Paul getting out of a cab outside Leicester Square tube station,” he explains. “They were slightly tipsy, therefore more clairvoyant than usual. “Andy, what’s wrong?” said John. He and Paul could call me Andy as I had until recently done their London PR. I told them we had nothing to record for our second single and that the Stones were rehearsing half a block away at Ken Colyer’s jazz club. “We’ve got a song,” they said in unison. They always had songs. They may have said the song was nearly finished, they forgot to mention that they’d recorded it 10 days before with Ringo singing. The song was ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’. They came and played it to the Stones. The moment I heard Brian play the bottle neck guitar I knew we had something good. I was so amazed I left for Paris to buy a pair of boots. The Stones recorded it with Eric Easton, my partner at the time.”

In the end the album contained a trio of original songs. Jagger and Richards contributed ‘Tell Me (You’re Coming Back)’ while two songs ‘Little By Little’ and ‘Now I’ve Got a Witness (Like Uncle Phil and Uncle Gene)’ were credited to Nanker Phelge, a pseudonym the band used for group compositions. The Phil and Gene referred to in the title were Phil Spector and Gene Pitney, who had been in the studio when they were recorded. Spector helped Jagger write ‘Little By Little’, and even ended up playing maracas on it.

The album was a huge hit, becoming one of the year’s biggest selling records in the UK and staying at number one for 12 weeks. However, NME interviews the time paint a picture of a modest, self-effacing group. In May 1964, Mick Jagger described the album simply as “the kind of stuff we like playing. I think the real R’n’B fans will know what we’re doing on it.” Keith Richards added: “I like it really, you know, I think it is good. It is something we have always wanted to do, to record these numbers.”

In later bootleg recordings, collected on ‘Voodoo Brew Two’, Richards describes how innocent he was in those early years. He says that when he first learned the blues standard ‘Cocaine’, he didn’t even know what the substance was, and had certainly never taken it. Looking back, Oldham says this was as much about the band’s work ethic as anything else. “It’s not just that we were innocent, we were very, very busy trying to get ahead,” he points out. “I’ve read so much revisionist crap about who took what when. It was not a competition. The first drug was the work.”

‘Sticky Fingers’ and decamping to France for the ‘Exile…’ sessions

With all the myths and legends that shroud The Rolling Stones like thick plumes of cigarette smoke, maybe the story that gets forgotten most is just how hard they worked. In 1969, finishing a brief American tour and with ‘Let It Bleed’ already done and dusted but not due for release until December 5, the band were already itching to start recording again. On December 2 they paid a brief impromptu visit to a new recording studio they’d heard stories about. Muscle Shoals Sound in Alabama had been started up by a renegade group of house musicians from the nearby FAME studio, which was then a soul hit factory. Writer Stanley Booth was touring with the band at the time. “I’d never seen any band work as hard as the Rolling Stones,” he says. “They really inspired me to work harder as an artist. At Muscle Shoals they cut three tracks: ‘Wild Horses’, ‘You Gotta Move’ and ‘Brown Sugar’ and they played for three days straight. At the end of the session Charlie went back to the drum-set and started playing again. Keith said, “Look at that! That’s a rock’n’roller”.”

Those three tracks would all make their way onto ‘Sticky Fingers’, with further recording sessions following at London’s Olympic studios and in the band’s Mighty Mobile studios which they had taken to Stargroves, Mick Jagger’s Hampshire estate. In April 1971 Jagger sat down with NME for a track-by-track run through of their upcoming album, which we said “gets back a bit to the roots that made The Stones.” He called ‘Wild Horses’ “my favourite ballad” and joked that ‘Bitch’ is “our tribute to all dog lovers.” Later that year, Keith Richards told NME: “When I first heard the completed album I was amazed how together it was. It took a long time to get it finished, but it hangs together very well. It still feels like the old Stones. All told, I think its one of our best.”

‘Sticky Fingers’ was the first record not to feature any contribution from Brian Jones, and Richards would say later that Mick Taylor’s increased presence in the band changed the way he wrote. “Some of the ‘Sticky Fingers’ compositions were rooted in the fact I knew Taylor was going to pull something great,” he wrote in his autobiography ‘Life’.

When the album came out in May 1971 it was a smash. It spent four weeks at number one before returning for another week in mid-June. Legendary rock writer Lester Bangs picked it as his album of the year, saying he’d played it more than any other record. At this point, The Stones were the biggest band in the world – albeit by default because their biggest rival for that title had just split. As NME’s Ritchie Yorke wrote in June 1971: “With the passing away of The Beatles and the lack of critical acceptance of such hugely successful bands as Led Zeppelin and Grand Funk, it could well be that the Stones are the top group in the world at present.”

It’s a mark again of just how hard The Stones worked and how prolific they were during the late Sixties that the 16-month gap between ‘Sticky Fingers’ and its follow-up ‘Exile On Main Street’ was described by NME at the time as “what seems like an eternity”. The 1972 record, which had initially had a working title of ‘Tropical Diseases’, was written and recorded when the band had decamped to Richards’ former Nazi villa Nellcôte, in the south of France.

Mick Jagger told NME’s Roy Carr at the time: “We recorded the album in this disgusting basement which looked like a prison. The humidity was incredible. I couldn’t stand it. As soon as I opened my mouth to sing my voice was gone. It was so humid that all the guitars were out of tune. By the time we managed to tune up to start one number, they were out of tune by the time we got to the end.”

Richards added in NME in April 1972: “Making this album was a much more relaxed affair than usual. Not being done in a proper studio, it was a question of who ever was around just picking up the appropriate instruments and laying down the tracks.”

Later Richards would remember it as arguably the most productive period of his and Jagger’s working relationship. They would force themselves to produce one or two songs a day, and the guitarist says that pressure spurred them to create. “You’d be surprised when you’re right on the ball and you’ve got to do something and everybody’s looking at you going, OK, what’s going to happen?” he wrote in ‘Life’. “You put yourself up there on the firing line – give me and blindfold and a last cigarette and let’s go. And you’d be surprised how much comes out of you before you die.”

Glastonbury & Hyde Park 2013

“Sorry to keep you all hanging around but the waiting is over,” announced Keith Richards with a pirate’s grin in 2012. After months of speculation, the greatest rock’n’roll band in history were returning to action. “I’ve always said the best place for rock and roll is on the stage,” he added, “and the same is true for the Stones.”

Half a century since their first gig at the Marquee Club on Oxford Street, on 12 July 1962, rumours had been running back and forth all year that the band would dust off their guitars to mark their 50^th anniversary. They’d been on hiatus since wrapping up a two-year world tour in support of ‘A Bigger Bang’ in 2007. So it was: in October they released their first original single in six years, ‘Doom and Gloom’, and announced two shows at London’s O2 Arena and then a further pair in New York and New Jersey.

The shows gave the band a chance to bury some very old hatchets, with former members Bill Wyman and Mick Taylor invited back as guests. Those four initial dates were seen as a toe in the water: after five decades together, unprecedented longevity for a rock’n’roll band, could The Stones still hack it on the world’s biggest stages? A further 18 date tour of the USA proved that there was still life in the old dogs.

By this point in their careers there was very little that they still had left to achieve, but surely the most egregious omission from their CV was that they’d never performed at Britain’s biggest festival. In 2013 the band finally announced that they’d be paying a long overdue visit to Worthy Farm. Keith Richards said he felt the band were “destined to play Glastonbury.” “I look upon it as the culmination of our British heritage,” he added. “It had to be done and it’s gonna be done.”

Their triumphant headline set drew right from the depths of their five decade legacy. They opened with 1968’s ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ and closed the night with the oldest song on the setlist, 1965’s ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’. It was clear the band relished living up to the sense of occasion the festival provided, reworking the ‘Beggars Banquet’ track as ‘Glastonbury Girl’ and indulging in a spot of pyrotechnics, not least the mechanical phoenix perched on top of the Pyramid Stage that lurched into life as the band played ‘Sympathy For The Devil’.

They rounded off their 50^th anniversary tour by returning to Hyde Park for a pair of shows. If Glastonbury was about proving themselves on a new stage, Hyde Park was a return to a former stomping ground that was inevitably tinged with nostalgia. Their set was designed to evoke memories of their show in 1969, when Mick Taylor had made his debut and the band had set off on the run of releases which cemented their legend. Mick Jagger played up the significance, pulling on a white top designed to look like the one he’d worn then, and claiming it was: “Just something I found in the back,” adding: “I just wanted to go back to my closet and see whether it still fitted.”

Even after the triumphs of Glastonbury and Hyde Park, the show stays on the road. As they wrapped up their 2013 tour, they announced dates which will take them across Asia, Europe and Australia this year. There’s no rest for the wicked.

“I can rest on my laurels,” Keith wrote towards the conclusion of his memoir ‘Life’, “I’ve stirred up enough crap in my time and I’ll live with it and see how somebody else deals with it.  But then there’s that word “retiring.” I can’t retire until I croak. There’s carping about us being old men. The fact is, I’ve always said, if we were black and our name was Count Basie or Duke Ellington, everybody would be going yeah, yeah, yeah. White rock and rollers apparently are not supposed to do this at our age. But I’m not here just to make records and money. I’m here to say something and touch other people, sometimes in a cry of desperation: “Do you know this feeling?””

Looking back now, former manager Andrew Loog Oldham says that when he and the band were locked away in Regent Sound Studios recording that debut album they had no idea that people would still be talking about it in half a century’s time. “I didn’t think about it,” he explains. “Back then people didn’t live that long a lot of the time, unless they had good genes and money.”

As it turns out The Rolling Stones had one and soon got the other. They tried to tell us: “If you try sometimes you just might find / You get what you need.”

Originally published in NME, 10 May 2014.

“What I’m trying to capture,” says producer Dan Carey, surrounded by countless electronic instruments and control panels in his Streatham, London studio, “is the place where it’s all just falling into place.”

He’s describing the ethos of Speedy Wunderground, the recording project he’s been running for the last year which sees bands record songs in just one day, finishing before midnight. The song is then mixed in the same time period and a limited run of 250 7 inch vinyl is produced. There are more rules too: recording takes place under cover of smoke machines and lasers, and every track must involve the Swarmatron, a type of analogue synthesiser. Carey owns the only one in Britain.

Full piece in NME, 10 May 2014.