“God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe say, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”
God say, “No.” Abe say, “What?”
God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but
Next time you see me comin’ you better run”
Well Abe said, “Where do you want this killin’ done?”
God said, “Out on Highway 61””

I stepped off the plane into the dry heat of the desert morning a little over twelve hours earlier than planned. My trip to Abu Dhabi, at the invitation and expense of the Aloft hotel chain, had been moved forward at the last moment when the Islamic authorities sighted the new moon and declared Eid al-Adha for the following Saturday. The religious holiday, which commemorates the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son at God’s command – Christian and Qur’anic traditions differ over whether that son was Isaac or Ishmael – necessitates that the preceding night the sale of alcohol is prohibited. This is to ensure that believers approach Abe’s obedience in a spirit of sober contemplation. Aloft had been planning to host ‘Turning Up The Spotlight’, their Battle of the Bands competition, on the Friday. However, after apparently being caught unawares by the annual holiday they obviously realised that a spirit of sober contemplation would be wholly unsuited to a Battle of the Bands and scrambled to rearrange the show for Thursday evening.

Hence the earlier flights, for myself and for the eclectic batch of judges: Charlatans guitarist Mark Collins, Grammy award-winning producers Kevin Bacon and Jonathan Quarmby, Facebook competition winner Karen Newby, and Radio One’s Huw Stephens. That, at least, was the plan. The change of date meant that Huw Stephens who, with scant regard for the timing of Islamic religious festivals, hosts a weekly radio show on a Thursday, was unable to make it. This meant some immediate changes for me. “We’d like you to step in as a judge”, one of the organisers told me shortly after I arrived at the Aloft Abu Dhabi, “Don’t worry, it won’t be anything like X Factor.”

Later that evening, after the stifling heat of the day had given way to the pleasant warmth of the night, I joined the rest of the judges by the hotel’s rooftop pool. The stage behind the pool didn’t have a lot of space in front of it to begin with, but now most of that space had been taken up by another stage with a long desk and a row of chairs. It looked unmistakably like the set of X Factor.

The three bands: Nikotin, Beat Antenna and Tim Hassall, were all milling around, and it was already obvious that they were taking things seriously. For them, the prize was a golden ticket to come and play a show in London at the opening of Aloft’s newest outpost. In between sound-checking they spoke about life in the United Arab Emirates. They had all earlier made the two hour drive down the coast from Dubai, where much of UAE’s cultural innovation happens. Indeed, the organisers admitted that the bands had been chosen for the show after they’d found it impossible to find suitable bands playing original music in Abu Dhabi.

Like the overwhelming majority of the UAE’s population, all of the musicians are essentially expats. Only 1 in 6 people living in the UAE are local Emirati, the rest are transient workers drawn here by the almost non-existent tax system but subject to strict immigration controls: lose your job, and you lose your visa and face deportation. Even people born here, like the musicians in Nikotin, do not automatically receive citizenship. Another result of making visas dependent on employment is that it’s a tough country in which to play music for a living. Writing ‘struggling artist’ on your visa application won’t impress anybody.

Beat Antenna, who are all from England, told me a little about the lifestyle here: “It’s a weird place to live, because you feel like you’re constantly on holiday. You go from hotel to hotel, your car is valeted, and there’s an Americanised feel, but the culture is completely different – as you see from Friday being a ‘dry day’. There’s a culture grind between the Westernised elements and the local culture, where you have the call to prayer five times a day.”

The attitude to alcohol is a good example of this uncomfortable juxtaposition of cultures. Drinking is theoretically frowned upon and is subject to heavy taxation and strict restrictions on where it can be sold. The only bars are in hotels, and although a pint of beer can cost you £8 the local workforce who pay so little income tax are happy to take the hit. The hotel dance-floors are packed with drunk people dancing to pop music. They could be anywhere in the world.

At that moment, however, the price of alcohol was of no concern to me. At the Aloft, judges drank for free. Before long we were ushered into our seats at the long X Factor desk while an enthusiastic radio DJ from Dubai burbled excitedly. He told us he worked for a station called Radio One, which made me think wistfully of Huw Stephens and how I wished he was there to play the role of indie Simon Cowell instead of me.

The first band up were Nikotin, a metal band whose prior claims to fame included opening shows for Nickelback and Maxïmo Park. Although their nationalities split them between India, Pakistan, Iran and Canada their sound was an MTV-friendly take on heavy rock. At the end of the set, when we judges were immediately asked for our verdict – the attempts to distance the night from X Factor seemed to fall at every hurdle – several picked out their track ‘Overloaded’ as possessing the sort of instantly memorable riff which Metallica fans in bedrooms all over the world search for.

The second act, Beat Antenna, were unashamedly ‘lad rock’ – their sound ran the gamut from Hard Fi, on ‘Coming Around’, to Oasis, on ‘Love Never Lands’ – and they had recently supported Beady Eye. Their singer Neil Harrison accurately summed up the weirdness of this particular gig set-up when he told the crowd: “If you guys don’t come further forward, we’re gonna feel like we’re in a job interview, and that’s not good.” One of the judges described them as “muscular guys playing muscular rock”, but the more introspective ‘Cloud Suits’ was maybe their strongest track.

The final act, Tim Hassall, told us early on that he wrote a couple of his songs when he was “down in Louisiana”, a much mythologised place he seems to permanently inhabit in his music. There were lots of lyrical references to “Lafayette” and old friends going “down to the Bayou”. His duet with singer Gayathri Krishnan on ‘Christmas Eve’ stood out, even after judge Mark Collins picked him up for making the “classic rock and roll mistake” of declaring how happy he is to be “back in Dubai” while stood onstage in Abu Dhabi.

After the show we were bundled backstage to pick a winner, where we all spoke about how international the bands sounded, and how little life in the UAE seemed to be reflected in their music. We eventually settled on Nikotin, and soon the band were popping champagne corks and raving about the promise of their first visit to London.

The next day I met Nikotin’s singer Cruize, and asked him about how he felt about the local music scene. “It’s quite restrictive,” he told me, “Because of local rules and regulations you have to be over 21 to play in a bar, because they’ll be drinks. It’s restrictive for young musicians who want to get out there, because they have no place to play, other than all-ages shows. This country is all about making money, so promoters really don’t go for all-ages gigs because they don’t get bar sales. That’s a restriction which causes trouble for bands in this part of the region. We do have a few promoters who try and promote local bands, although most people play covers. There is a music scene growing though.”

There don’t seem to be any purpose-built gig venues in the entire country: it’s either hotel bars or stadiums. Cruize said: “We don’t have any actual ‘venues’. Most of the places we play are in hotels, because they have bars with alcohol licenses so they can do this. They’re supposed to be opening a new Hard Rock Café, which I guess will be open to bands. Other than that, there are very few places where most of the local music scene play.”

Even if going to watch a local band remains a niche pastime, people will flock to see big names. Cruize added: “Abu Dhabi have been bringing huge acts down to the Yass Arena, which is where Metallica played recently. I think there were about 45,000 people there on a week day. Abu Dhabi have the F1 track so there’s going to be a series of big shows: Britney Spears, The Cult, Incubus and Paul McCartney. You can’t miss them.”

One of the things to remember about the UAE is that it’s still so young: it only recently turned 40. Bands like Nikotin are among the first generations that have lived their whole lives there. “Most of us were born and grew up in Dubai,” Cruize told me. “We’ve had the Dubai experience. Growing up, the music scene has been underplayed. Being a Muslim country, really heavy music is not really approved of but slowly it seems to be coming out in Dubai because Dubai is opening up. That’s something that we welcome.”

‘The Dubai experience’ is a hard thing to pin down, but the journalist and author Jim Krane gets close to it in his book ‘City of Gold’. Towards the end of it he writes: “Given everything I’ve written about this fascinating place, one must understand that Dubai is not a genuine city. Yet. It’s still an unfinished collection of buildings where the atmosphere is transitory, like an airport or a hotel. The population consists of flows of people rather than permanent residents. Life is superficial.”

The same goes for Abu Dhabi, a place where it often feels like life is taking place within a bar room scene from Lost in Translation. Before I left I visited one of the city’s landmarks, the Emirates Palace Hotel. Inside this sprawling Xanadu, which contains a vending machine which sells gold bars along with various luxury goods shops, there is an exhibition about Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi’s planned quarter of museums and art galleries. Designed as the new centrepiece of the city’s cultural life, it will have branches of the Guggenheim and the Louvre. Just as with the promoters looking to fill stadiums, there is an attitude that when it comes to culture the UAE can afford to buy in the best of what the world has to offer. The local arts scene feels neglected by comparison.

Several weeks later, back in London, I got the news that Nikotin were not granted visas in time to make the gig. After the show goes on without them, I get an email from Cruize: “It was tragic that we couldn’t make it due to the delay in getting our visas in time for the show. A lot of our fans in the UK were quite excited to hear that we were making our debut appearance in the UK, but alas we could not make it,” he wrote, before adding: “Winning the Abu Dhabi leg of the Aloft competition, on the other hand, did bring in a lot of interest and renewed exposure to the band.”

I hope winning the competition helps Nikotin get themselves heard, but I fear that they, just like Beat Antenna and Tim Hassall and every other musician in the UAE, are trying to climb a ladder which is missing all of its middle rungs. Hotel bars are as high as they can climb in a country willing to sacrifice its own homegrown potential for glamorous imports. There’s plenty of money in Abu Dhabi, but there are some things it can’t buy.

Originally published by Drowned In Sound.

Part 1: Beginnings

I was watching Björk play the Other Stage at Glastonbury in 2007 when the dreadlocked man in front of me took a live snake out of his backpack. “Jesus!” I said, “Is that a live snake?” The serpent danced slowly in his hands, flicking out its tongue inquisitively as Björk’s rhythms filled the air. The man looked back at me with a distant smile: “He loves the vibrations.”

Well, don’t we all? Over the last two decades Björk’s vibrations have established her as pop music’s preeminent innovator, a fearless and restless proponent of the avant-garde whose discography defies the staid categorisation of genre. When I meet her on a summer afternoon in West London her enthusiasm for her work is infectious and the ebullient conversation as eclectic as you’d expect. We talk about education, about feminism and Lady Gaga’s outfits, about why she’s like ‘carrot soup and tequila’ and Coldplay are like ‘chips and sausages’, about political activism and aluminium mining and even about the lack of punk spirit in proprietary software, a topic she acknowledges she probably shouldn’t talk about.

Fittingly for someone who can make even reptiles shimmy, she also talks about the passion for nature which informed her latest wildly ambitious project, which shares its name with the hypothesis that humans have an innate affinity with the natural world: Biophilia.

It’s an idea she relates to. We’re in Little Venice, where she has kept a house since the time of Debut, and she tells me that the canals here are her surrogate for the sea: “Yeah, when I came here in ’93 I looked first for places by the Thames, but I didn’t really find anything I liked. Maybe it was a bit industrial, too. I guess I settled for the canals, I just like walking…”

This is a nicer place to walk than down by the river. “Yeah, I have a routine where I will go for walks and I can work on my melodies. I actually use the canals, but then I discovered because I go to the swimming pool in Westbourne Grove that I can walk through – there’s all these tunnels underneath the motorway. They’re quite good for working on my melodies actually. They’ve got a really nice echo. I sort of have to go somewhere where no one is, or they’ll arrest me and put me away.” She giggles. “In Iceland, even though you’re in the capital you can always walk for five minutes and you’re on your own. That’s kinda how I’ve worked on my melodies since I was a kid.”

The evidence for this is there in her songs: she says they’re all 83 BPM because that’s the speed she walks at. “Yeah, it’s pretty pathetic!” she laughs, “I’m actually trying to push one of the songs on the album now above 100 BPM but it’s proving hard!”

When Björk says she’s been working on melodies since she was a kid, she means it. She first became a star in Iceland at the age of 11 after one of her music teachers sent a recording of her singing a cover of ‘I Love to Love’ by Tina Charles to RÚV, at the time Iceland’s only radio station. When the recording was broadcast Björk was offered her first contract by local label Fálkinn, and with the help of her stepfather released a self-titled album in 1977. Björk has since said that she felt strange receiving praise for songs she had only sung, not written, although she did contribute one track which showcased her precocious talent and her maverick aspirations: an instrumental piece for flute named after Icelandic painter Jóhannes Kjarval.

She didn’t remain that cherubic child for long. As a teenager she shaved her eyebrows and joined a series of punk bands: she drummed for an all-girl group called Spit & Snot, was flautist for the proggier Exodus and then joined Tappi Tikarrass, whose name translates as ‘Cork the Bitch’s Ass’. Her next band, KUKL, recorded a couple of albums for Crass Records before spawning The Sugarcubes, whose 1988 single ‘Birthday’ and subsequent album Life’s Too Good gave Björk her first real taste of global acclaim.

After three albums The Sugarcubes split in 1992 and Björk moved to London to establish herself as a solo artist. She made it look effortless. The album she recorded with producer Nellee Hooper of Soul II Soul, Debut, won her ‘Best Newcomer’ and ‘Best International Female’ at the Brits in 1994, while her music videos were already beginning to make her an icon: the Michel Gondry-directed video for ‘Human Behavior’ was nominated for a Grammy.

For 1995’s follow-up Post she worked with an assortment of producers drawn from jungle and trip hop, including Tricky and Graham Massey of 808 State, to create an album she described as “musically promiscuous”. 1997’s Homogenic reacted against this, setting out to explore her Icelandic identity against a backdrop of explosive, distorted beats. Her next album Vespertine was another about turn. When it was released in 2001 she told Simon Reynolds that she wanted it to be “a love affair to the home, about creating paradise under the kitchen table. It’s about creating peaks without outside stimulants… The kind of peaks you reach reading a book.”

Looking back at her career, Björk acknowledges that the clearest pattern is her stubborn refusal to repeat herself. She offers by way of explanation the fact that she adores a challenge, which often manifests itself in her choosing to take on genres she ordinarily dislikes. She wasn’t sure about a cappella music, she says, so she made Medúlla. She wasn’t excited by protest music, so she made Volta . “I guess with each project I have some sort of personal taboo I have to break,” she continues. “I don’t know why. It’s some sort of a kick I get out of it. I mean, obviously I’m also embracing a lot of things that I like, like nature, electronic music, vocals, choirs…”

For Biophilia, which will be simultaneously released as a series of musical and educational games built into an app for iPad and iPhone, part of the challenge was to take the idea of generative music, music created by a system, and use it to actually write great music: “I guess I’ve been going to galleries and museums – not often, but once in a while – and I’ve always thought it was such a strange brand of music. A lot of it is such a good idea, an amazing concept, and you walk through it and it’s interactive in space – but would you be able to then go home and listen to that song on your stereo, without knowing that, and it still be a good song? Or hear it on the radio? In most cases, that’s not the case. I don’t blame it; because of course it’s still good. Certain music is good in films, certain music is good in porn movies, certain music is good in clubs… that’s the good thing about music, it’s everywhere. I guess my challenge with this project was to do generative music but that it was still ‘songs’. I gave it my best shot that if in ten years somebody listens to the CD, or whatever format is going on then, and they don’t know anything about it… it would be just like my other CDs. It wouldn’t be that you needed the apps to get it. So in that way I wanted to unite those two worlds, you know?”

Part 2: Biophilia

Björk‘s new project Biophilia does not want for ambition. It has been billed as the first ‘app album’: Each of its ten tracks are being released alongside a corresponding app version for iPad and iPhone. These apps can be bought and accessed through the central Biophilia app, which appears as a galaxy waiting to be explored and navigated, with the songs as stars in its constellation. Zeroing in on a star enables you to hear the song as Björk recorded it, or to play a game which will involve you manipulating the music in some thematically-appropriate way. For example, on ‘Virus’ you play the part of a cell defending itself from viral attack, while on ‘Thunderbolt’ you draw Tesla coil charges which alter the bass lines you hear.

I’d been playing with the apps before we met and while they all seemed intuitive at the time, my notebook ended up covered in a bewildering cobweb of ideas: something about ‘continental drift’, something else about ‘seduction’, something about ‘DNA’, something else about ‘piano keys’. I look at Björk helplessly. Can she put it into words? “In a way, every app is a visualisation of the song. You are inside the song,” she explains eagerly. “I think when you listen to music on headphones and you close your eyes it’s very… internal. I wanted it to be that you could see the sounds, you know?”

Her career has already given us a series of beautiful and intensely original music videos, so I ask whether that experience of working with directors helped to inform her design work with the app developers? One immediate obvious difference is that she’s not onscreen for the apps: “With all the video directors I’ve worked with in the past I’ve always had just a couple of clues about each song: ‘This one is about walking on roofs’ or ‘This one is confrontational’ or ‘No, it’s not pink’. I’ll have a few clues about each song, and then I will try and work with them and try and bridge that gap between the image and the sound. But I mean I think this is even better, for me. For me it was never really about the way I look.”

I have to stop her there. This is a woman who wore a swan to the Oscars, whose dress at the Olympics in 2004 unwrapped itself to reveal a 10,000 square foot map of the world, and who, more immediately, is currently sat opposite me beneath a copper dome of hair that blossoms around her ears in the shape of a bell. She’s one of the most iconic pop stars in the world. It must, I suggest, have been a little bit about the way she looked. She laughs. “Yeah, of course it is, but it’s really about the core, and the core of it to me is the song. I guess I learned after being in bands for fifteen years before I did my solo stuff, and we were punks and we were like: ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter how things look it’s all about how they sound’ and then somebody would just take a picture of us and put us in the papers and you would be upset – not that it was ugly, nothing to do with vanity – just that it didn’t fit the music. So I guess I had fifteen years of kinda…” she shrugs indifferently, “and then once every few years I would meet somebody who totally got it. So I learned, almost like I was a pupil. So for fifteen years I learned that if you match the right image to the right sound it makes my life a lot easier! But I think it has changed as I get older and become more idiosyncratic with the music – like, I used to collaborate more but now in the studio I make all the decisions!”

You’re an auteur now? “Yeah, yeah, yeah! I’m bossy! I’m a bossy-boots!” She laughs. “Well to be honest it’s mostly me and the engineer so there’s no one to boss around anyway, but I’ve kinda managed to develop more so I know more what I want there, so by the time I work with the visual people, or the app people, or the photographers, it’s like I’m back in a band. It’s like ‘Oh!’ You all sit in a circle and say: ‘How about crystals?’ ‘How about this?’ So it’s more like being in a band. So I enjoy the process, in that way.”

What struck me when I played with the apps was how immersed you become in the music and in the myriad ways that your actions could affect it. In an age where music seems to have been devalued by its sheer ubiquity, these apps demand your full attention. Was that the aim? “Hmm… that’s a good question.” She pauses to think, and when Björk is thinking she does this thing where she rotates her jaw as if chewing distractedly. “To be honest, I wasn’t focused on that but maybe unconsciously! I can’t promise you totally… my focus was kinda more on the fact that we had the touch-screen. We were performing on it on the Voltatour from 2006 to 2008 and all I could see was opportunities. The thing I was more conscious about was how I was unsatisfied with my music education in school. I mean obviously there were a lot of amazing things. I was there for ten years and I loved it, don’t get me wrong, but I felt it wasn’t tactile enough. It was more ‘booksy’ or, I don’t know what you say in English? Like ‘academic’?”

‘Didactic’, I suggest? “Yeah! So because I had such strong feelings about musicology, and about how I see rhythms.” She laughs. “Well, I said it there, didn’t I? How I see rhythms, and how I see different chords and different scales and different speeds, and what I feel like at the beginning of a song, when I go inside and when I come out the other end. I wanted to include that somehow, and I kept thinking: ‘For kids’. I guess because I spent three years on trying to get it as true to how I feel about music as possible, I could say ‘yes’ to your question and say I wanted other people to be able to see it too. But to be honest I wasn’t so much thinking of that because two years into the project I didn’t know that it would come out on touch-screens because they hadn’t even made iPads! I was mostly writing it for our touch-screens, we had Laniers. I was making programs: ‘The structure of this song is crystals, so it’s this shape. Let’s write a program that’s like that.’ Then I’d sing about it and put the emotion in there as well, so for me it was trying to connect things which very often are not connected and I feel they should be, you know?”

She’s overflowing with excitement about the project now: “In my mind I was trying to simplify something but I guess it comes across as being the most complicated project I’ve ever done! I think it is in print, but I think once you sit down and play with the apps it’s something like… ‘Oh! You go three times round the galaxy and then you tap on something and then lightning comes at you’… it’s very hard to describe in print, because basically then you’re making it didactic again, when you write about it! Basically this project, to cut a really long story short, is about making things that I feel have been too didactic into a 3D tactile experience. You know, you take up the spoon and you get to turn it in circles.” She picks up an empty coffee mug and whisks a tea spoon inside it. “The other idea is to do with electronic music, because I love electronic music. I’ve been doing it for a very long time, but it had its limitations and one of the criticisms I’ve heard for twenty years from people who prefer indie music or classical music or jazz or whatever is that they’ll be like: ‘Yes, but it has no soul’ and I’ve been doing that debate for twenty years now!” She laughs. “It’s like, well, it’s because nobody put it there!”

So this album is not just about bringing together music, technology and nature, it’s also about putting the soul into electronic music? “Yeah, and with the touch screens now you’re not stuck with a grid. That’s why the songs are like they are. The grid is water. The grid is a pendulum. The grid is DNA multiplying. It’s not 4/4. It’s not TCK-CH, TCK-CH, TCK-CH, TCK-CH. It’s basically liberating you from the grid, but it’s still electronic music.”

Björk’s quest to give electronic music a soul reminds me of a contrary attempt by Coldplay to use a machine to help their drummer sound less like a machine. In a recent New Yorker article by Burkhard Bilger about a study into time perception by neuroscientist David Eagleman, Coldplay’s Will Champion describes how the band had been using a click track when playing live to keep time but then, having found that playing to it made them sound too rigid, the band decided not to do away with it but to speed it up and slow it down in places to artificially recreate the mood of a live gig. Coldplay now use elaborate “tempo maps” for their live shows and, as Champion told the magazine: “It re-creates the excitement of a track that’s not so rigid.”

As I describe how uncomfortable the idea of Coldplay’s tempo map makes me, Björk is nodding furiously: “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.” It seems strange to me, I tell her, that a machine is actually helping them to sound human. “It’s a really interesting point, because obviously I’ve been doing gigs since Debut and I’ve tried to solve this riddle ten times! It’s like the tenth time I’ve tried to solve this same riddle, in a way, but I just get better tools now! I mean, I personally would not have gone about it that way, because I feel you should let the tools be good at what they are good at. It’s not that the tools are pretending to be human or that the humans are pretending to be tools. Then again, I’m a very different musician to Coldplay. I like extremes. I think they probably like the middle a bit better than I do.”

Björk: queen of the understatement. She smiles. “I’m not saying that as a bad thing, you know? I quite enjoy a fierce techno beat with a pipe organ, do you know what I mean? I like that contrast, you know? Some people don’t. It’s kinda like having carrot soup and tequila, not just chips and sausages.” She laughs. “So I quite enjoy that. I mean the way I’ve done it in the past, what I’ve found really helpful, is if you solve this riddle in a few different ways in each concert, and then you never have songs back-to-back that are solved the same way. That puts the musicians on their toes. Say for example, on the Post tour: I had an accordion player who could play like Beethoven, he was a virtuoso accordion player and he played all the string arrangements but he was playing on a grid… so you had something very human, that no machine could do, and then you had something that only a machine could do. The next song, it would be electronic samples, very techno or whatever, played by a drummer not on a grid. He would be playing that and then I would be singing on top of that, you know?”

So varying the use of click-tracks or grids is your way of keeping things fresh? “Yeah. On one song the accordion player would just press ‘play’ on a computer and you’ll have a beat that doesn’t vary in speed. It’s just like a grid. Then you have a virtuoso musician do something that only a human can do. The next song would be a totally different approach, where again you would have electronic sounds that are very electronic – they’re not pretending to be acoustic – but they’d be played by a drummer so they wouldn’t be on a grid, or on a clock, and then you have musicians playing along with that. Then the next song would be just me and a keyboard, and then the next song would be everything on a grid. In that way, things can be dynamic. It keeps people on their toes. I’ve been in bands where nothing is on a grid and that can also, funnily enough, become stagnated. It brings different things out in people if you do that, but I think life is like that, anyway, and nature is like that. You can have something very grid-like such as your calendar, or your heartbeat, but you have to work around it. Aging, for example. It’s not dynamic. You’re not 10, and then you’re 50, and then 5. It’s a grid that you have to work around. You might as well just let it be very ‘griddy’ and then bring something that’s the opposite and… spunk it up!” She collapses into a fit of giggles. “I don’t know what word to use!”

Another example of throwing opposites together is the fact that the electronic sounds the Biophilia apps make are based on a series of acoustic instruments, many of which she had built specifically for this project: “Basically, I kept thinking of the kids. So, I wanted them to have a touch-screen, to have access to an algorithm from nature, to be able to play it with one finger and then for it to be connected with either a pipe-organ, or gamaleste, or pendulum, or sharpsichord. It’s sort of like ‘Where is the electric?’ and ‘Where is the acoustic?’ You make the machine do what the machine is best at doing, which is those algorithms that nobody could do live without it and then you can make impulsive decisions depending on your feelings at the time, or your emotions, and react to that – but then that’s plugged with acoustic sounds. I kept thinking about how kids sometimes get too stuck into computer games and I wanted it to not just be this virtual world where everything’s perfect. I wanted to be connected with things which are more like the skin or oxygen. So basically the pipe-organ is like wind, and the gamaleste is like bronze and the pendulum is like gravity. I just think that age between five and seven is magical. You can learn new languages, you can learn to read and write, you’re just a sponge. So whatever you grasp on the world in those years usually stays with you for the rest of your life.”

Was it important then that there was a element of composition built into the app, as well as creating a new way to present your own music? “Very much so, but I understood that it would just be an introduction. I call it ‘semi-educational’ because if you wanted to take the ‘semi-’ off you’d have to do a lot of work and a proper program. But it’s sort of an introduction, the 101 of musicology, but obviously this is my point of view: how I see musicology, so the songs will sound a little bit like my songs. Hopefully it will inspire people to go off and do their own songs.”

Part 3: Bootlegs

As intriguing as Björk’s Biophilia project is, there’s something about it that makes me feel slightly uneasy. I think it’s to do with the number of times the names ‘iPad’ and ‘iPhone’ appear on my press release and particularly with the fact that the Biophilia apps will not be made available on any other format. For someone as fiercely independent as Björk, who has spent her entire career on indie labels, this seems out of character. I hate to think of Björk as a corporate shill, but as we all know deep down in the depths of our iSouls, Apple have now unquestionably become The Man.

So this is what I ask her: ‘You’ve talked about the iPad feeling like a return to a punk ethos, where anyone can use it to make their own music. At the same time, iPads are expensive and elitist gadgets. Do you think there is a discord between the technology and the spirit of what you’re trying to do?’

“Yeah, for sure, there’s definitely another polarity there, a conflict,” she replies. “The only solution for me was to somehow be some sort of a ‘Kofi Annan’ and try and make these two worlds speak to each other.”

She pauses and coyly drums her fingers on the table.

“I’m not supposed to say this, probably, but I’m trusting that the pirates out there won’t tie their hands behind their back.”

‘So you’d quite like to see Biophilia end up on other operating systems?’

“Yeah. I mean, I’ve been in Africa in the last few years, and Indonesia. There are people there who have cardboard houses but they have mobile phones. Everybody’s texting. It’s just a question of time before touch screens are cheap. That’s why we really made sure when we wrote all the programs that they will transfer to other systems. I mean, I don’t totally understand technologically what it is that makes that possible.”

Björk, as she mentioned, should probably not have said that. It seemed to me at the time that she was being disarmingly honest, and also perhaps a little knowingly provocative, so I quoted her in the news story we ran when the interview took place in July. The story was quickly picked up by Wired, then Pitchfork and NME and then pretty much every other music magazine with a net connection. Unfortunately but inevitably the time-worn journalistic credo of “simplify and exaggerate” kicked in a little more with each new article, with the result that by the time her thoughts had made it to, say, Billboard, they had become simply a reductive instruction: ‘Björk: Hack My Apps!’

In the interests of clarity then, here’s the message that appeared on Björk’s Facebook page the following day: “been doing scrillions of interviews , most has gone well except, i noticed a misunderstanding online when asked in an interview if i thought hackers would get into the app box i answered something along the lines that that was to be expected . that you could trust that they wouldnt have their hands tied behind their backs . i have seen this then juxtaposed against other things i said later to make it look like i am encouraging them. this is not how i feel.”

Interestingly, that message itself disappeared a day after it was posted without explanation. It’s understandable, of course, that she does not want to see a project she’s invested so much time and energy in being bootlegged. This is without mentioning the huge amount of her own money that she’s poured into Biophilia, of which more later. Ultimately it’s likely that the point is moot anyway: transferring an iPhone app to another operating system presents significantly more technological hurdles than pirating an MP3.

The subtext here is the broader question of how musicians are going to get paid for the work they do, now that we have apparently decided, as a society, that we’re cool with getting our music for free, either through streaming services like Spotify or through illegal means. The result is that making a great album is no longer enough: musicians are having to find new ways to persuade us to actually part with our cash. There have been missteps. Indeed, Björk herself started to get a reputation for unnecessarily repackaging and reissuing her music around the time of 2006’s Surrounded box set, and she’s currently selling something called Biophilia: The Ultimate Edition from her website which will set you back a cool £500. There doesn’t seem to be room for egalitarianism in the brave new world that the internet has created, but at least with the apps she has created something original and of real value.

However, I get the impression from talking to Björk that her work on Biophilia is not born out of a desire to sell a gimmick, but out of a genuine desire to create something innovative despite the baffled state of the music industry. Unfortunately for her, and for her fans, being in the technological vanguard tends to come with an accompanying high startup cost. Hence her involvement with Apple and the grim shop-front reality that as influential as Björk is, she couldn’t have even dreamed of getting something like this off the ground without being certain that she could count on the support of the iTunes Store. What her comments really tell us is that Björk is still struggling with the same dilemma being faced by countless contemporary artists across a whole range of mediums: do you want your art to be enjoyed by as many people as possible, or do you want to earn a living?

For Björk, it was her work with cutting-edge app developers which really recalled her punk days: “I guess when I was talking about ‘punk’ I was more talking about the way the app team worked together. By then we had no money, we’d run out of budget. It’s like two years since we ran out of budget. The app team said ‘We wanna do this so much that we’ll do it for free, but then we’ll split the profit 50/50. That’s kinda how we used to do things, the indie companies back in the punk days. Everyone makes the posters and glues them up and hand-makes the covers and then if there’s profit you just split it 50/50. That’s kinda what I meant by ‘punk’.”

The flexibility offered by the apps opens up the possibility of releasing further songs into the Biophilia universe: “I’m hoping I can do that. I’m at least thinking ‘double album’. We’ve got ten songs, maybe I can keep adding another ten. I don’t know, I’m just going to improvise. The good thing about the internet, or should be, is that it’s more spontaneous. I feel like if we’re making a new model it should be more flexible. But I mean, I wrote almost all of the songs on this album on touch-screens. That was a really new thing to me. The first time I’m not writing songs by walking outside and singing, because I had it in my lap and could faff about and improvise. A couple of songs were written on Nintendo games controllers. The chords we made on the touch-screens I would put on so that we could control the chords and the speeds and the time-signatures like a computer game. Both because I was trying to think of something that kids know, and also after programming with a mouse for ten years… it’s not really helpful for making quick decisions. I haven’t even tried it because I know it’s not a turn-on for me, to be singing like ‘dner-dner-d-ner-ner’ and then going on the mouse,” she mimes clicking and dragging, “clicking and opening up new boxes. It’s just not… it’s good for… is it the left-side of your brain? The more sort-of essay-writing side… but if you’re writing a song it needs to be more tactile. So far, with computers or electronic stuff, this is the most… you can grab it…” she mimes moulding clay, “or act really quickly and be more impulsive, so that’s kinda why we’ve be doing stuff with that.”

Björk believes children will respond instinctively to this tactile world: “I’ve wanted to do a music school since I was a kid, and so I was thinking well maybe it wasn’t that literal. I always imagined myself on some farm in Iceland, an elderly lady, and all the kids with recorders or whatever coming for a few weeks. I was always thinking about those few years, between five and seven, when it was more of an introduction to music, and for this to be an inspiring and enabling thing. For me to see the touch-screens and realise how everybody’s downloading the ocarina, so that this could mean that a kid in India could learn the difference between scales or time signatures, and not by reading this thick book but just through feeling, just by playing with it for a bit. I saw my own daughter, who’s eight now, playing with an app called ‘The Elements’ which is basically the element table. There’s also another one called ‘Solar System’. The teams that made those two apps actually did a couple of things for me. But with ‘Solar System’, she’d just been playing and scrolling with the solar system, and I think she gets more what the solar system is from that than I did from five years of lessons! I think these things are meant to be known more like that. They’re not like Latin or something, where you have to spend years and years over details and grammar. It’s more of a feeling.”

So you want to teach the world to sing? “I don’t know. I think everybody, once in their lifetime, wants to have a go at sharing what helped you… I was laughing about it with my friends. ‘Oh my God, what am I doing?’ This project is about the universe and everything! It’s vast! But I think it’s something I’ve noticed with people my age, because obviously I take care of my kids, but now I’m just about getting to that age where I’m starting to take care of my parents as well. It’s sort of a debate. ‘When will I start having the Christmas parties?’ It’s not yet kicked in, but give it five years. It’s a really strange feeling, because I’ve always thought of myself as the one who attends the Christmas parties. It’s interesting that age, about 50 or something, that you are in the middle, so you take care of both sides.”

The album also seems to reflect an almost spiritual awe that comes from contemplating the intricacies of our universe, recalling the work of the cosmologist Carl Sagan. Is she becoming more spiritual as she gets older? “I think so! I never thought I would… When I was a teenager, or in my twenties, I thought stuff like that was really pretentious, but now if I can teach you something…” She laughs. “Now that I’m not twenty any more, I think it’s natural for each individual, at least once in their life, to want to put out their version of how they see the world and how it could function. For me, obviously, I’m obsessed with music, so my musicology… nature is my religion, in a way, and I see sound as celebration of that. It’s a bit…” She pauses as she searches for the right phrase, “a bit ‘over-the-top’ to say that!” She smiles indulgently, “But I do! I do. I think everybody has their own private religion. I guess what bothers me is when millions have the same one. It just can’t be true. It’s just…” she screws her face up incredulously, “…what?”

Part 4: Business

One of the things you realise pretty quickly around Björk is that for all her colourful flamboyance, her eccentricity and her sometimes child-like awe and wonder, she is not naïve. She is fiercely intelligent and hard-working and despite spending the better part of her life trapped inside the distorted mirror ball of her own celebrity, her engagement with the world around her is honest and clear-sighted. In particular, the passion for nature which she espouses so readily on Biophilia would be easy to dismiss as abstract whimsy if it were not for the fact that she has proved herself unafraid to engage wholeheartedly with grassroots environmental activism and to take on big business without ever displaying a pop star’s sense of entitlement.

She described her radicalisation in a 2008 op-ed for The Times, in which she wrote about how she’d been forced to stop living “happily in the land of music-making” when she realised that “politicians seem bent on ruining Iceland’s natural environment”.

As activist groups like Saving Iceland have identified, Iceland’s bankrupt government is currently scrambling to cash in their few remaining chips by granting permission for huge tracts of land to be torn up for aluminium plants while simultaneously signing a secretive and ludicrous contract to sell off Icelandic energy producer HS Orka to Canada’s Magma Energy Corp in a deal which grants the corporation exclusive access to some of the country’s largest geothermal reserves for the next 130 years.

Björk first got involved in the protests in 2004, when she played at the Hætta concert in Reykjavík which had been organised in opposition to a new Alcoa aluminium smelter. She then founded an organisation called Náttúra and has taken up campaigning in a way that was new to her: “It was another thing I thought I’d never get into, funnily enough,” she laughs. “I’m breaking all my own taboos!”

Although Náttúra faces a huge struggle to protect Iceland’s landscape, there are echoes of similar battles being fought across the world. We talk about the Dongria Kondh tribe in Orissa, India, where I used to live, who recently won a historic battle against Vedanta Resources to save their forest lands and stop their sacred Niyamgiri mountain being turned into an open-pit bauxite mine. “It’s great,” she says, “I’ve been following this since about a year ago.”

She says she never intended to become involved in this sort of activism: “I always felt music was better if it wasn’t political, but I live on an island which I guess is about the same size as England – without Wales and Scotland – but it’s only got 350,000 people. It’s the biggest untouched area in Europe. You can imagine how we felt: not just me, but the majority of Icelanders, when we found out that behind the scenes for 20 years the right-wing rednecks had been planning to harness all of its energy. I mean, already we’re over the pollution mark that the Kyoto agreement set, so that would just be gone! I just had to do something about it.”

She says that at first she had been complacent: “We had two huge aluminium smelters and they were going to build a third one. I thought ‘that’s not going to happen’. There was a lot of protest, everybody went bonkers, people came from all over the world… and it still got built!”

After that, she could no longer content herself with just turning up for benefit concerts: “That was 2005-6, and after that I was just like…” She mimes rolling up her sleeves. “It’s about my children or my grandchildren. I had believed it would be stopped. There were a lot of people in government who were against it, but it still didn’t get stopped. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself, when I’m old and looking at my grandchildren, unless I at least gave it a whack.”

With the lack of alternative employment opportunities being cited as the critical factor, Björk decided to get creative: “In the autumn of 2008 I spent four months on it full time. It sounds maybe odd, but it seemed to me and my friends that the best way to do it was to go to the rural areas and ask ‘Why aren’t you thinking of starting other companies?’ We figured out very quickly that legally it was impossible for these people to start start-up companies. If you had a village of 500 or 1,000 people, and 20 people are unemployed, then if they could start three little companies they’d be fine. Basically they wanted to build an aluminium smelter there and then the people who were unemployed from ten villages would all come and get jobs. But if instead you could start one company that would grow their own vegetables… I mean, it doesn’t all have to be hippy, green things… you could start a data centre or an online company!”

“We basically went and wrote out lists of 500 companies that were possible to inspire people and so we basically ended up with 150 people who were cherry-picked, and we had a brain-storming weekend, and then we had a lot of really influential people in Iceland but also a lot of people who started start-up companies which nobody thought would work: like gaming companies that hire now 2,000 people but were set up by two guys who are half my age. So these kind of people. We wrote a manifesto, not a thick one but just a functional manifesto and took it to the Prime Minister and said ‘These are laws that you can change now and they’d make things easier for little start-up companies.’ It was silly things. For example, fish is under a monopoly, so you can’t have fish markets in the villages. Which is insane when they’re catching these fish right there. You can’t have sushi restaurants. It was a collection of stuff like this, you know? So that did something, not much, and then was the privatisation of access to Iceland’s energy sources. After the bank crash, it was sneaked through, so then started a year-long fight to try to raise awareness. We did a petition online, I don’t know if you saw it?”

I tell her I did see the petition, which called for a referendum to decide whether the country’s natural resources should be publicly owned. Then I tell her I also saw the remarkable series of open letters that went back and forth between her and Magma Energy CEO Ross Beaty last year, in which he at one point offered to sell her a 25% stake in the Icelandic energy company HS Orka. She eloquently rebuffed him, writing back: “you totally miss my point. i feel this company should not be privatized , it should be given back to the people. therefore i am not interested in shares.”

When I mention the letters she laughs loudly and scowls in pantomime disapproval.

“He is so cocky! So cocky! So anyway, to cut a long story short we got 47,000 people to sign a petition to give to the government to not privatise access to our energy resources. That’s like 25% of voters! But like what you were saying about India, it’s a cobweb. For three years, half of my time went into this and then in January I realised that if I didn’t go full time on my project it would never, never happen. So in January 2011 I organised the karaoke marathon and then I took the next plane out and said; ‘Now I have to focus on my project.’ I think with my project I can be proactive, do you know what I mean?”

After hosting a three-day karaoke marathon in January this year to attract attention to her calls for a referendum, Björk decided that making her own music was the best way to get people talking and engage them with environmental issues.

“That was actually one of the driving points, emotionally, for Biophilia. Instead of standing on a chair and criticising and going ‘Ner-ner-ner-ner-ner’ why didn’t I come up with solutions? I ended up being… touch-screens… internet… ok… solutions. After the bank crash and seeing all the people who lost their houses and lost their pensions because of what 20 crazy venture-capitalists did, my problems were superficial. After trying to encourage people who’ve got nothing, to tell them: ‘Come on!’” She claps emphatically. “‘You could start your own fishing company! You could grow mussels! Harness the tide! You can do it!’ Then when you come back to your home, to your studio… you cannot be lazy. It’s like karma. If you’re saying to other people that it’s no big deal, then you have to give it a go yourself. You have to practise what you preach, you know?”

It wasn’t just witnessing other people in trouble that spurred her on, she had her own problems as well: “There are so many things that used to work that don’t work anymore. Not only with the music industry, but I lost my voice… I got nodules on my voice and had to learn a totally new technique. I didn’t know if I could sing again. So on so many different levels it seemed like all the old systems were off the table, and it was a case of: ‘Let’s just do simple stuff that works’. It’s an interesting irony that this project maybe comes across as being pretentious and complicated, but for me, how I experienced it for three years was very DIY. We’d run out of budget. It was as if all these old systems, these palaces, had tumbled down and it’s like: ‘Ok. Here’s a spoon. Here’s a cup.’” She picks them up off the table and mimes a pestle and mortar: a picture of single-minded determination.

You felt like you could rip it up and start again?

“Yeah. That’s how it felt to me to do it really.”

Having spoken about the failings of the music industry in general, and about running out of budget herself, I’m intrigued as to how she manages to fund a project as singular and ambitious as Biophilia. The live show alone is reported to be a vastly expensive undertaking. Is she actually making any money?

“Well I’ve always felt that because I’ve got money from my albums that I should use them to make the next project. It’s been one of the reasons that every project has been so different, because I felt that somebody was rewarding me for being brave! If I stopped being brave it would stop! If I started being stingy, the project would be stingy. So far in my career, I’ve usually used the money from each project to pay for the next one. So for this project, I could pay for the making of the album, that is the music. I got the Polar Music Prize, from Sweden, a year ago, and that’s quite a generous prize, so I paid for the instruments with that, but I couldn’t pay for the apps.”

The Polar Music Prize is worth one million Swedish kronor, just under £100,000, which paid for the unique instruments she showcased at her summer residency at the Manchester International Festival.

“The concert in Manchester, we just about made it on zero. I mean, that’s success, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve got a house in England, I’ve got a house in New York, I’ve got a house in Iceland, I don’t need anything more, you know? I’m fine. Once I stop making music… once I stop making money from music, I’ll sell one house! So after I stop making money from music… I can make albums for a few years, at least the next ten years, from selling the houses I’ve got! I’m not trying to be rich; it’s more that I want to solve riddles. For example, with the music industry: it tumbled ten years ago, and I felt that I wasn’t doing anything about it, really. Probably I was having it too good or something! But now I can say ‘I postponed it too long’. Also maybe because I come from this punk background where there was only 80,000 people in the village I was brought up in – the capital, you know? – and there was a big company there already that sold Abba and Beethoven or whatever, put out the commercial Icelandic musicians. We didn’t want to be part of that. We knew that it’s no big deal putting out an album. I think a lot of musicians think it’s this kinda thing where you have to send your music to all the big labels. It’s more of a psychological, confidence thing: ‘If I’m good enough, they will like my demo.’ But I mean I did it all for ten years. I’ve done it: making the album in somebody’s bedroom, making the poster yourself.”

Do you think that’s what you’d be doing if you were just starting out now?

“I think so. I think because I had that background, I knew when the music industry started tumbling that it wasn’t a big deal. I knew it from experience. I haven’t always been able to just hand out my demo and get a response. I’ve done it myself. Taking buses around Reykjavik and putting the posters up myself. Now, with the internet, that’s exactly what you do. What I’m trying to say… in a really complicated way, I’m sorry!… is that I felt that if somebody would know what could be possible it would be somebody of my generation. I’ve had it quite good for a decade, so that I can take this kind of risk, you know? But I think it was also very driven by the stuff I was doing in Iceland.”

Part 5: Boundlessness

Björk was never going to be happy with an ordinary, workaday world tour for Biophilia. Instead, she plans to spend the next three years visiting just eight international cities for a series of six-week residencies. She will spend around a month and a half in each location, and her venues will be carefully chosen with science museums more likely to be selected than arenas. She plans to perform twice a week to relatively intimate audiences of fewer than 2,000 people, while the rest of the time the venues will host a series of music-education workshops in collaboration with local schools. At long last, her dream of becoming a music teacher will become a reality, albeit in a fittingly fantastical way.

A conventional tour is unthinkable in part because of how absurdly unwieldy her instruments are. While the high-tech touch screens that her band played on the Volta tour have directly influenced her composition of Biophilia, the machines she will use to play it are the sort of objects which will strike fear into the hearts of roadies everywhere. There is the vast barrel harp known as the Sharpsichord and then there are a further four 10-foot pendulum-harps whose strings are plucked by gravity’s pull. There is a pipe organ controlled by midi files and a celeste which has been re-fitted with bronze gamelan bars to create a hybrid called a Gamaleste. In order to play the bassline on ‘Thunderbolt’ she will have a twin Tesla coil system suspended over the stage. You know, because a single Tesla coil is just never enough, is it?

While she’s already told me how important Iceland is to her, it’s clear Björk relishes the opportunity to travel. Likewise her music has incorporated influences and collaborators from the far reaches of the globe, from Inuit throat singer Tagaq to Malian kora player Toumani Diabaté, and she recently released a series of Biophilia remixes by Syrian maverick Omar Souleyman. As I’ve traveled and worked in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I’m particularly interested in how she managed to stumble across Congolese dance pioneers Konono Nº1 before inviting them to play on Volta?

“I can’t remember… I guess somebody sent me a link to them – I guess that’s how you find out about new music these days!”

Does she spend a lot of time on the internet? The subject matter of Biophiliasuggests she has the sort of mind that could spend weeks falling down Wikipedia’s rabbit holes.

She laughs: “Yeah! Yeah, I do a little bit! I still haven’t gotten into Twitter and Facebook and all that. I’m trying, with this project, because it has that educational streak so I feel I want to talk about it. In a way it’s not about me. It’s the frustrated music teacher in me that’s gagging to find a platform! I mean obviously I do emails and use it to find music, but I also go to CD shops, so it’s a bit of both.”

Going back to Konono Nº1, she adds:

“I wanted to go to Congo, when I worked with them, but it was exactly when… when was it, it must have been 2005? It was like the week before that this big war had kicked off, and I asked the people who put Konono Nº1 out, who are Belgian, and they said that even they couldn’t go there at the time. So I couldn’t go, although of course I wanted to. I ended up going to Mali and working with Toumani Diabaté. In the end I met Konono Nº1 in Belgium. They were fun! We had a language barrier, but it was all translated. I would have liked to have worked more with them but their schedule and mine was tricky. My original dream was to persuade Timbaland to come with me to Congo. Not just for a short week or something but for a few months, and somehow combine his beats… because he’d been asking me for ten years to work together and I never understood exactly how I was going to enter that world. But I think between me and Timbaland, I would have been the anthropologist! That would have been my role.”

Björk is well cast as a pith-helmeted musical anthropologist, and having recorded in the past with not just the aforementioned musicians but also the likes of Thom Yorke, Antony Hegarty, Mike Patton and Rahzel I ask whether she’s seeking out future collaborations?

“Yeah, for sure,” she replies, “I’m not that greedy though, because to be honest I’ve been doing them for so long that I understand that it’s not just about ‘shopping’, you know? In the end of the day, if you have good chemistry then you have good chemistry. The chemistry is kinda more important than the two individuals. Usually, if you’re lucky, at any given point you might have chemistry with maybe one or two musicians. For example, I became good friends with Antony before we even sang together. It takes a while. I don’t know if you heard what I did with Dirty Projectors? That was one of the most exciting things I’ve done recently.”

As she said earlier, the songs are the core for her. I wonder whether she sees a triumph of style over content in the contemporary pop charts. Is Björk interested in or by Lady Gaga?

Her reply is cautious: “I definitely like some of the outfits she’s worn. I definitely admire her for her courage – it was getting really boring! It was like everybody was just really conservative, and nobody was taking any risks. I love theatrical stuff. I think all of us have a theatrical side and a not-so-theatrical side. The music? It’s not my thing. I mean, I don’t judge it. One thing good about music is that you can have all sorts of music. You can have… easy-listening new age music…which actually is even bigger than Gaga! Classical music. You can have billions…”

There’s room for everything.

“There is room for everything. Something that is quite common though, and I’ve noticed it even though things have changed a lot, is that there always seems to be room for a lot of male singers, and they don’t get asked to duel. You have Jay-Z and Kanye West being best mates. There’s always room for many male characters.”

Whereas women tend to be pitted against one another?

“Yeah, still it’s like ‘Christina vs. Britney’. Why? I don’t want to be put in a position where I have to attack her. I thought it was really weird and unfair when M.I.A. and Joanna Newsom were asked about Gaga and then because they didn’t like her music, it was immediately big news online and they had to shoot each other down. It’s like the three new, most happening female pop girls, the same kind of age, and they had to shoot each other down! Guys are never asked to do that. It’s just ‘the more, the merrier’, you know?”

I ask her whether she thinks of herself as a feminist and she draws a deep breath:

“In the same way as religion… I am very spiritual, but I don’t belong to any… ‘party’. The same with feminism. I get really scared and worried and run the other way the minute it becomes a dogma, or a doctrine. My mum’s generation, the hippies, were quite radical when it came to those things and I felt that for my generation the best thing we could do for women was just to go and get things done instead of pointing your finger forever. I think it’s better for me to focus my energy on just getting things done. Especially as you get older, because there seems to be this kind of invisible line that you’re just supposed to go home and stop doing things, which is odd. My idols have often been authors, because we have so many in Iceland.”

Who do you idolise?

“So many! In Iceland we are the nation that writes most books, reads most books and buys most books per person in the world. Our heroes are always authors and they always did their best work between 50 and 60. You’d do your angry, hardcore, ‘pose-y’ poetry book when you’re 21, when you’re an arrogant youth and you beat people up and all this kind of stuff! People will say: ‘Let’s see… when she’s 40 or 50, then she’ll do her mature work…’”

Björk, despite not appearing to abide by what she would call the ‘grid-like’ nature of aging, is now 45. The eclectic, ecstatic music she has made her life has at times been angry, hardcore and even ‘pose-y’. Is Biophilia her mature work?

“I don’t know! I definitely feel like I personally broke through some old, stagnated habits on this project which might enable me, for the next ten years or so, to do better music.”

For a moment she is lost in thought, rotating her jaw. She is still as driven as she always has been, still as exacting in the demands she places on herself as she scampers ceaselessly into uncharted territory: pop music’s most fearless explorer. She smiles ruminatively:

“I still feel I’m just as far away from what I want to do… but, you know? That’s just the way it is, right?”

Originally published by Drowned In Sound.

I arrived at the Grosvenor House Hotel just in time to be reminded that I should refer to tonight’s Mercury Prize as the ‘Barclaycard Mercury Prize’, which of course I’m only too happy to do. I would have thought that Barclays might like to lay low for a while, what with it having emerged earlier in the day that they’re being sued by the US government for “routinely breaching their own mortgage-lending rules” and bullying supposedly independent appraisers so that they “feared for their livelihoods, and therefore cherry picked data” to support home loans which should never have been granted. But hey, if the Mercury Prize wants to be associated with the “liar loans” lawsuits then so be it: the Barclaycard Mercury Prize it is.

Speaking of reckless gambling, I rang my man Rupert Adams at the bookies, William Hill, shortly before proceedings began and he assured me that PJ Harvey remained the firm favourite at 6/4 on, but that King Creosote and Jon Hopkins had enjoyed a late flurry of bets. “Over the weekend we have seen significant gambles on King Creosote and Jon Hopkins, who our punters think could be the dark horse this year,” he said, which I took under advisement given that last year Mr Adams told The Guardian that Paul Weller had been at the centre of the “biggest turnaround in music betting for 40 years” just hours before he lost to long-term favourites The xx.

I collected my press credentials and entered the Art Deco opulence of Grosvenor House’s Great Room, complete with extravagantly ostentatious chandeliers. The room was originally built as an ice rink, so it had been designed with a broad balcony running around the outside of the open central space. This is as far as I got, as heavily-built men in ill-fitting suits stepped in to bar my way downstairs. Below me, on what used to be ice, eighty tables full of music industry suits and Barclays bankers chilled out in places which reportedly cost £2,000 a head. Meanwhile I was swiftly escorted towards the press enclosure, where the only bar sold bottles of beer for £8 and a bottle of wine for over £30. Not being a banker, I reached for the bottle of whiskey I’d secreted about my person but was soon distracted by the distant sound of a man mumbling mournfully into a wind tunnel. Further investigation revealed that it was Jools Holland saying something about a music prize. The time had come.

Tinie Tempah and Anna Calvi were first up, but I was distracted by bumping into Metronomy. Bassist Gbenga Adelekan, looking as dapper as ever, said the band were feeling relaxed but slightly weirded out by the fact that they’d been asked to leave the venue earlier so that they could re-enter on the red carpet for the benefit of the cameras. Never trust anything you see on TV. I drew an ill-advised parallel with the practice of war-reporters setting up cameras inside buildings so that they could be filmed kicking down doors from the inside, which Gbenga kindly and patiently ignored.

I wished Joseph Mount luck, and mentioned that like him I had spent my own adolescence on the English Riviera. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he smiled. I thanked him for making Torbay seem like a tropical paradise, both in song and in music videos. He said that he occasionally gets complaints from people who think he’s misrepresenting it, which seems to be missing the point somewhat. If there’s a lesson here, it’s that musicians should never read the comments under their own YouTube videos; a world of mad opinions and bad spelling awaits.

On stage, Gwilym Simcock played ‘These Are The Good Days’, starting off by using the piano keys in the time-honoured manner but then progressing to reaching inside and playing the strings, which was a pretty neat trick. PJ Harvey was next up, and played ‘The Words That Maketh Murder’ dressed in a flowing white robe and matching headdress. Aside from the outfit, the performance was pretty low-key but this only served to underscore the strength of the source material. King Creosote and Jon Hopkins gave a similarly understated but beguiling performance, and after those two performances Metronomy’s chest lights alone seemed frighteningly futuristic, never mind the gorgeous pop of ‘The Bay’.

In an interval break I got chatting to a man from Barclays. “I don’t know much about music,” he said, which I’m not sure would have disqualified him from being on the judging panel. “I liked that King Creosote though, that was nice, and Metronomy were charming.” He’s looking forward to dinner, and to Elbow, in that order, which probably tells you most of what you need to know about the sort of night this is. He’s surprised when I tell him that the journalists don’t get served dinner, and seems a little confused as to why we’d have bothered coming.

Katy B’s performance was full of confidence and swagger, James Blake’s wasn’t. Adele had a bad voice, a doctor’s rather than a critical opinion, so we got a video. Everything Everything were followed by Elbow as the night’s music lurched to a close.

The whiskey was gone. PJ Harvey was declared the winner, and the consensus seemed to be that it was a safe choice only because she has made a truly great album. A swiftly erected dance floor lay depressingly empty. It was time to go home. It was hard not to feel like I’d spent a night at a carefully choreographed advertising function, which of course I had. This isn’t necessarily a negative, the likes of Ghostpoet and King Creosote and Jon Hopkins will have benefitted hugely and deservingly from their time in the spotlight. However, something about making exciting and talented artists perform for suited and seated bankers and label bosses makes the experience of the awards show vaguely uncomfortable. This is supposed to be a celebration of great art, but the art is elsewhere. The muse has been left weeping gently at home, and as I walk home I’m reminded of Nick Cave’s letter to MTV when he withdrew from their award show in 1996 and bridled against the very concept of making musicians compete for a prize: “My muse is not a horse and I am in no horse race and if indeed she was, still I would not harness her to this tumbrel – this bloody cart of severed heads and glittering prizes. My muse may spook! May bolt! May abandon me completely!”

Originally published by Drowned In Sound.

“I don’t feel like there’s much to be gained by admitting that you’re part of the wallpaper in a capitalist system that you help propagate.” Stephen Malkmus is lying on a sofa in the book-lined lobby of a self-consciously upmarket hotel in Soho. The erstwhile Pavement ringleader is talking about class, about the role of musicians and music fans and about the futility of rebellion, but he’s doing it with characteristic nonchalance. He never quite seems to be taking himself entirely seriously, and as he reclines I realise I’m being offered an irresistible visual metaphor: Stephen Malkmus is so laidback he’s horizontal.

“You can say there is a sort of dilettantism… a sense of saying ‘no’ to this system, just by being a really obsessive music fan, yerkno? Maybe you’re not buying into a lot of what the system and the culture is trying to make you buy into. I say we do that, but that’s still saying it’s ok to be in the system. You’re just on the edge of it; you’re not really outside of it.”

He stretches out on the sofa. He is very tall, or from this angle, very long. His fingers point and weave expressively as he talks and his hands are perpetually in motion, a sort of slow-motion version of hyperactivity. “Not to be, like, a French philosopher or something, but we’ve been co-opted into the bourgeois culture, totally, whatever. We’re like a rough edge. My idea is that the only way that I could be truly avant-garde, or somehow outside the consumption system, is through humour.”

Anybody who is familiar with his song-writing will know that Malkmus possesses a finely tuned sense of the absurd, whether he’s skewering bourgeois culture or the endlessly ridiculous world of rock & roll. Back in 1992, promoting the first Pavement album Slanted and Enchanted, he told Simon Reynolds: “When we play live, we do feel the whole ritual is absurd. Music isn’t life and death for us, and it’s hard for me to believe that art can be like that.”

Of course, despite, or because of, their apparent indifference, Pavement became the sort of band that are talked about in life and death terms. Robert Christgau called them the “finest rockband of the ‘90s”. Chuck Klosterman noted that for fans they were “the apotheosis of indie aesthetics”. Their reunion tour last year, their only performances together in a decade, seemed to sell out almost before it was announced.

It was a tour which finally laid Pavement to rest – a sort of worldwide victory lap. Malkmus confirms that they are now officially over, although he does hesitate slightly before laying the word ‘forever’ on the tomb of perfect sound. “Well, basically we could do a fat guys reunion tour or something in ten more years again, but it’s done as a creative venture. I don’t wanna rule out some kind of fun, or some major charity. If someone wants to offer us a million dollars to play a charity I’m sure everyone would find time to do that.”

With Pavement firmly quarantined in the past, Malkmus is releasing his fifth album with the Jicks, Mirror Traffic, although he points out that his ‘solo’ career isn’t all too different from his song-writing with Pavement. He’s no more or less of an auteur now than he ever was. “In Pavement I had full authoritarian control, for better or worse. It’s no different, really. I write the tunes, the band plays them, and if they don’t play ‘em well, we drop ‘em.” His laconic drawl renders tunes as toons. “It’s still the same thing. They almost always say they like them, or they give me the benefit of the doubt to carry through. If they’re not good, we sorta all agree. They don’t have to say ‘That song’s bad’, they just sorta die on the vine.”

For Mirror Traffic, Malkmus had his old friend Beck in the producer’s chair, fresh from his work on Thurston Moore’s Demolished Thoughts. He says Beck was “a pleasure to work with” although this might have something to do with the fact that it doesn’t sound like Malkmus ceded too much creative control: “He’s in the right zone for people like us. There’s no point in trying to, at this age, change someone like me. I think he heard our demos and he realised what we needed was kind of a performance. A good performance and quick, but not overcooked. There’s so many different ways you could work with somebody. I could come there with no songs…”

I mention that I spoke to Charlotte Gainsbourg when IRM was released and she said that Beck, nominally the producer, had written the whole thing. “Yeah, I think he did. He might not have even known he was going to have to do that…” He laughs. “She’s a different breed to the likes of me or Thurston. We got our toons. We play ‘em. He tries to get the right ambience. He’s very Californian. He doesn’t really say many negative things about anything. That’s pretty nice. If he does he sort of couches it in L.A. speak.”

There’s a parallel here, because Malkmus has only worked with a ‘name’ producer once before, when Nigel Godrich was brought in for the fifth, and as it turned out, final, Pavement album, Terror Twilight. “Yeah. I would give production props to this dude Bryce Goggin who worked on early Pavement albums, and I’ve done different levels of mixing and production with different people who didn’t have enough of a name or the power to call themselves ‘producers’. But yeah, this is where someone else had their name on the line, as it were, as a producer, and I took advantage of that in both cases and did a little bit less and just focused on… on um… doing less…” He laughs again, still lazy after all these years. “No! Focusing on lyrics and playing, yerkno?”

How did working with Beck compare with working with Nigel Godrich? “Well, Nigel at that time was much more of a taskmaster… more British… and coming through the ranks of the producer side. More interested in you hitting the right notes. He definitely added more ‘Nigel’, and now that I went back and listened to the record there’s more ‘Nigel’ on there. He was infatuated with delay pedals and, like, echoplex sounds. I let him, like, do it all over that because I was a little worn out on Pavement, I didn’t put up a fight. There should have been less of that on the album and it probably would have been better.”

He is sat upright now, and warming to his subject. It’s obvious that this is a topic he’s given considerable thought to. “But the good things Nigel did were incredible. He’s a brilliant engineer and some things he added I could never… I mean the sound he gets is unbelievable. I don’t know how he does it, but he definitely is a fucking genius at getting sound. Now Beck also gets a good sound too. His engineer works with Nigel – Darryl, the guy that worked with us, so they know some of those tricks. They’re in the same ballpark without the ‘Nigel’ overload. The difference obviously with Beck is that he’s coming more from an artist’s perspective and he’s a little more sympathetic to what I might want to do. He doesn’t care so much about things being in tune. He doesn’t notice, or it doesn’t bug him. He just kinda hears the whole thing as a fan.”

So Beck is less of a perfectionist than Godrich? “Beck’s a perfectionist definitely sonically, but maybe not tune or tempo. Where Nigel just couldn’t help it, back then. He’d be like ‘That’s out of time’. Once you’ve been down that road with Travis or with Natalie Imbruglia, where things have to be right, it’s hard to say ‘I don’t want that’. I bet he’s changed though, now. I bet he doesn’t care as much about that.”

It’s tempting to wonder whether Malkmus himself, now 45 and naming people like Nick Lowe and Bert Jansch as influences for his new record, is feeling mellow? “I can be. I wouldn’t mind being. Not enough to be played in a coffee shop, unfortunately. I would like to be one of those, like, Sufjan Stevens-type people that is soft and the girls love it, but I haven’t mellowed that much.”

There’s a pause, and then he shrugs. “Not that sensitive, I guess. Not a sensitive boy.” I tell him he’s going to have to be a lot more earnest if he wants that coffee shop airplay. “I’m earnest in my unearnestness. I’m not a ‘let’s talk about our feelings’-type person. I talk about feelings but there’s an undercurrent of darkness in the relationships. I just look for that because I like reading stories by John Updike or Richard Yates. I was always attracted to that. There are a lot of unreliable narrators in these songs. It’s not really me, it’s just a person – it’s like some projection of a dark person. Unreliable narrators are more interesting to me. Some of it is just humour, some feeling. Some unreal, some real. There’s no real answer.”

Updike and Yates are two authors with a clear stamp on his unabashedly literate lyrics, but Malkmus is a writer who has always been more concerned with cadence than literal interpretation. In terms of literary influence he offhandedly remarks that Dostoevsky and F. Scott Fitzgerald are equivalent to The Beatles and The Stones but says he’s more likely to read poetry than novels when writing, particularly post-Beat American poets like Jack Spicer and Lew Welch. “Poetry is something I try to keep in my mind. What would they do? But regardless I know I’m not doing poetry so I’m aware that music is really about that year, so I’ll throw in stuff that’s topical.”

Stephen Malkmus, it seems, still doesn’t see music as life and death. He shrugs, “When music comes out it’s like advertising or a magazine to me. It’s not some big work of art, yerkno?”

I look at him and try to decipher his deadpan delivery. Does he really think music is just ephemera? “I definitely do. I know what turns out to be classic could be… I mean, obviously, some things are more ephemeral than others. It’s like movies which are just total pop because they look really bad thirty years later. You don’t wanna ignore your times or the temporality of it. It’s not some ‘uber-text’. There are some talented poets like Charles Olson who are trying to write for all time, for eternity or something. I like him… even when I don’t understand him… but I wouldn’t try to do that in a pop CD that’s like gonna be in Mojo magazine or something.”

The speed with which he dismisses the ‘pop CD’ makes me wonder whether he thinks Pavement were taken too seriously. He rubs his chin and delivers an answer which suggests that perhaps he’s a little more invested in his work than he’d like to let on: “It’s paradoxical,” he says, “Sometimes you wanna be taken more seriously. You wanna be taken seriously and say that you’re not!”

He laughs. “It’s like Bob Dylan. He’s like [affects Dylanesque whine] ‘You don’t understand, man’, but, yerkno, he’s loving it! Deep in his heart he’s loving the attention. You can see it. He wouldn’t be doing it if he wasn’t getting attention. It’s more important to be loved than ignored. It never got to a point with Pavement where it was so annoying as it did for Bob Dylan, where people are looking through his garbage. Then I would probably be bummed out by it.”

There’s always been a sense, though, that Malkmus has wanted to take a step away from the ritual of rock & roll. “Absolutely,” he agrees, although he knows enough rock iconography to point out my skull ring. “I like your Keith Richards ring,” he says. “He’s one of my favourite guitar players actually. People might not expect that, but he is.”

If making music is just magazines and advertising, what keeps him going? I ask him what his favourite part of the job is: “Probably somewhere in making an album when you’re first listening and you realise you’ve done something that you and your twenty friends think is special, at least. That’s all you can rely on!” he laughs. “It’s in that record producing thing because that’s more final. Shows are really fun, but they’re so temporal. You do it and it was amazing but then it’s gone and there’s no… it could be a sort of a payoff but also you can work so hard on that show and it could be so amazing, more amazing than the album, but you just… no one will ever know, so it’s like this wasted energy. So it’s kinda sad. That’s frustrating and good and just so temporal. So it’s more in that recording time. Also, it’s fun getting positive feedback from people, like: ‘Hey man, I like what you did. We’re friends by proxy because I like your shit and you’d probably like my shit. That’s the most rewarding.” He pauses, then deadpans: “And then the big fat cheque from the music placement in the Guinness ad, that is, like, totally what I’m there for.”

He smiles. “That’s never happened, so I don’t know.” Oh well, I tell him, everybody has to have a dream. Maybe if you knuckle down and fly right you’ll end up in Guinness adverts and get played in coffee shops. “Well, that’s right,” he says. “If I really wanted it I’d probably already have it. I tend to believe that, within reason. That you can get what you really want.”

I get the impression that Malkmus has an uneasy relationship with his success, so it seems worth asking whether he really did ‘want it’? “Not really… on my own terms,” he replies, with just a trace of melancholy. “If I could have done as much work as I did and be Arcade Fire I think I would like it. It’s gotta be fun to be just travelling at that level. Being the headliner, blowing people away and stuff. That must be fun, and I never really did that.”

I think I visibly cringe when he says this. Oh come on, man! Don’t tell me you, Stephen Malkmus, want to be Arcade Fire! For a start, surely the Pavement reunion tour was pretty damn huge? “It was, but it didn’t feel… the moments were of the past, a bit. Maybe sometimes when Pavement was going it felt a little like that, but unfortunately on the rock & roll treadmill once you start doing festivals you’re constantly reminded where your status is…”

I laugh at this, and it turns out that Malkmus has a thing about that classic rock hang-up, the festival hierarchy ego battle: “I was looking at this advert in a magazine for this festival, it looked like a cool festival. It’s one where Björk’s headlining.” Bestival? “Yeah. We’re not playing it this year, but we might next year. I started scanning and I was like ‘we’re gonna be right THERE’,” he jabs the air with his index finger. ‘There’s Graham Coxon, we’re gonna be right… probably two above where his name is, or something, judging by the names… regardless of how good or well-received our album is. That’s where we’re gonna be.’ It’s like, that’s where you stand. It’s pretty funny. Those festival charts are the most incredible class systems. I was thinking about it because there’s this one festival in there that has like James Blunt headlining…” I think he means Guilfest? “Yeah, it’s like… not an elite festival. It’s obviously low money, for the bands. Probably cheap for the punters too, which is good, but it’s definitely like ‘well this festival is in this class, and this one is this way’. There’s enough of them that it’s not like you have just three classes. There are millions of ‘em.”

Stephen Malkmus shakes his head and shrugs in mock amazement. He’s back here on tour in November, and then look out for him on the festival circuit. Spare a thought for where he lands up. He’ll be there somewhere. Right there. Probably two names above Graham Coxon. Not yet a senile genius. No need to reinvent the wheel. Not mellow enough for coffee shops. The rough edge of bourgeois culture. Still finding the whole thing faintly absurd. Still slanted. Still enchanted.

Originally published by Drowned In Sound.

Mark Oliver Everett is walking through Hyde Park to meet me. The man called ‘E’ is currently in the most prolific form of his life, about to release his thirdEels album in just under two years. Then he’ll set off on a world tour that will take in Japan, Australia, Europe and Canada before heading back through the States to his home in California. The sun is shining. God damn right, it’s a beautiful day.

Just as he nears the edge of the park, two policemen accost him. Apparently, they’ve had a report that someone matching his description – beard, cuffed jeans, blue jacket – was staring suspiciously at nearby embassies and hotels. E starts to smile, but they’re not laughing. Before they search him, he digs in his pockets and retrieves his hotel key. “Why would I be staring at my own hotel?” he asks them, baffled. After some discussion, they agree to let him go. Hey man, now you’re really living.

He explains what happened to him as soon as he arrives. “Now I’m on some terrorist watchlist, I think.” He lets a low laugh escape from the thick black fuzz of his beard, but he’s clearly annoyed. “The whole thing was so ludicrous! Someone was telling me that this is a very snobby area. Apparently you’re not allowed to look like me here.” He stares out of the window at the park he’s talking about and shrugs. “I used to enjoy walking around here but I don’t know if I can now. I feel weird about it.”

It is safe to say that this is not the first weird thing that has ever happened to E. It’s not even the first weird thing that’s ever happened to him at this hotel. He was staying here, next door to Kensington Palace, the day Princess Diana died. He was supposed to be promoting his first Eels album, Beautiful Freak, but instead he ended up spending a week watching the masses queue to leave flowers at the gate while the country seemed to grind to a halt. His song ‘Your Lucky Day in Hell’ was deemed to no longer be appropriate for Top of the Pops.

As has been well documented, E has had more than his fair share of grieving to do. While he watched the public outpourings over Diana, he was still reeling from his sister’s suicide. At 19 he was alone when he discovered his father slumped dead at home. Later, he would nurse his mother through a slow, painful and ultimately fatal fight with cancer. On September 11, 2001 his cousin Jennifer was working as a flight attendant on the plane that hit The Pentagon, where his father had once worked. Now, as he prepares to release Tomorrow Morning, the final album in a trilogy which started with 2009’s Hombre Lobo and continued with End Times, he tells me of the sense of urgency that drives him: “I’ve always had that, because of my family history. I’ve always felt that I better strike while I can.”

Having lived through such a litany of misfortune, E’s music has often been wreathed in tragedy. He agrees though that even amongst Eels albums this year’s End Times ranked among the most melancholy. He laughs: “I probably thought, you know, ‘Everyone’s always calling my albums sad – I’ll show them sad!’ I wanted to make the other ones look happy!” He does however take me to task for assuming, in my reviewof End Times, that ‘The Mansions of Los Feliz’ included his own home: “I don’t live in a big mansion!” he says, then thinks for a beat. “Well, I like to think of it as a mansion, but it’s not.”

“After that last one, in my mind, there was only one direction to go. I had to go up!” says E of Tomorrow Morning. “I didn’t want to go any further down,” he laughs again. “I didn’t think that album would be releaseable. It’d be too much!” For E, making an upbeat album brings with it its own problems. He would loathe to produce anything trite. “I think this kind of album is the biggest challenge. It’s the hardest thing to do: to try to do something overtly uplifting and happy-sounding but to do that in a meaningful way.”

As someone who writes such intensely personal music it’s hard to imagine him sitting down to write a dancefloor-filler or stadium anthem. Who does he write for? “I just write for my demographic,” he says with a knowing smile. “No, I just write for myself. You’ve gotta just treat yourself as the audience. I don’t know how else you could do it.”

When he was first signed to a label, as a solo artist, he was in the rare position of signing a deal without having performed his music live. Looking back, he says his formative musical experiences meant it wasn’t so hard to translate his bedroom tapes into the live arena: “It was an interesting experience for me. I grew up as a drummer. I played in a lot of bar bands and stuff in Virginia, but I’d never been a frontman until after my first album came out. Everyone, I think, just expected me to not be a very good live performer because I was this kid making tapes in his closet. It surprised everyone, myself included, that I seemed to have a natural knack for live performing.”

His ability as a performer is complemented by his desire for invention, which ensures that every Eels tour seems fundamentally unlike the last and also to exist separately from his records. “I just don’t like ever to treat a show and an album as the same thing. I treat a show like it’s its own album. It’s its own beast, completely. I understand that that can be frustrating for certain kinds of audience members, but once again I’m just trying to please myself, the audience member, and that’s the kind of artist that I always enjoy going to see. People that switch it up.”

The obvious comparison seems to be with Dylan, one of his great heroes, going electric. “Right, there’s a whole bunch of good examples. I can’t imagine being the kind of person that wants to go see the same thing over and over again. It’s weird though, because there are all sorts of people that have giant careers who do that. Every year people go to their concerts and it sounds exactly like the record. I just don’t get it.”

Which is why he’s so determined to switch it up. I remind him that when I saw Eels a few years ago he was accompanied on stage by a security guard who burst into dance halfway through the set. “That’s right! 2006 was the dancing security guard year. That was fun!” He adds that anyone coming to this year’s world tour should cast their expectations aside. “You should expect nothing, because it’s always a mistake. The thing I always enjoyed the most, when I was a teenager and I’d go to a show, was not knowing what to expect and being surprised in some way. That was my favourite part of it – when that happened. So, it’s smart to not have expectations. I’ve never had expectations about my life or anything, because I learned early on there’s no point in it. If people want to expect a certain thing, and I don’t give them what they expect, I feel like that’s a success!” He chuckles wryly, “But they might feel frustrated by that, so what can I do?”

He says he takes a similar approach to his records, but points out that he doesn’t change things purely for the sake of variety. “I’m not trying to dazzle people with being versatile. I’m not going to make a record that’s in some genre just because I haven’t already. I’m only going to do what naturally comes out of me.” Intriguingly though, he corrects me when I suggest that we can rule out an Eels jazz album: “Well no, that is possible. That could happen.” To be safe, he picks a more obscure example of an unlikely genre: “I’m not going to make a polka record, because I’m not that interested in polka, although that may change some day. But so far, it’s not.” He smiles and glances away: “The jazz record is possible, though.”

At the moment, having completed this trilogy, this cycle of words and music, E is happy to look into a future with no clear path mapped out for him. “For the last couple of years I’ve known that I was doing these three records although I trained myself to get good at not talking about it too soon, because I didn’t want to paint myself into a corner. I knew I might change my mind along the way, and I didn’t want to ‘have’ to do it. But now it’s okay because I’ve seen it through and that’s the end of it. So for the last couple of years everything was kinda mapped out in my mind, but now it’s wide open. I don’t know what happens atall. I don’t know where I’m going next. Which is exciting. After the tour is over, I don’t know what happens next. It’s a place I haven’t been to for a while.”

You shouldn’t expect him to take too long a break. Making music is a compulsion. “For someone like me, there’s a million reasons to do it. It just serves me on so many different levels. I feel so lucky that I get to do it. Also, I think a lot of people who do what I do have an obsessive element to their personality. You kinda have to have that, to be such a factory. A lot of the issues in my life are the opposite of most people’s issues. A lot of people have a problem that they don’t work enough, or have a problem following through their ideas. I have to worry about what I think about because I will probably follow through on it, so I have to be careful what I wish for because I might not want that much work.”

In 2008 he made a documentary about his father, Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives, and came to see that this obsessive streak was perhaps inherited. His father, Hugh Everett III, was a quantum physicist who rarely spoke to his children because he was so wrapped up in developing his Many Worlds Theory. I ask E whether the experience of getting to know his father’s work has affected his own. “I don’t know how that’s affected my work, exactly. Definitely personally it had a big effect on me, and a very good effect. I’m not sure how that relates to the work yet, though. That might not be clear to me for a few more years.”

His mother’s birdwatching seems to have had a more direct influence on him. After ‘I Like Birds’ and ‘Little Bird’, the new record includes a song called ‘I’m a Hummingbird’ and he still has her bird tables at his home in Los Feliz. “That’s where the idea for this new song came from, a hummingbird on my back porch. They’re just so amazing. They must get so tired!”

2008 seemed to be a year of taking stock for E. As well as the documentary about his father, Eels released two compilations, Meet The Eels: Essential Eels and Useless Trinkets and he published his critically-acclaimed memoir Things The Grandchildren Should Know. I ask whether he nows sees that as a cathartic experience, having released a trio of albums in quick succession since then. “It’s strange to do all that stuff that early in your life. I mean, none of us know how long we’re going to live, but usually you write your memoirs when you retire, or whatever, so now I’m in this strange sort of ‘Part 2’ feeling of my life. It’s kinda unusual.”

As he enters his life’s second act he’s still as determined as ever to do things his own way. “It’s the sickness of the times we live in now: the way that everything is made by committee. Everthing has a focus group. It’s just a horrible way to make things. The age of the auteur is quickly dying. You look at the film world. All the genius film-makers wouldn’t be able to make movies, the way things work today. It would be impossible for anyone who had a strong artistic vision to see it through.”

When I ask about the artists he admires, it’s “auteurs” that he turns to while admitting that his tastes are “the usual suspects”. “I just feel like, if you’re going to do anything, why not go to the best? If you’re going to watch movies, watch Stanley Kubrik movies. If you’re going to listen to music, listen to Bob Dylan or The Beatles.”

E is also doggedly resistant to the commodification of his music. “I think I’m starting to look pretty old-fashioned about that, because everybody does it now, but I don’t think that means it’s the right thing to do. I can understand a brand new band doing it, because it might be one of the only ways for people to hear their music, but I have an ethical issue with what the music’s about. It’s just important to me that the music means something, you know? I just feel like, if it’s selling a product, other than itself, it becomes meaningless.”

His refusal to sell out is also motivated by his desire to build a body of work that he can feel proud of. “You want to try and look back on your life at the end and look at the CD shelf and feel good about what you have sitting there.” He pauses, then laughs. “If you have your own CDs on your shelf, that is!”

For me, it’s this sense of perspective that makes E’s music so life-affirming. Gazing out of the hotel window we have a clear view across to the Royal Albert Hall. Things The Grandchildren Should Know concludes with a moving passage about the sense of validation he felt playing his songs there, a feeling of catharsis that he’d managed to turn every shitty hand he’d ever been dealt into music that creates a “sense of community”. He also wrote that being exposed to so much death and grief throughout his life had changed his whole worldview: “I realized that people probably liked to look at the vast horizon of the beach and the endless sky at night because it took them out of their daily routine and reminded them about the bigger things. But I never seemed to stop thinking about these bigger things.”

What makes him such a perceptive songwriter is precisely that understanding of the bigger things. Although he wears it lightly, that burden must still weigh heavily on his soul, as much a curse as a blessing. Talking to E, I’m reminded of Douglas Adams. I ask him whether he knows The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy? “Yeah?” he replies.

I start to recount the story of the Total Perspective Vortex. The Total Perspective Vortex is the most horrible form of torture any sentient being can be subjected to and it was invented by a man to annoy his wife. She would nag him for having no sense of proportion, so he decided to invent a machine that would illustrate exactly what having a sense of proportion means. When you’re placed inside the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire, unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says simply, “You are here.” The machine destroyed his wife’s brain, but the man was comforted by the fact that he had been right and she had been wrong. As Adams wrote, the machine proved that: “In an infinite universe, the one thing sentient life cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.”

E laughs loudly. He pauses for a second, then shrugs. “Yeah. It’s true. Every once in a while you’ve got to remind yourself how insignificant you are.”

Originally published by Drowned In Sound.

‘Who in the hell is Tom Jones?’ spat Charles Bukowski. It’s a good question. The Tom Jones he wrote about in Hollywood is a slick Vegas showman, “his shirt is open and the black hairs on his chest show. The hairs are sweating.” The Tom Jones I meet is a white-haired Welshman about to release an album of blues and gospel so out of character that the vice-president of his own record label called it a “sick joke”. So just who in the hell does Tom Jones think he is?

He was billed alongside The Beatles and The Stones, partied with Elvis and Sinatra and dueted with everyone from Janis Joplin to Ray Charles, but in the popular imagination he’s festooned with knickers, his career built on sex appeal. Now, on Praise & Blame, he’s traded sex for death. There is a lot of mortality on Praise & Blame, and a lot of God. What’s happening here, Mr Jones? He looks at me and turns his palms towards me. “Time’s getting shorter,” he says.

“Now that I’m seventy, I know I haven’t got as much time left as I did when I was thirty, or forty, or fifty, or sixty. I still want to record as much as I can, but when you don’t have that much time left you think about it more.” Age has given him a sense of urgency, I suggest. “Exactly! You think, let’s knuckle down and let’s do some stuff that I want to do.”

It turns out that what Tom Jones wants to do is cover Bob Dylan and John Lee Hooker and a host of standards drawn from the deep well of the American South. “I’d heard a lot of them before, from different artists. I knew them. ‘Run On’, I knew the Elvis Presley version. We tried it in the same key as he did it in, but I sounded too much like him. I’m not going to play it if we’re not doing anything differently, so we put it in a higher key.”

One thing you realise quickly talking to Tom Jones is that he really, really loves singing. When he talks about it, a boyish passion spills out of him. He knows these songs inside out, every nuance. “I said rather than have voices for the answers, I’ll sing the whole thing. It made it different from what I’d done before, from when other people had done it. I tried to do the same thing with all the songs, really. One or two are similar, like Johnny Cash with ‘Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down’, but still we put more of a beat to it. Johnny Cash’s was a little slower.”

This mention of Johnny Cash is telling. It has been suggested that Praise & Blame is Jones’ attempt to replicate the success of Cash’s American Recordings. Was that a conscious decision? “Well, there are comparisons – because I’m seventy now, and because some of the songs are the same, and the stripped-down nature of it because of what Rick Rubin did with Johnny Cash and Neil Diamond.” The difference, he says, is in their voices. “With him, he was at the end of his… well, as it turned out, the end of his life… but certainly at the end of his recording career. He had difficulty in doing that stuff, and some of it added to the feel, because he was struggling with it. But with me – I’m not struggling with it.”

Jones is proud of his extraordinary voice, and it lends itself well to this music. Gospel is in his bones. “I’ve always liked 50s rock’n’roll music, and rock’n’roll came from gospel and blues and was a marriage of all those things in the South, in the States. I like rockabilly, boogie-woogie stuff. I like gospel not only because of the lyrics but because of the feel of the songs.”

He says he didn’t record these songs earlier because record labels were in thrall to Tom Jones the Sex Bomb: “I’ve wanted to do gospel for a long time, but most record labels want you to do pop records. Any time you sign with a label, it’s ‘Well, I’d like to do…’ ‘Yeah, we will, we’ll get to that, but meanwhile give us a hit.’ Island Records, they initially wanted hymns or songs for Christmas, so I thought that maybe this is my chance to get to those gospel songs.”

Island’s enthusiasm and decision to team him with Ethan Johns, who’s produced the likes of Kings of Leon and Ryan Adams, makes it even more surprising that their vice-president David Sharpe attacked the album in an email that was leaked to the press. His complaint was precisely that Jones was singing “hymns”, not pop songs. Jones is fiercely protective of his songs, and if the leak was part of a marketing stunt then he certainly wasn’t in on it: “I read it on the plane coming over,” he says. “One of the stewards had an English paper and he said ‘There’s a spread about your album’, so I said ‘Oh, really! Let me have a look!’ I read it and I thought ‘Who the fuck is this?’ First of all I didn’t know who the guy was. I still don’t. I only deal with the people who are involved in making the record. So, first thing when I got in, I said, ‘Who is this guy? What does he do?’ Apparently he’s one of the financial guys. I said, ‘What the fuck’s he on about?’ You can’t go condemning a record. It’s terrible for people to say, ‘Well, maybe Tom has made a mistake if the record company don’t even like it.’ I mean, that’s what people are going to read – ‘cause that’s what I read! They’ve been apologising to me ever since, but they still haven’t come up with why it was done. What is the point of that? I don’t get it. As far as I’m concerned there was no plan to get a controversy. It’s negative, I think, and misleading.”

Misleading certainly, because despite the spiritual themes these are by no means hymns. Is Jones himself religious? “I’ve always been a God fearing person,” he replies. “I pray every night, before I go to sleep. I’m always aware – aware that there’s something.”

It’s a deeply introspective album, never more so than on his version of Dylan’s ‘What Good Am I?’ Is Tom Jones really a Dylan fan? “Yeah! I listen to him more now, or I have done in the last twenty years, than I did before. When I first started recording, even before that, I’ve always liked voices. I listened to a lot of ‘singers’. I wasn’t much interested in ‘Did he write the song or didn’t he?’ In those days, I just went with what it sounded like. I wasn’t so much of a fan of Dylan then because I didn’t particularly like the way he was delivering them, whether he wrote them or not. The more I’ve listened to them, the more I’ve appreciated them.”

So what drew him to ‘What Good Am I’? “I wanted songs that were meaningful, I wanted songs that said something. Even on the up-tempo songs, like ‘Strange Things Happen Every Day’, there’s things that’ll make you think. They’re important songs. So that’s why I liked that one of Bob Dylan’s. I mean, I’d like to do an album of Dylan’s stuff, he’s written some great songs. Ethan thought, ‘How are we going to treat this?’ It was his idea to sing it in a lower key than I would ordinarily. ‘Don’t sing it out,’ he said, ‘Try and hold it, even when you go up.’ When I start to sing higher, my voice opens up, but here I controlled it. It took a few takes to get to where we did, but it was his idea for the arrangement, which I thought was great. Slow it down and sing it low. Breathy.”

He’s back enthusing about singing, but I want to know why he thinks he’s been so successful interpreting songs he hasn’t written. Does he have an actor’s instinct? “That’s exactly how I approach it. The sound of my voice – there’s a certain quality to my voice that sort of defines me. That’s the first thing, the sound of it, but then I listen to the lyrics and I want to get into it. Lyrics are very important to me, no matter what the song is. I’ve always liked lyrics, and when I hear an interesting lyric – that could be ‘Sex Bomb’, if you like. If you listen to ‘Sex Bomb’, the verses are really clever. There are some really good things in there. Like ‘Delilah’ – “I felt the knife in my hand” – it paints a picture.”

Thinking about the darker subject matter of Praise & Blame, it’s worth noting that Jones has been a proponent of the ‘murder ballad’ since early in his career: “With ‘Delilah’, everybody knows the chorus, but you’re thinking about the knife and the fella killing the girl, or ‘The Green, Green Grass of Home’, where’s he’s in jail.”

Jones talks about his career, his hits and his life like a man who can’t quite believe his luck. He was 24 in 1964, scraping a living as frontman for Tommy Scott and the Senators, listening to Jerry Lee Lewis records and recording unsuccessful demos with Joe Meek. Then he met Gordon Mills, who became his manager. His debut single ‘Chills and Fever’ failed to chart, but when Mills wrote ‘It’s Not Unusual’ for Sandy Shaw, Jones recorded the demo and managed to persuade them both to let him release it instead. He never looked back: “The record was so big, all of a sudden, like a few months. I recorded the song at the end of ’64, then it came out at the beginning of January ’65, and it was number one on March 1st. Then it went worldwide.”

On one particularly memorable bill in 1965, Jones appeared at the NME Poll-Winners Concert alongside The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, Dusty Springfield and The Animals. What on earth could it have felt like to be a part of that scene? Did it feel like something special was going on even then? “Oh, definitely! I mean, The Beatles opened the door. Before that it was always American music. British music was cover versions of American records. Then The Beatles came along. When I was here in London at that time you felt it – that this was it. American acts were coming over and they wanted to go to Carnaby Street. It had moved from Memphis or Motown to London.”

But like he said, he’d gone worldwide: he broke America instantly: “I think I did my first Ed Sullivan show in April of ’65. I met Elvis the same year. It was unbelievable!” Surely it was overwhelming. How do you readjust to your landscape shifting so permanently? “It was just mind-boggling. It goes from wanting to prove what I could do, singing-wise. When I got onto Top of the Pops and met all the bands they were going ‘Jesus! You’ve got a great voice!’ and I was like, ‘Wow! I’m proving it! I’m doing it!’ It was buzzy. The Beatles and The Stones were at the top of their game – and then Elvis Presley! And Frank Sinatra! In the same year! Mind-boggling!”

Jones is beaming as he tells the tale, that note of incredulity still in his voice. He shows me the way he hunched up shyly when he first had his picture taken with Elvis Presley. The way Elvis posed. “It was great, and you don’t get used to it, but it becomes a part of your life, the more you do it. Then in the Seventies when I had my own TV show and I was doing duets with Jerry Lee Lewis and…”

He’s on a roll now, but he was on a roll back then too. He was safe enough for middle America to grant him his own television show, but edgy enough to demand that his guests were his rock’n’roll heroes. The guest list reads like a roll-call of Seventies celebrity: Richard Pryor, Johnny Cash, Janis Joplin, Peter Sellers, Ray Charles, The Who, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young – but the name of the show was This is Tom Jones. “It was fantastic! I was pushing for rock’n’roll acts, you know. It was made by ABC Television in the States and they wanted more ‘safe’ acts, they wanted it to be a TV hit on the ratings. Rock’n’roll, even then, in ’69 still hadn’t really been accepted.”

Hang on a minute there, Tom. You were pretty ‘safe’ yourself. That’s why they hired you! “Well, I was recording available material. Not being a songwriter I had to rely on what was coming in. ‘What’s New, Pussycat?’ came from that. Burt Bacharach wanted me to do it. I was thinking ‘I want to do more rhythm and blues, soul’, but things kept popping up – it’s like I was saying with the record companies – ‘We’ll get to that…’ Meanwhile, Big Burt Bacharach wants me to do this song for this Woody Allen film! So yeah, some things I did people would think it was towards middle-of-the-road type stuff, but if anybody came to see me live in those days I was doing more soul music than anything else.”

The advantage of being ‘safe’ in the network’s eyes was that he had the power to open the door for people he loved to get on television. That included his hero, Jerry Lee Lewis. “I’d been a fan ever since ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’. Elvis had come out with ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, which was the first major hit, so everybody was going, ‘Wow! Elvis is a freak of nature, a white guy singing like that’, and I said, ‘Well that’s gotta be other people! He can’t be the only one, surely!’ So when ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ came out that was it. It’s a Southern thing – White people grew up with Black people, and it was all rubbing off, you know what I mean? Elvis definitely came out with a unique sound though. The sound of his voice was… phew! In terms of the show, I was getting my way – as I say, they wanted Robert Goulet and other people that you probably don’t know, mainstream America – so I’m saying, ‘I want Jerry Lee Lewis!’ and they’re going
‘Jerry Lee Lewis?’ I said, ‘If you want me to do this, you have to do that.’ I was pleased that it was happening – and the guests were thanking me! Jerry Lee thanked me for getting him back on TV!”

Jones is still pulling in the crowds. His low-key Latitude set to showcase Praise & Blame saw disappointed fans being turned away, recalling memories of the rush to his set at Glastonbury last year: “When I went on and I was singing, I could see these kids coming in, ‘cause they weren’t all around the stage at that point, but I could see them coming over and running and I thought ‘Jesus Christ! This is great!’ I loved it!”

Bukowski called him a “cardboard man”. Bukowski was wrong on that count. He may have played ‘safe’ for much of his career, but there’s a real depth to Tom Jones, and on Praise & Blame a newfound sense of perspective. Now in his fifth decade as a professional singer he still has the ability to surprise. Then again, there have always been those who saw a little more in him. Among the devoted viewers of This is Tom Jones was a young Tim Burton, who remembered the show when he came to write Mars Attacks!. “He came to see me do a show in LA and said, ‘I’m writing this film and I want you to be in it,’” Jones chuckles. “He said, ‘I thought to myself, if anybody can save the world it’s Tom Jones!”

Originally published by Drowned In Sound.

Mark Mothersbaugh is showing me his impression of Sid Vicious. He’s standing next to a coffee table, scanning the room and sliding the lid of a coffee pot towards the edge with his fingertips. It teeters for a moment, then falls. He explains: “When The Sex Pistols played their last show in San Francisco, Devo had played a punk club the night before. We slept in the offices of a magazine called ‘Search and Destroy’ and after The Sex Pistols show they came over there to party with us. Sid was with Nancy. There’d be a bottle of beer on a table, and he’d be going like this. Looking around. Then he’d push it a little closer. Keep looking around. Then he’d push it over: CRASH! Then he’d look around and realise nobody gave a shit, so then he went and did it again somewhere else. He did it three or four times and then he realised he wasn’t gonna get anybody upset, so he quit.”

Devo were never a band who smashed things. Mothersbaugh liked Vicious, liked that he was true to what he stood for, but Devo eschewed nihilism. They were playing club shows in 1978 surrounded by punk upstarts, but they had long since decided that rebellion didn’t lead anywhere. They had witnessed the starkest imaginable demonstration. On 4th May 1970, founding members Mothersbaugh, Gerald Casale and Bob Lewis were students at Kent State University when the Ohio National Guard shot dead four unarmed students at a protest against the invasion of Cambodia.

Devo’s art still ripples with the impact of that seismic day: “The thing that we took away from that is that rebellion is obsolete. We came to the opinion that rebellion and nihilism weren’t really the way to affect change in our culture. We came to the conclusion that the best way to affect change was through subversion. Who really affects culture? It seemed like it was Madison Avenue.”

So on Something for Everybody, their first new album in twenty years, Devo tell us that they’ve taken the dark arts of the advertising industry and applied them to their music. ‘88% Focus Group Approved’ declares the sticker on the CD case, after the band asked fans to vote for the track listing on their website. Their iconic red Energy Domes are now blue, another decision by focus group. It’s worryingly reminiscent of the ‘Most Wanted’ artwork by the graphic artists Komar and Melamid who took a focus group approach to creating art and found that what people want is banal blue landscapes.

Fortunately, the music on Something for Everybody is anything but banal. Somehow, despite the intervening years, Devo still sound ahead of their time. Meanwhile all this stuff about focus groups is just part of Devo’s Dadaist satire, isn’t it? “Yeah, and maybe no”, says Motherbaugh. For a start, they really did work with the advertising agency Mother LA: “We talked Warner Brothers into hiring an ad agency for us. Three years ago, if you’d have said ‘In 2010 you’re going to put out a record on Warner Brothers Records’, I’d have said ‘You, my friend, are hallucinating. There is no possible way I would do that. There is not one compelling reason.’ Somehow, in the last year I went and met them and it was interesting to hear them say: ‘We know we’re going to be obsolete in five years, we know that record companies as they exist now are useless and needless, but we’re going to put one last effort behind seeing if we can redefine what a record company is.’ I thought that sounded intriguing.”

He finds it quaintly amusing that Warner Brothers still insist on releasing “unnecessary” CDs: “I mean, okay, it’s a little souvenir, but most people are still going to get the music from the internet.” Mothersbaugh has even less time for that last resort of the desperate label, the re-release ‘with bonus material!’: “The record companies already got you for a third time! After you bought the records, they’ve got you to buy the cassette of your favourite album, and then they got you to buy the CD of your favourite album. Then because they could, they threw in other crap that wasn’t part of the original presentation. That’s like saying ‘Well, when I painted that painting that’s what I originally did, but now that I can I’m going to add some other crap on the side that wasn’t there originally.’ All of a sudden the original intention has been perverted for the sake of a record company trying to make an extra couple of bucks trying to sell one more version of a record.”

Mothersbaugh seems to be enjoying watching the death throes of the record industry, but then he’s been predicting it for years. He knew that labels were out of touch with the MTV generation when he had to convince them it was worthwhile spending money on music videos, but their self preservation instinct soon kicked in. “I thought that ‘sound and vision’ was going to be the death of rock’n’roll. I thought I’d never have to listen to another Rod Stewart album, because by the time the Eighties get here it’s going to be visual artists who also make music, or musicians who also do visual art, and it will eliminate all those dinosaurs that were out there. I was wrong. What really happened was record companies took a look at what bands like Devo were doing in making these films and they said ‘We need to do that for Van Halen!’ They became moronic within like five minutes. The whole concept became subverted and was assimilated by the status quo of the rock machine, and it allowed the music industry, as it had existed for thirty or forty years, to hang in there for another ten or fifteen years.”

The internet is changing all that, and Devo have embraced it in a way that it’s difficult to imagine many of their contemporaries doing. When Mothersbaugh talks about the internet it is with the fervour of a true believer: “The internet has already so radically changed the way artists create art, the way artists present art, the way people view art, the way people perceive art. I think YouTube is a much more successful version of what ‘sound and vision’ should be than MTV. It’s not about budgets. It’s not about Michael Jackson paying $175,000 to do ‘Thriller’, or Madonna spending $190,000 to do her last video, or Lady Gaga doing the most incredible spectacle ever. I’m not saying that any of those were necessarily bad videos. I mean, those were great. ‘Thriller’ was great. Lady Gaga is really talented and does really good work. I’m just saying that the field has been leveled because of YouTube and access to technology. Artists have been empowered. All the record companies are wringing their hands and going ‘No-one is buying our beautiful records any more!’ I say ‘Hoody-hoo-hoo! You made that work for a really long time, and either we applaud you for your cunningness or shame on you for keeping people captive for so long and being able to dictate what we were allowed to listen to and to watch’. Now, you go to YouTube and the most important thing is a good idea: something that’s great and somebody who is talented at delivering it.”

Devo were making homemade videos to showcase their great ideas long before YouTube came along. They filmed ‘The Truth About De-Evolution’, a music video for their tracks ‘Secret Agent Man’ and ‘Jocko Homo’ in 1974, four years before they released their debut album. The success of that video led to Neil Young inviting them to appear in his experimental film ‘Human Highway’. Having initially dismissed it, Mothersbaugh is pleased by how “weird” the film remains on repeated viewings. “Neil Young crushed my playpen! Half of the score is him fooling around with synths. He’s an interesting guy! He was really interested in The Sex Pistols. His half of the score sounds like Gary Numan to me. My half sounds like Pee-wee Herman.”

It is his work as a soundtrack composer, for the likes of ‘Pee-wee Herman’, ‘Rugrats’ and last year’s ‘Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs’ that has kept Mothersbaugh occupied in the years since Devo’s last record. Film scores are not just a way to pay the rent, however. His scores for Wes Anderson, in particular ‘Rushmore’, ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’ and ‘The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou’ have been brilliant, at turns playful, touching and just plain hilarious. Mothersbaugh says there are plans to work with Anderson again, once he’s overcome his transatlantic separation from the anglophile director. Once again, he evangelises the ability of the internet to provide the solution: “Now there’s technology where we can be on screen talking, but we can also put the movie in the top corner of the screen and both touch it. He can make marks on the film and I can take music and try it out. It’s like being in the same building but we’re just on each side of a plate of glass!”

Mothersbaugh’s obvious delight at the opportunities new technology presents his art, and his constant striving to break new ground, arguably sits somewhat uneasily alongside Devo’s decision to play a ‘Don’t Look Back’ performance of their debut album Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! last year. Mothersbaugh agrees that it was a “contra-intuitive” decision, but one that proved to be “a learning experience”. He says that the concept behind the shows didn’t make sense to him until they did it: “Onstage, playing it that night, I said ‘What a brilliant idea’, because I realised that I could think of at least two dozen albums that I would love to hear the artists play Song 1, Side 1 all the way through to the end of Side 2, because that’s the way I experienced that music when I first experienced it, and that became the imprint of my memories and my best experiences. If I could hear the Ziggy Stardust album from Song 1 all the way to the song on Side 2, I’d die and go to heaven. There’s at least a half dozen Stones or Beatles albums I’d feel the same way about.”

They resisted the initial desire, however, to take a similarly atavistic approach to the new album: “When we first started I had this kinda romantic notion, ‘Hey! Let’s get the same gear we used for album one and let’s go in a room and get a four track recorder and let’s do it the same way we did the first album. Everybody was not so sure about that, but we tried it for about a month and I was the only one pushing it. Then I started thinking about why the other guys weren’t into it and why did it not seem right, and I realised we did nine albums and they weren’t like that. We didn’t go back to the first album every time. By the time we had our fourth album, Lynn drum machines had come out. We got a Fairlight by the time our sixth album came out. We were always embracing technology, so it was kinda ingenuous to decide that we’re going to artificially pretend that we’re 22 again.”

So what has changed since they were 22? “If you see a Devo live show you’ll be like, ‘Oh, they all learned how to play their instruments over the last thirty years!’ You can’t be what you were, but I think it’s a logical progression.” When Mothersbaugh talks about Devo, he doesn’t seem to talking about it as a band. He seems more like he’s talking about a hilarious art experiment that he can’t quite believe he’s still getting away with. “I don’t think all of us would call ourselves musicians, really. We were influenced by the artists of the time when we were starting the band. It was Andy Warhol who I really paid attention to because he was a painter, and he was a photographer, and he was a silkscreen artist, and he was a fashion designer and all these different things. What I took from it was that technology was plastic and that it was available for an artist to use whatever fit his needs. There was no restriction to just music or sound. You could be a visual artist and an audio artist at the same time. You didn’t have to be in one category. We thought with Devo we were going to be Akron, Ohio’s version of Andy Warhol’s Factory. I remember early on thinking that Devo wasn’t even going to be us as band members. I thought we were going to hire people as our little agitprop groups and they could go out and be Devo. We thought we could have like five Devos out at once, if we were that successful!”

A version of this was almost realised with Devo 2.0, a “kinda flawed” collaboration with Disney which saw children covering Devo songs. Wait! A collaboration with Disney? Aren’t these the same guys who sued McDonalds for using their hats on a Happy Meal toy? Mothersbaugh can’t help but laugh. “It was definitely a subversive way to infiltrate the minds of young kids that maybe someday would find out about Devo 1.0 and be curious.” In fact, Devo have never been too worried about letting their art be used by corporations. ‘Whip It’ alone has appeared in advertisements for Twix, Pringles, Jeep, Taco Bell and Swiffer dusters. Mothersbaugh jokes: “I could do a reel of them all, and by the end of it you’d say ‘This is the band De-Ho’”. I get the impression he sees each one as a victory, an infiltration of the mainstream by Devo’s own brand of weirdness and something his hero would have firmly approved of: “I met Andy Warhol a few times and I think if he were alive he’d love where we were taking things. It’s blurring the lines between pop and fine art, and fine art and commercial art.”

Devo never smashed things because they never needed to: they do rebellion their own way. Their prophecy of de-evolution may have been proved right by a lowbrow media intent on cultural homogeneity, but simultaneously the rise of the internet has created a new space for artists like Devo to thrive in, a base from which to launch their assaults on the establishment. “If I was a kid now I think it would be a great time to be starting off as an artist. I think there are so many possibilities if you want to be an artist who creates visual or sound art,” Mothersbaugh concludes. “I feel like we may be more in our time than we were back in the Seventies.”

Originally published by Drowned In Sound.

When Charlotte Gainsbourg was 12 she made her musical debut dueting with her father, Serge, on a still notorious single called ‘Lemon Incest’. As an actress, she appeared last year as the unrelentingly sexually violent lead in Lars von Trier’s ‘Antichrist’. Hers is a career that has always playfully shrugged off social mores with an air of measured provocation, but then what else would you expect from someone whose parents breathed ‘Je t’aime… moi non plus’ to each other?

I wasn’t sure whether these calculated controversies would be delicate topics to broach in conversation, but I needn’t have worried. Gainsbourg turns out to be charmingly ebullient and engaging whether she’s talking about her father, her film career or her own intriguing musical journey.

It began with her first record, called ‘Charlotte for Ever’ in France but known to the rest of the world as ‘Lemon Incest’ after the controversial single she recorded two years prior. It was released when she was just 14, twenty years before she would record her second, ‘5:55’. Looking back, she says the intervening years distance her from those songs. “It’s very separate. It’s like being a different person. The memory I cherish is recording ‘Lemon Incest’. That was another time, I was twelve and it was on a record of my father’s, Love on the Beat. It was my first experience and it was very magical, but the record I did with him was done so quickly. He did everything, so I didn’t really have an influence on anything. I’m very thankful that I had that experience with him, but I didn’t talk about the lyrics with him. He didn’t work that way. He wrote the songs and I recorded in a week and it was done. It’s very, very far away and very immature, in my head.”

She has just released her third album, IRM, a collaboration with Beck named for the French translation for the MRI scan. It is anything but immature. In 2007, Gainsbourg suffered a brain haemorrhage in a water-skiing accident and as she lay in the metal tube for scans, the sound of the machine accompanied her contemplation of mortality. No surprises, then that the sound found its way on to her album in the form of sample lifted from the internet.

She says now, however, that there was never a conscious decision to theme the album. “The idea was important to me, but I didn’t do the album thinking ‘I’m going to talk about this experience I’ve had and the MRI’, it just very naturally came and I didn’t talk to Beck that much about it.”

She must have talked to Beck about something, though, because although IRM is billed as a Charlotte Gainsbourg solo album, the music and lyrics were written predominantly by Beck. What did she tell him she wanted? “At the beginning, I really didn’t know. When he asked me what sound I wanted or if I had a precise thing in mind, I didn’t. I wanted to explore things with him and I wanted to try different stuff.” But the accident played a part in that? “What I had in my head at the time was not the accident itself, but the memories and a fragile state of mind and I think that’s what he understood. He wrote all the lyrics, I just came up with titles and song ideas and words here and there, but not more than that. He was able to really understand what I had in my head.”

Going exploring with Beck may sound like an exciting way to make music, but inevitably not every roll of the dice pays off. She laughs as she recalls a few of the missteps along the way. “We tried a rap song that was quite terrible, which was my fault. Then we did a disco song, we tried all sorts of things. We had fun.”

Building that intuitive working relationship meant working together closely at Beck’s home studio, a culture shock compared to the more collaborative approach she took recording 5:55 with Air and Jarvis Cocker in Paris. “I was alone with Beck – I mean, there was a sound engineer there with us – but the discussions were more intimate. Then the fact that it wasn’t in Paris, so it was away from my home and away from any kind of references that I had. 5:55 was done in a studio in Paris, which was very close to what I had experienced with my father. This time it was in Beck’s house.” Was that an isolating experience? “Yes, being in Los Angeles I felt completely isolated, sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a very bad way but it helped for all sorts of moods. The whole thing was really very different. It was the same thing, though, of working for a very long time, maybe a year and half. That was the same with Air, because I wanted to be able to continue doing films. That was quite nice, being able to go back and forth and taking a bit of distance.”

The film that she was going off to film during the making of IRM was Lars von Trier’s ‘Antichrist’. Gainsbourg won the Best Actress award at Cannes for her performance as a woman who becomes more violent and unhinged as the film goes on. Surely such an intense performance must have been hard to leave behind when she returned to music? “It did have an importance,” she concedes, “but just in the mood. I didn’t bring back anything about the subject of the film. But about the experience and the intensity of the shoot that I had been through, yes, I think I wasn’t entirely ‘over it’ when I got back to the music with Beck. I had to talk about the shoot and what I had gone through. Also, because it was so unreal. I only had the memory of the shoot. I didn’t have any of the images, I didn’t know what the film would be like, so it was completely abstract. It was quite vivid in my mind and I needed to talk about it, so it influenced the kind of helpless mood I was in afterwards.”

A film with a more obvious influence on her musical career would be Todd Haynes’ ‘I’m Not There’, in which she played the artist wife of Heath Ledger’s Robbie Clark, just one of the film’s splinters of Bob Dylan. She contributed a cover of ‘Just Like a Woman’ to the film’s soundtrack and says the film was a dream for a Dylan devotee like her. “It was an incredible film to do, and I’m very emotional about it today because Heath Ledger’s dead and the whole thing was so strange. But as an experience it was just wonderful to be able to be inhabited by that music which I had listened to really all my life. Just being able to play scenes with the music is quite rare, and it’s so helpful, you’re just compelled to go towards the music.”

Performing with music is something she’ll be getting used to now, as for the first time in her life she’s decided to play live. She says she didn’t tour 5:55 because she was intimidated by seeing “incredible” performances by Radiohead, Fiona Apple, and the French singer-songwriter Camille. This year she overcame her nerves to complete a short tour of America, including a stop at Coachella. On the 22nd June, she brings her tour to London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire, and she returns in July to play the Sunday at Latitude. She’d previously mentioned Grizzly Bear as one of her current favourites and sounds delighted when I point out that she’ll be on the bill with them there. Coachella was her first festival experience but it gave her a taste for them. “It was very exciting, and so new. To be able to experience something new at my age, and have such discoveries – the whole experience was really thrilling and at the same time, kind of nerve-wracking.”

This seems to be the mantra by which Gainsbourg pushes her career forward. She enjoys nothing more than finding that space in which she can provoke discussion, thought and controversy, even if her nerves are jangling as she does it. “It’s terrible to have to juggle with that fear all the time but that’s what gives me enough pleasure to want to do it and to continue.”

Originally published by Drowned In Sound.

Anyone with a passing knowledge of the Red Bull company could be forgiven for thinking that their raison d’être is, firstly, to sell caffeinated soft drinks and, secondly, to sell more caffeinated soft drinks. Apparently this is not the case. The Red Bull company exists to rock out, party hard and give up-and-coming young musicians wings. At least that’s the impression their press release gave me. I had come to a nondescript building near London Bridge to find out what sort of musicians would sign up to be part of a rock brand.

I found myself stood in the lobby of the Red Bull Music Academy. Each year the Academy hand-picks sixty young musicians from all over the world to come together and make music, and it can count the likes of Mr Hudson, GoldieLocks and Flying Lotus among its alumni. A different city plays host each time, and the last three have been held in Melbourne, Toronto and Barcelona respectively. This year, it came to London.

It came, specifically, to a spacious building on Tooley Street. Bought to house Red Bull’s new London HQ, it was first transformed into a musical playground that looked like it had been designed by Nathan Barley. There were brightly coloured sculptures that resembled those toy car rides you see outside arcades. There were Macs sat in the cafe loaded with GarageBand. There was a piano with all the wires pulled out into bushy eyebrows. It looked as if someone was trying to show the guts being ripped out of music, but it seemed rude to mention this to the pleasant PR guy showing me round.

As he talked, I became increasingly embarrassed of my own cynicism. Reading Naomi Klein’s ‘No Logo’ had taught me all about ‘cool hunting’, corporations piggy-backing on the talent and creativity of young artists to boost their own sales, and it seemed pretty obvious that that was what was going on here. But as he showed me the recording studio fitted out with one of Rammstein’s old mixing desks, the basement rehearsal space and the storeroom filled with every kind of instrument or music-creating gadget you could dream of, along with plenty of private rooms in which to experiment, I began to see why competition was so fierce to get a place here. The glaring omission from it all was the Red Bull logo. There were plenty of cans about, but elsewhere the branding was always subtle and understated and the PR guy was at pains to point out that the Academy’s participants were given access to the facilities with no strings attached. They weren’t asked to hand over rights to their music or to make it a certain way. They weren’t even actually required to make any music at all. If this is selling out, it can never have tasted so good.

I wanted to find out how the artists felt about the promised land they’d found themselves in so I left the PR guy and found a 20-year-old Mexican girl going by the name of Teri Gender-Bender. Teri is the singer and songwriter in a band called Le Butcherettes and is the most energetic human being I have ever met. She carries herself like a natural rock star and instantly begins telling me self-mythologising tales of onstage excess. Meeting her, I’m even more baffled about the fact that, in her words, “music, and Red Bull, have brought us together.” She does have an off-brand confession: “I haven’t had one Red Bull. I don’t drink caffeine.”

I ask her how she feels about the Academy, and she says:

“It’s amazing. There’s a lot of investment in computers and stuff. It’s like a taste of heaven.” At the same time, she’s aware that she finds herself in an odd situation: a self-described punk-rocker being supported by a soft-drink company: “It’s ironic, in a way, because the history of punk rock is rebelling against the White Man’s industry, the White Man’s market. But the White Man’s market is also helping music. It’s crazy.”

She says she doesn’t think about how she’s going to make a living out of music in the age of Free, so I ask her how she’d feel about writing a song for Red Bull.

“I don’t know if it’s ‘selling out’. If you’re going to sell your soul to rock’n’roll, at least try to take advantage of it. I know it sounds weird. People try to make us feel bad for doing something that has to do with big stuff like Coca-Cola or Red Bull, but if Red Bull asked me to do a song for them I would do it because they’re doing this for me. Maybe I wouldn’t do it for anyone else. I’d just have to feel comfortable with it. I don’t drink caffeine, but I like what they stand for, which is why I would do it. If it’s selling out then cool. At least I’m going to get bread, get fed and I’m going to give milk to my children. Everything’s a business nowadays”

Jorge Read agrees. He’s a DJ from the Dominican Republic who calls the Academy “a dream come true.” He tells me:

“It’s incredible, man. They pay for your trip, they pay for your hotel, they pay everyone who works here, they pay for everything. It’s sixty people, two terms, a big fucking huge building with all the equipment, drivers, cars, events. It’s such a massive project.”

Unsurprisingly he’s all for Red Bull supporting struggling artists who’d never otherwise have access to this calibre of studio equipment. He’s not going to look a gift horse in the mouth, and reminds me of the lack of corporate branding going on. “You can go through the building and you don’t see one Red Bull sign. Everyone walks by and is like ‘What is this place?’”

As well as the access to equipment and all-expenses-paid lifestyle, one of the attractions of the Academy is the private lecture series they run, featuring established musicians and industry figures. I sit in on a talk by Pedro Winter, the guy behind Ed Banger records. Among the anecdotes about hanging out with Daft Punk, he has some sage advice for his rapt audience. He tells them about his move into producing merchandise with Cool Cats and says “finding money with brands is the new game today.” He asks them rhetorically how they could ever turn down Nike: “They are monsters, but sometimes it is good to play with monsters. Nowadays brands understand it is not about putting a logo on your flyer. It is about being part of something.” He tells them simply: “Take life with a smile and sell out. Mainstream and underground is over. You are all mainstream now.”

So there you go. There’s no shame in corporate arts patronage. It’ll surely be soon forgotten anyway. No-one remembers the patrons of Shakespeare or Da Vinci, but they both took money from the wealthy to fund their work. Samuel Johnson once described a patron as “one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help”, but that’s not a charge you can level at this Academy. It’s surely better for music that Red Bull plough their money into unknown creatives rather than slapping their logo onto an established band’s mega tour.

The question, then, is what Red Bull are getting out of this? I find the PR guy again and ask him straight: what’s the catch? He concedes that the company is not running the Academy out of altruism. For Red Bull it’s about a notion of authentic involvement, or as he puts it, the brand having to “earn its place on the scene”. They think the way to do that is by stepping in where record companies are failing. “Record companies don’t nurture anyone anymore,” he says, “Brands can play a part in music.”

The Red Bull Music Academy is testament to that, yet despite their enthusiasm it still leaves me feeling somehow sorry for the talented kids making righteous noise in the next room. They’ve been dumped into a brave new world that the most experienced heads in the business are struggling to make work. All they want to do is make a living making music but they’ve been raised on dreams of rock stars they can no longer possibly emulate. The rules of the game have changed and you can’t blame them and other struggling artists for feeling like there’s nothing left for them to do but grit their teeth and take the corporate bull by the horns.

Originally published by Drowned In Sound.

Guess who just got back today? Those wild-eyed Libertines that had been away. But what brings them back? Money? Ego? Music? Love?

That depends on who you talk to. The cynics will tell you it’s the fact that Reading and Leeds Festivals offered them over a million shiny reasons to forgive and forget past transgressions. Ask a romantic, if you can find one, and they’ll tell you it’s the fans, the songs and the fact that Pete Doherty and Carl Barat are back on the sort of terms where you’ll struggle to separate them with a rizla paper.

When I arrived at The Boogaloo, the infamous north London boozer where the band chose to announce their reunion, there were a lot more cynics in the room than romantics. There also seemed to be more cameras than people. The Libertines are a News Event.

By the time I got to the bar I could already overhear people muttering about the band’s motives and the size of their fee. The Libertines became heroes playing in people’s kitchen cabinets and underwear drawers, with half of less than 50p in their pocket and a reputation for pissing it all up the wall if they got any more. How do you square that anarchic spirit with this barrel-load of filthy lucre to play a corporate-sponsored festival main stage?

When the band arrived a few minutes later, they found themselves staring down the barrel of their very own media circus, all bulbs flashing. After some polite preliminaries, mainly answered by bassist John Hassall and roughly along the lines of it feeling like the right time to get back together, they were asked the inevitable million pound question: “What is it about the £1.5 million appearance fee that’s so appealing to you?”

“£1.2 million,” Doherty quickly corrected, “and what’s appealing about the money is what’s left over after tax, obviously. Which, turns out, luckily, to be just about enough to pay last year’s tax bill.” A relatively candid answer, but a field day for the cynics.

But if you’re waiting for a romantic, Pete Doherty’s your man. He declined to put his feelings about the reunion into mere words, saying: “The way we’ve always communicated with each other successfully is through music. I know that sounds really naff, but it’s true. That’s how and why we’re together.”

Which sounds all well and good, but even taking the money out of the equation it remains to be seen whether The Libertines have anything new to say. They certainly made no promises of new material, although Barat was clearly eager to start writing. He joked: “We just wrote a song in the guitar shop, but it turned out to be ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’. We’re gonna keep working on it.”

Many a true word is spoken in jest, Carlito. That line contains a kernel of truth you’d do well to heed before you follow Oasis down a dingy Memory Lane to peddle your own brand of Union Jack-coloured nostalgia with ever diminishing returns. But for now, nostalgia is the order of the day. This means DO NOT OPEN OLD WOUNDS. Barat dismissed one unwanted question about tension in the band with a blunt, “Fuck off with your bitterness!”

Drummer Gary Powell got into the spirit of things by promising the music will be as “heartfelt and as dynamic as it possibly can be”, but surprisingly all this misty-eyed nostalgia doesn’t extend to the small pub and house gigs which forged their Libertine reputation. Or at least they’re not letting on if it does, with Doherty declaring: “It’s either gonna be the four of us alone or in front of 100,000 people.”

Whether or not The Libertines succeed this time round is probably down to whether these inadvertent tabloid rock stars can channel the urgency that made them form the band over a decade ago. As Doherty put it: “We were so desperate to do something. We couldn’t quite put our finger on what it was but it was something to do with performing songs, and we were kind of falling over ourselves to do it. It all got so messed up. But looking back on it, we actually did produce things that we’re all so proud of. I’m dying just to play some of them songs with the boys.”

So play some of them songs with the boys he did. If the press conference was oddly tense, the band’s short set brushed aside all traces of cynicism and converted every soul in the building into a hushed, awed romantic. They opened with a cover of ‘Georgia On My Mind’ which ran into ‘The Good Old Days’, a rather neat riposte to accusations of nostalgia. By the time they got to ‘Music When The Lights Go Out’ and ‘Can’t Stand Me Now’ even the most jaded of hack was spellbound. For those of you keeping score, they also played ‘France’, ‘Death On The Stairs’ and an “old Liverpool song” called ‘Sally Brown’ with a bearded gentleman named Rabbi John.

Later on, after the ambulances had taken the last few tabloid hacks away to treat them for emotional shock, I grabbed Doherty for a quiet chat while the TV crews from Sky and Channel 5 squabbled over the band. “Drowned in Sound? Why do I know that name? Oh…you slagged us in the early days!” he chided me. “I assure you, Peter,” I replied, “it ain’t me you’re looking for.”

His eyes were like saucers, but in person he’s much more softly spoken than in front of the massed ranks of Her Majesty’s press corp. I ask him whether he thinks there’s more to this band getting back together than just flogging festival tickets after he’d admitted: “It’s hard to justify taking 150 quid of someone’s money to make them wander round from one sponsored stage to another sponsored stage”. He told me he doesn’t see it as “just a payday”, and added, in light of his tax bills, it’s “not even that much of a payday. Which is a shame.” He says all this with such open vulnerability that I’m inclined to believe him. “The Libertines are more than a band to me,” he says. “That’s definitely something that’s always been in my heart, and for Carl as well. I don’t think he would be doing it otherwise.” Which seems much more plausible having just seen him play his heart out while sharing a mic with Barat. Suddenly this all looks a lot less like hitherto acrimoniously estranged band-mates regrouping purely to accept a million pounds and loose change from Britain’s biggest festival company. It looks rather more like a band of brothers realising that their clock is ticking and that the time for heroes is now.

Originally published by Drowned In Sound.

Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, is a vast, sprawling city in a vast, sprawling country ten times the size of the UK. The Congolese like to refer to their home as the “richest country on Earth”, a reference to the lush rainforest and its wealth of natural resources. Sadly, those killjoys at the International Monetary Fund like to refer to it as the “118th richest country on Earth”, coming in just behind financial powerhouses Armenia and Afghanistan, and presumably a reference to the years of conflict and political instability that have gutted the national infrastructure and left many of those resources in the hands of a motley assortment of warlords.

This makes Kinshasa a hell of a place to live at the best of times, but for Staff Benda Bilili singers Ricky Likabu, Theo Nsituvuidi, Coco Ngambali, Kabose Kaamba and Djunana Tanga there was also the complication of growing up with polio in a country with over 9,000 humans to every qualified doctor (the UK has 440). The core of the band bonded over their shared experience of disability, and many of their lyrics are directly informed by it. One song translates as “Parents, please go to the vaccination centre / Get your babies vaccinated against polio.”Of course, it is not this social consciousness that drew fans to the Brighton Dome the night I met them, so I began by asking if they fear their songs have less of an impact for crowds who not only don’t understand the lyrics, but are also living lives a world away from the situation the songs were born in. Michel Winter, their manager and acting translator, sums up their answer: “They’re here so that people can enjoy it. They realise that European audiences like their music, so what the lyrics mean isn’t so important. The music is good and so is their attitude on stage and the energy they give. They’re just happy to be here.”

I’m meeting them at the start of their first ever full tour, 35 dates dotted around Europe, and the band are clearly on a high following what they describe as the “great success” of their debut British show at London’s Barbican the previous night. They say they’ve always known they’d play in Europe; such is the utter confidence they have in the music they’re making. I ask if it was a dream, but Michel replies with a Gallic shrug, “It was obvious for them.” The rather staid, sedate venues they’re playing is perhaps a reflection of the narrow box ‘world music’ is routinely filed away in, and their remarkable if sobering back-story probably leads some to assume that a Staff Benda Bilili gig will be a solemn affair. The reality is anything but. Later that night the good people of Brighton are dragged as one from the comfort of their chairs to find themselves dancing down the aisles and pressing up against the stage. They are being led by an irresistible rhythm and the example of the band, pirouetting in their wheelchairs. Djunana hops out of his on powerful arms and forward-rolls across the stage, the legs that polio has withered to stumps tucked beneath him. He is grinning wildly, and so, I realise, am I. Regardless of anything else, Staff Benda Bilili are a great party band.

They were inspired by one of the greats. Back in 1974, Congolese dictator Mobutu helped bring the now legendary ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman to Kinshasa. The fight was preceded by ‘Zaire 74’, a three day festival immortalised in the documentary Soul Power and headlined by James Brown. Two of the band saw Brown’s performance, and the Godfather of Soul’s fingerprints are imprinted on their music and on their tireless quest to entertain. On ‘Je t’aime’ you can hear them call out “Sex Machine” in tribute. As for other influences, they mention reggae, the Cuban rumba and the vague catchall of ‘international music’. They are sketchy about specific artists, and Michel reveals that it is only recent touring that has introduced them properly to many musicians. “Other than James Brown, they don’t know many Western artists. They are just starting to discover now. For example, they didn’t know about Jimi Hendrix before they started touring, but now they see some similarities.”

Claiming musical kinship with Hendrix strikes me as a bold claim, but the band have their own musical innovator in the shape of Roger Landu. As a child Roger lived on the streets of Kinshasa, but he was taken in by the band after they came across him busking with an instrument he had invented himself: the satongé. You can make one yourself if you happen to have a powdered milk tin, an electrical wire and a bit of broken basket lying around. Simply jam the curved basket wood into the side of the tin and string the wire between the top of the tin and its new handle. Sounds simple, looks simpler, but by pressing the tin tight to his chest and squeezing the wooden handle in and out, Roger wrings virtuoso solos out of that single wire that could raze Electric Ladyland. The only drawback to his improvisation seems to be several occasions during the night when he is forced to repair or even entirely rebuild his instrument.

Not that the audience seems to mind, and neither do the band. For them, it’s a tiny hurdle after a journey that seems to have been mainly constructed of much larger obstacles. Their music, and their performance, now drips with the confidence of a band who feel they can do anything. Before I leave, Michel smiles at the apparent chaos backstage and confides that when he first heard of the band he was told “They are fantastic musicians, but they are disabled. Is that a problem?” His reply has proved true, “If the music is good, there won’t be a problem.”

Originally published by Drowned In Sound.

Republished in an alternate form by the World Health Organisation.