Published in British GQ, October 2018.
All posts by Kevin EG Perry
Lenny Kravitz: ‘There’s not so much musicianship today’
In Lenny Kravitz’s bedroom, at his grand home in the centre of Paris, there is a photograph on the wall in a gold frame. It was taken on 16 July 1971 by his father, Sy Kravitz, and shows the Jackson 5 onstage at Madison Square Garden. It was the first show little Lenny ever attended. It was a night that changed his life.
“I was seven years old, but I remember the show completely,” says Kravitz. “It made me want to do what it is that I do.”
Watching a 12-year-old Michael Jackson work his magic in New York that night wasn’t even Kravitz’s first encounter with musical greatness. His father – an NBC television news producer who moonlighted as a jazz promoter – had already introduced him to the likes of Miles Davis and Duke Ellington, and they’d even dropped by to sing Lenny “Happy Birthday”. Those early experiences set the tone for his Zelig-like life, populated by a cast of characters and collaborators featuring everyone from Mick Jagger to Al Green and David Bowie to Prince. He even ended up, years later, in the studio with Jackson himself. “There I was working with the person who started the whole thing for me,” he remembers. “I’ve had the opportunity to work with so many of my heroes. It’s wonderful. My path was laid out with so many amazing artists who gave me my education.”
Try Anything Once: Flamenco
Originally published in Lonely Planet Traveller, October 2018.
In search of Sub Pop’s soul
In 1988, underground radio DJ Jonathan Poneman and fanzine editor Bruce Pavitt quit their day jobs to dedicate themselves full-time to running their independent record label. 30 years later, I’m stood in a departure terminal at LAX looking across the tarmac at the Alaska Airlines Boeing 737-800 which will take me to Seattle. It’s covered in what looks like huge road case stickers that all read: ‘SUB POP’.
I have questions. How do you go from making a few scribbled notes in Seattle’s Uptown Espresso coffee shop to becoming one of the world’s most famous record labels, with your name painted down a plane’s fuselage? What was it about the remote Pacific North West that allowed it to incubate grunge, the sound that would change the world? And most pressingly: Does this mean they’ll let me play ‘God’s Balls’ by Tad over the tannoy?
The answer to one of those questions is: ‘No’. The rest will take some explaining.
Let’s get right to the heart of this thing. Let’s ask somebody who was there. About 24 hours ago I was sitting in the baking LA heat listening to Mark Lanegan tell me – in that voice that sounds like gravel in a gale – about the first time he ever heard Sub Pop’s most famous signing. It was the tail end of the 80s and he was still living in Ellensburg, a small town smack in the middle of Washington state, and singing with Screaming Trees, when he got a phone call from his friend Dylan Carlson.
“He said: ‘Hey, my friend is playing a show at the Ellensburg Library and he’s a big fan of your music.’” remembers Lanegan. “‘Would you go down and watch him? Because there’s probably not going to be anybody there and it would be a thrill for him if you went.’ I went down there. When they started playing, I realised that I was hearing one of the best bands I had ever heard… and in the fuckin’ Ellensburg Library no less. It was Nirvana that were playing, and it was Kurt that he wanted me to meet.”
From that day on, Lanegan and Cobain became close friends. They shared a love of old blues records, not to mention heavy duty narcotics. Soon they were cooking up a half-baked plan to record an EP of Leadbelly covers together. Naturally, Sub Pop – the newborn label who had snapped up Nirvana for an initial outlay of just 600 bucks – were keen to put it out, but when it failed to materialise it was co-founder Poneman who rang Lanegan and asked if he wanted to make a solo record instead.
“I distinctly remember that the offer was for $13,000 for the first record,” says Lanegan. “Up until that point, my contribution to Screaming Trees songwriting basically amounted to changing some of the more egregious lyrics written by the guitar player to make them less embarrassing. I had never picked up a guitar or anything, but I knew that the records we’d made were for a strict $1,000 budget. I thought I could make a record for a thousand dollars and pocket the other twelve.”
So Lanegan taught himself to write, and then wrote ‘The Winding Sheet’. He included the sole song salvaged from the ill-fated Leadbelly sessions: a version of ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night?’, featuring both Cobain and Krist Novoselic. The album was a departure for both Lanegan and Sub Pop, but it turned into a success that would heavily influence the sound of Nirvana’s own famous MTV Unplugged performance. This story illustrates two important facts about Sub Pop: They were willing to gamble, but they knew their shit.
“I thought it was kind of weird because everything else on the label was hard rock, but they were into the idea and it obviously panned out for me. I owe him one!” says Lanegan, acknowledging the confidence Poneman showed in him. While he says his own relationship with them was “tempestuous” (they dropped him midway through the recording of follow-up, ‘Whiskey For The Holy Ghost’, only to later resign him and give him the money to finish it), Lanegan reserves high praise for the label.
“What really changed shit was Nirvana and Sub Pop,” he says. “Sub Pop had a genius for marketing and the way they promoted the label, with Nirvana of course being the shining star in their universe. In terms of Seattle at that time, I don’t think it had ever really happened before where a small city had so many bands going to the top of the Billboard charts. Soundgarden. Alice In Chains. Pearl Jam still play stadiums like they’re the Grateful Dead. It was an unprecedented phenomenon.”
I tell him I’m about to head north to visit the city for myself. ”Shit, man. I haven’t looked at the weather report but you might want to take an umbrella,” he drawls. I tell him I’ll be used to it, coming from Britain. “It’s uber-British,” he says. “People say Manchester is like Seattle. Bullshit. Seattle is like Manchester x100 weather-wise. It’s got the shittiest weather of any city in the world, hands down.”
“A lot is said about the weather,” says Jonathan Poneman, sat in his office at Sub Pop HQ in downtown Seattle. Outside in the corridors are various bits of memorabilia, like a framed copy of a restraining order that K Records’ Calvin Johnson took out against Courtney Love, and a bit of wall ripped from that previous office that Kurt Cobain scrawled his address on. Poneman doesn’t know if it was the climate that made Seattle creative, although he does posit an alternative explanation: “I’ve heard it said that there are more books read per capita in Seattle than in any other major American metropolitan city,” he says. (This is true, at least according to Amazon, who happen to now be one of the city’s main employers.) “Although…” Poneman continues. “That may not be saying all that much at this point.”
While it’s easy to look back with hindsight and see the Seattle scene as fully formed from the get go – Sub Pop would put out debut releases by Mudhoney, Soundgarden and Nirvana all within a couple of years – Poneman says the reality was very different. “The thing that was most remarkable about Seattle was how spontaneous everything was,” he says. “There was no premeditation or calculation. We were just thinking about life-changing shows and mind-blowing bands.”
Suddenly, though, the outside world was starting to take notice. By 1992, the New York Times had decided they needed to find out what this grunge thing that was happening was all about. This lead to one of Sub Pop’s most infamous gags – Poneman passed a phone call from a reporter on to Megan Jasper, a mohawked receptionist who’d recently left the label and was by then working at Caroline Records. She promptly supplied the Times with a list of entirely made-up ‘grunge’ lingo which the newspaper of record faithfully printed. A loser was henceforth to be known as a “cob nobbler”. Hanging out was apparently referred to as “swingin’ on the flippity-flop”. Whatever happened to Jasper? She’s now Sub Pop’s CEO, obviously.
“They were doing a huge piece on Seattle. It was the front page of the Style section,” Jasper recalls. “I had had a shitload of coffee, and was just rattling a bunch of bullshit off. I honestly thought at some point we’d just laugh and say: ‘This is ridiculous’. That never happened.”
It’s a funny story, but it also illustrates just how strange, exotic and remote Seattle seemed to outsiders at that time. “You have to imagine that the writers for the New York Times are pretty intelligent people, we would hope,” says Jasper. “But there was this weird, dark corner of the country that so many people knew so little about.”
The years that followed the grunge boom weren’t always plain sailing for Sub Pop. Bruce Pavitt left the company acrimoniously in 1996, saying that he saw too much waste, and money being squandered. At least they managed to keep a sense of humour about it. Ten years ago, at their 20th anniversary, they announced they were celebrating ‘15 years of great music.’ “Every record label has its dark times, and we’re no exception,” says Poneman now. “I’ll leave it up to the discerning listener to decide which five years we were talking about. They weren’t always sequential.”
But Sub Pop weren’t finished yet. In 2001, The Shins’ debut record ‘Oh, Inverted World’ helped usher in a new era of indie. The Postal Service’s one-off 2003 album ‘Give Up’ gave the label an unexpectedly massive hit, their first platinum record since Nirvana’s ‘Bleach’. Fleet Foxes followed before the end of the decade, who in turn begat Father John Misty – now one of the label’s biggest success stories, and part of a genuinely eclectic roster that also includes Beach House, Pissed Jeans, Shabazz Palaces and – at least as far as their musical endeavors go – Rick and Morty.
Leaving Sub Pop’s offices on my way to see Afghan Whigs play the label’s showcase beneath Seattle’s iconic Space Needle, I decide to stop off at the nearby Museum of Popular Culture. Inside, there’s a whole exhibition dedicated to Nirvana. Among the collection they have the first demo tape that Nirvana sent to Sub Pop, and the first contract they signed with the label, along with later curios like the original print off of the photo of the baby in the pool from the ‘Nevermind’ cover. It’s inscribed with the memorable line, from Geffen’s art director Robert Fisher: “If anyone has a problem with his dick we can remove it.”
It’s a great exhibition, although for anyone who grew up on Nirvana’s music there’s something odd about seeing that youthful energy literally trapped under perspex. It shouldn’t be strange to see them as an historical band – the 30 years that have gone by since their debut single ‘Love Buzz’ is exactly the same amount of time that separates ‘Love Buzz’ from The Everly Brothers crooning ‘All I Have To Do Is Dream’ – yet somehow it is. Go and put on ‘Bleach’ and tell me it doesn’t still sound vital.
The next morning it’s raining, just as Lanegan prophesied. I catch a ferry from downtown Seattle over to Alki Beach, where Sub Pop’s free birthday festival is taking place, and overhear a couple of young fans onboard.
“I wish Nirvana were still around to play today,” one of them muses.
There’s a widespread general murmur of approval at this thought. Everyone wishes they could have seen Nirvana.
“Then again,” the same fan eventually concludes. “If they were… you know they’d be charging for it.”
Even with the label’s newest signings, the influence of Kurt Cobain still hangs in the ether. LA three-piece Moaning are one of the festival’s early highlights. Frontman Sean Solomon tells the crowd that at the first show he ever played, a Battle of the Bands, his band played ‘Molly’s Lips’ by The Vaselines in the style of Nirvana’s cover. “Our mics didn’t turn on so it was just the same two chords over and over again,” he recalls. “It was really embarrassing.”
Earlier, he’d told me how Sub Pop had always been the label he’d dreamed of signing with. “Everyone in the band has been friends since we were teenagers, and we’d always joke about getting signed to Sub Pop. It was the label we fantasised about. They were always, in my mind, the label I was supposed to be on.”
While the label have long outgrown the ‘grunge’ tag that they always bristled against anyway, Solomon says there’s still a certain vibe that unites the bands that Sub Pop sign. “I think we all have a sense of independence, and you can tell that the music is untouched,” he says. “A lot of labels get more involved than Sub Pop do. They really allow artists to do their thing, and they don’t interfere. In a lot of different productions it’s difficult to be an auteur, but I feel like the artists on Sub Pop have very clear visions, and I think that’s why so many of their records are my favourites. There’s a sense of authenticity, and I think that makes sense that the ‘grunge’ label continues to put out really authentic-sounding records.”
Despite the grey, Manchester x100 drizzle, the rest of the birthday party goes off without a hitch. It’s estimated that 50,000 people show up. Father John Misty, Shabazz Palaces and Beach House all play on the beach. Loma frontwoman Emily Cross not only jumps into the crowd but manages to run out into the sea while the band plays on. Yet somehow the best band of the day end up being Mudhoney, playing some songs that are as old as the label itself. The past isn’t over, as Faulkner said. It isn’t even past.
The next day I take the inevitable pilgrimage to the house where Kurt died. There’s a steady stream of visitors to his memorial bench, seemingly unaware that his old record label had just celebrated an anniversary. Outside the gates of the house, I meet a young guy with long hair and a Nirvana T-shirt on. His name is Justin Huynh, and he’s come from Fort Worth, Texas. He’s 25 – five years younger than Sub Pop. “This was the must-do thing of my life,” he tells me.
There’s a solid wooden gate in front of the house, but he’s determined to get picture so he crouches down and pushes his phone underneath.
“Hi Kurt,” I hear him say. “I love you.”
Born By The River
There isn’t a soul alive who knows the Mississippi River better than Captain Clarke ‘Doc’ Hawley. Now retired, the 82 year-old’s pilot’s license once extended over 1,300 miles of the river and its tributaries. In order to be granted this license he was required to draw that entire distance by hand, from memory, five miles to a page. As Mark Twain, a former riverboat pilot himself, wrote in his memoir Life On The Mississippi: ‘In order to be a pilot a man had got to learn more than any one man ought to be allowed to know.’
‘Not only do you draw the shape of the river, the sandbars and the bridges, but you draw what’s under the river as well,’ explains Captain Hawley, standing on the bridge of the Steamboat Natchez. We’re docked at the Toulouse Street Wharf in New Orleans, and outside the window cargo barges laden with grain pass silently along the Mississippi. ‘That’s more important than anything, because you need to know where not to drop anchor or you could hook into an oil line. After I drew from Cincinnati, Ohio down to here I thought I could go to work for Rand McNally forever.’
Needless to say, Captain Hawley did not go off to draw maps for a living. Instead he spent 60 years expertly guiding steamboats up and down the mighty river, which has its source at Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota and flows south for 2,320 miles before it finds the ocean in the Gulf of Mexico. It remains to this day an avenue of commerce, carrying 60% of U.S. grain shipments, 22% of oil and gas shipments and 20% of coal shipments. Yet even more important than its practical use has been its cultural impact on America. It was home to the native Mississippian culture long before Hernando De Soto became the first European explorer to set eyes on it in 1541. During the 20th century, blues, jazz, gospel, R’n’B, soul and rock’n’roll were all born within splashing distance of the river. There must be something in the water.
From his vantage point onboard, Captain Hawley had a unique view of how the culture that grew by the Mississippi shaped America. ‘Jazz really went up the river by boat first,’ he says. ‘Louis Armstrong’s first job was on a riverboat, the steamer Sidney in 1918. I can guarantee that the first jazz that was heard in St Paul, Minnesota was on a boat with a New Orleans band on the dance floor. I remember I was on the boats when rock came in. It was electric! It was a new rhythm that took over America.’
To Captain Hawley, life on the steamboat promised a life of adventure and excitement, just as it had to Mark Twain a century earlier. The river gave the writer, born Samuel Clemens, a way to escape small-town drudgery. He claimed it even gave him his nomme de guerre. ‘His name, in river-talk, means 12 feet,’ explains Captain Hawley. ‘‘Mark Twain’ means two fathoms, which was safe distance. To this day, the Corps of Engineers only guarantees 12 feet of water above Baton Rouge.’
Twain, or rather Clemens, grew up in Hannibal, Missouri – almost 800 miles upriver from New Orleans. His whitewashed boyhood home has been restored and converted into a museum, whose director Henry Sweets stands on the doorstep and points out the proximity of the river. Today it’s devoid of major traffic, a tranquil shadow of its former self. ‘In Twain’s day, the riverbank would have even closer to this house,’ he says. ‘You can imagine how watching the variety of people coming in by boat – from the wealthy to the enslaved – would have implanted the lure of the river in his mind. What’s out there to go and see? When you look at his writings, at Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, or later Pudd’nhead Wilson, you can see how the river was always an influence in his writing.’
Twain was born in 1835, just as the Mississippi steamboats entered their golden age. Their number jumped from just 20 in the 1810s to over 1200 in the 1830s. Many of the boats which ran between St Louis and New Orleans were used to move cotton, rice and other produce of fertile farmland, and there was no land anywhere more fertile than that formed by the thick layers of the Mississippi’s silt deposits.
That land is dotted with tiny rural farm towns like Dyess, Arkansas. It was here that Johnny Cash grew up, picking cotton in the fields from the age of five. The land was prone to flooding, as he described in his song Five Feet High and Rising.
His youngest sister, Joanne, who has a jet black streak in her white hair and her brother’s square jaw, remembers that singing was always part of family life. ‘The music came from the way we lived,’ she says, standing on the porch of the restored farm house in the midst of the paddy fields which stretch out for miles on every side. ‘Most all of Johnny’s songs that he wrote about this area were from experiences that we had here in this very house and on this land. It was a life of hard work, a lot of love, and singing together every day. Johnny was always writing songs and singing the truth.’
In 1954, when Cash was ready to record his songs, he went to Sun Studio in Memphis. By then the studio was already drawing in the greatest musical talent of the Mississippi Delta. The blues had been born in places like the Dockery Plantation, where Charley Patton, considered the godfather of the Delta blues, lived and worked. In 1941 Alan Lomax, touring the Delta to document the musical culture, recorded a then-unknown Muddy Waters at his home on the Stovall Plantation. They set a sound in motion which would soon be heard in ever corner of the planet. Just a decade later, at Sun, Ike Turner wrote Rocket 88 for Jackie Brenston, widely considered to be the first rock’n’roll song.
Memphis still moves to a beat. On Beale Street, the sounds of competing bands echo out of every bar. In the Blues City Cafe, Blind Mississippi Morris is onstage making his harmonica sing beneath a red neon sign that reads LIQUOR. As Morris roars through ‘One Way Out’, a woman takes her partner’s hands and places them on her own hips as she sways. The blues still has the power to move people. When the band takes a break, Morris reminisces about his youth in the plantation fields outside Clarksdale, birthplace of Ike Turner, John Lee Hooker, Sam Cooke and so many other greats.
‘Poverty is what made the blues,’ he says, his low, mellifluous tone cutting through the chatter of the busy venue. ‘It all started back in the cotton fields. Before they were playing music they were singing it a cappella, trying to make the day go. When you’re singing it, all of that is coming through your music. The things you’ve seen, like people being hung. Oh man, that was terrible.’
For Morris, the blues are a way to connect with people and help them to understand his life. ‘You try to tell a story in your music and make them feel exactly what you felt when you had to wake up every day not knowing what you were going to eat,’ he says. ‘All your money from the fields went to the store to pay your debts.’
Of course, blues and rock’n’roll would make a lot of money for some. Across town at Graceland, you can walk the hallowed hallways of Elvis Presley’s mansion, preserved just as the King left it – with a shag-carpeted Jungle Room in the den, and kitschy trinkets like his treasured porcelain monkey dotted about. While his vast wealth and fame may have earned him his regal sobriquet, the Memphis Sound was defined by Stax Records. Their studio is now a museum where you can soak up the energy still trapped in the room where R’n’B and soul hits by the likes of Sam and Dave, Isaac Hayes and The Staple Singers were all recorded.
Heading south from Memphis through the Mississippi Delta you drive through field after field of cotton and corn. The land is perfectly flat, leaving a vast canopy of sky above which is punctured by nothing taller than a Pecan tree or a church steeple. It was here where European and African culture came together on American soil. From the devastating pain of slavery, from the spiritual thirst of the church congregations and from the sexual heat of the juke joint dancefloors there came the most powerful outpouring of music the world has ever seen.
Many of those rhythms had originated with the slaves who arrived in America at the port of New Orleans, where Twain’s steamboat route ended, near the mouth of the Mississippi. On Sundays, enslaved men and women would come together to drum and sing, keeping their West African traditions alive. The Code Noir, which governed slave ownership in French Louisiana, decreed that they be given the day off as they were expected to convert to Catholicism.
‘Congo Square was the only place like it in the United States,’ says Dianne Honore, a New Orleans tour guide known as Gumbo Marie, as she stands in the square where the slaves congregated. Sheltering from the heat of the afternoon sun under her parasol, she explains how important this place would have been to people like her own sixth generation grandmother Catiche Destrehan, who was born a slave in the city in 1738. ‘Enslaved people would come to celebrate here, practicing their own dancing and their own music.’
The culture of circle dancing and drumming brought from West Africa evolved, as it paraded out of Congo Square, into the tradition of New Orleans jazz funeral processions. ‘We honour our deceased and we celebrate them,’ explains Honore. ‘Of course it’s a sad thing and we’re upset, but we want to celebrate their spirit and the energy that’s still around us.’
Jazz funerals proved to be just too much fun to have to wait until somebody died, so they in turn gave birth to the weekly tradition of brass band parades known as the Second Line. Each Sunday, a large crowd gathers outside a venue such as the Treme Center to meet the band – themselves known as the ‘First Line’. There’s a carnival atmosphere in the air as they dance together past brightly coloured homes and murals celebrating local icons like Louis Armstrong and Dr John. The Second Line flows through the streets, as powerful and irresistible as the Mississippi itself, gathering momentum with every new wave of people who run out of their homes to join in. Soon everyone around is caught in the current of the music, a fierce kind of joy ringing in their souls.
Originally published in Lonely Planet Traveller, September 2018.
Lads On Tour: Kasabian Reign In Spain
It’s the day after England’s emotional, last-gasp defeat to Croatia in the World Cup semi-final and noted football fanatics Kasabian are bouncing back the best way they know how: by playing a huge festival headline slot at Madrid’s mammoth Mad Cool festival.
Backstage, frontman Tom Meighan is sipping a cup of pre-show Yogi Tea that may be helping his voice but is doing nothing to calm his hyperactive personality. He shrugs off last night’s result. “It is what it is, we were never going to win it,” he shrugs. Right now he’s more interested in a bright orange graffiti marker somebody’s left lying around. “I haven’t seen one of these in years!” he cries with glee, grabbing it and setting about tagging every sheet of paper he can find.
Bandmate Serge Pizzorno cuts a more laidback figure. He’s laughing to himself at the length of the seemingly endless guitar solo we can hear emanating from Pearl Jam, who are currently onstage. “He’s shredding out there, isn’t he?” he grins. “The rest of the band must be like…” and he mimes impatiently tapping his watch.
Mad Cool 2018: Frankie Cosmos on tour life and the new New York scene
Mad Cool 2018: Wolf Alice on coming together for music, football and hating Donald Trump
Mad Cool 2018: Kasabian’s Serge Pizzorno talks football and festival headliners
Warren G on G-Funk, making Annie Lennox starstruck and the immortal ‘Regulate’
Picture the scene. You’re deep in the sesh with a load of people you don’t really know and somebody asks you to pick the next tune. What do you choose? You need something everybody loves. You need a song any person between the ages of 18 and 39 knows all the words to. You need Warren G. You need Nate Dogg. You need ‘Regulate’.
I’ve been to a lot of parties in my life (yeah, I know. Legend.) and I’d estimate that I’ve heard ‘Regulate’ played loud and late more often than anything else. It’s rivaled only by Biggie’s ‘Juicy’ for its sheer ubiquity, and only by the Fresh Prince theme for the likelihood of someone being able to recite all the lyrics off the top of their head while mashed. Altogether now: ‘It was a clear black night, a clear white moon…’
What I’m saying is, ‘Regulate’ is a seriously big tune. It’s so big that it’s easy to let it overshadow what an integral figure Warren G has been for West Coast hip-hop. A new documentary, ‘G-Funk’, streaming from today on YouTube Premium, goes some way to redress that balance. It follows Warren from his early days in Long Beach growing up with Snoop and Nate Dogg, forming 213, his sometimes tense relationship with his step-brother Dr Dre, his influence on ‘The Chronic’ and how his signing for Def Jam – and not Death Row – changed the course of rap history.
To mark the release of the documentary, I hit the east side of the LBC on a mission trying to find Mr Warren G. We talked family, fame and G-funk. But first, a question that’s been bugging me for years:
What does ‘The rhythm is the bass and the bass is the treble’ mean?
“I don’t know! ‘Rhythm is life, and life is rhythm.’ I learned that from Jimmy Spicer. He always used to say that, so I said it, and then Nate took that part with his singing: ‘The rhythm is the bass and the bass is the treble.’ Chords. Strings. We brings. Melody. [Laughs]”
That’s made my day, just hearing you recite that. How does it feel to have created a song as universally loved as ‘Regulate’? I honestly don’t think there’s any song that gets played as reliably at parties in London to this day.
“It’s all good, man! It feels so good. I got the chance to go over to London and just really get a chance to feel it. I’mma tell you, I was thinking different because there were a lot of Jamaicans there! I was like: ‘This is crazy!’ but it was cool. You guys’ accents and everything, it was incredible to me, and the love I was getting was just incredible. I performed at Wembley when Snoop was doing it. He asked me to come out in his show, and when he pulled me out they lost it. Wembley went crazy! I was like: ‘Oh, shit!’ I was so nervous, but then I was like: ‘Damn, they really love me!’”
We do, it’s true. We really love you. In the documentary it’s clear that when you and Nate were making it that you were just trying to tell a story.
“That record was things that I went through, and friends of ours went through. We’d witnessed that and we’d been a part of it. We just told the story, and then on the hook we just let everybody’s imagination flow. After hearing that you’re going: ‘Wow, he went through this’ and then: [sings] ‘I laid all them busters down, I let my gat explode’ and you roll right back into it. It’s on again!”
You had no idea when you were making it how big it would become?
“No we didn’t know, man. I got to meet Annie Lennox, and so many different people that I didn’t think I would ever get to meet.”
Are you a big Annie Lennox fan?
“Annie Lennox couldn’t even hardly speak English! I’m serious, I was like: ‘Wait a minute! You’ve got ‘Sweet Dreams!’ She could speak English, but not fluent. I was like: ‘This is crazy!’ I told her: ‘You just don’t know how much I love you! You carried me through so much shit with ‘Sweet Dreams’.’ That was one of my theme songs when I was travelling from the United States to Europe. That was my theme song, my song to get myself right and think: I’m really out here. I’m really international.”
The title and the opening sample comes from the 80s cowboy movie Young Guns, doesn’t it?
“Yeah. I was a fan of Young Guns, that was one of my favourite movies at the time. I used to watch it all the time on VHS. I would watch it two or three times a day. We used to always say ‘Regulate’. Like: ‘Man, we’re gonna have to regulate this shit in here!’, ‘Fool, regulate the spot!’ or ‘Get on out of here, we’re gonna have to regulate this situation.’ We used to always say that, so when I heard him say: “We work for Mr. Tunstall as regulators. We regulate any stealing off his property – we’re damn good too!” it made me think of our crew, and who we was. The Death Row crew. I was over there, and I was part of it. I took the RCA jacks right out of the VHS and plugged it into a quarter-inch into my MPC60 – which I’ve still got! I’ve still got the Moog that ‘The Chronic’ was done on, and all the record crates. Don’t tell Dre! [Laughs]”
Dre is your older step-brother, but it comes across in the documentary that even though you worked on ‘The Chronic’ and introduced him to Snoop, he maybe didn’t always appreciate your contribution. There’s a moment where you turn up at the airport to join Dre and Snoop’s first tour, and everybody’s got a ticket but you. Were you upset with Dre for that?
“I wasn’t upset with him. I was upset at the way I was treated when I was ride or die. It wasn’t Dre! Suge [Knight] was the head of the company. I got treated different, and it just wasn’t cool. I wasn’t getting ready to sign or anything. Dre was like: ‘You should go and be your own man. Create you own life so you don’t have to deal with this shit.’”
Do you think if you’d signed with Dre and Suge Knight at Death Row at that point, maybe you’d never have made ‘Regulate’?
“Exactly. He was kind of like a saviour. He purposely did that to push me into doing my own thing. He knew I was dope already, and he would help me with whatever I needed. If I’d signed to Death Row I probably wouldn’t have made my own record. I’d probably be in jail. That’s how a lot of motherfuckers ended up, in jail, and I probably would have been right there with them.”
This documentary is a real reminder of how influential you were on G-Funk, and how influential G-Funk has been on hip-hop. Are you making new music?
“Yeah, I’m planning on dropping seven new songs around this documentary. Me and Snoop have been in the studio together. I’m constantly working. It would drive me crazy if I didn’t do no more music. I have other passions that I love doing too, like barbecuing. This is me. I always say: ‘Music and barbecue and love’ and then I say: ‘G-Funk’. That’s the good shit.”
The Baby-Faced Far Right Terrorist Who Planned to Murder an MP
When the annals of great chat-up lines are written, it’s unlikely former BNP Youth spokesman Jack Renshaw will feature highly. On the evening of the 1st of July, 2017, he approached a girl in a nightclub in Warrington and told her: “I’m a terrorist.”
He was telling the truth. Earlier that night, at the Friar Penketh Wetherspoons on Barbauld Street, he had spoken of his plan to use a machete to murder his local MP, Labour’s Rosie Cooper. He would later testify in court that he had been “drunk and ranting” and that he’d “have probably talked to anyone that was there”.
He may well have been drunk, but he was deadly serious. At some point during the previous month he’d spent £54 on a 19-inch machete, which he intended to use as the murder weapon. Even before that, in May, his search history showed that he’d googled the phrase: “cutting the jugular artery”.
Renshaw said he believed that murdering Cooper would “send the state a message” – that message being: “If you beat a dog long enough, it bites” – and called his actions “white jihad”. Asked in court why he chose Cooper as his stand-in for the British state, he said simply: “She happened to be my local MP.”
Rosie Cooper was not his only intended victim. Renshaw also planned to take hostages after killing the MP so that he could lure Detective Constable Victoria Henderson to the scene. He had a vendetta against Henderson because she was investigating him for allegedly grooming children for sex, as well as several racial hatred offences. He told the jury that, unlike Cooper, the murder of Henderson “was personal”.
After killing the two women, he planned to reveal a fake bomb vest. He imagined the day would end with his suicide by police. He hoped to die a martyr to the far-right cause.
Spirit of the night
There is a correct way to drink absinthe, and it has a certain sense of theatre. On a quiet afternoon at Barcelona’s Bar Marsella the landlord José Lamiel Vallvé is demonstrating the time-honoured tradition. For this he requires: one glass of neat absinthe, a short silver fork, a pair of sugar cubes and a plastic bottle of water with – and this is the important part – a pin prick in the lid of the bottle. First, José balances the fork on the top of the glass of absinthe and places the sugar cubes into the cradle. Then, taking the water bottle, he squeezes a narrow jet very slowly over the sugar cubes. Keeping my eyes on the yellowy-green liquid, I see the magic start to happen. Ghostly tendrils appear, filling the glass until the liquid has become a misty emulsion. This is known, appropriately, as the ‘louche effect’.
Originally published in Lonely Planet Traveller, August 2018. Continue reading at Lonely Planet.
In Search Of The Perfect Barbecue Ribs
Originally published in Lonely Planet Traveller, August 2018.
The Risen Star: Cardi B
In 2011, when Cardi B lost her job at Manhattan’s Amish Market it was her former boss who suggested her new career path. “You have such a nice body,” he told her. “Why don’t you go across the street and work at Private Eyes?” She took his advice, but stripping couldn’t contain her outsized personality for long. Videos of her sharing her South Bronx street wisdom went viral, landing her on reality show ‘Love & Hip Hop: New York’ in 2015. It was only then that Cardi – born Belcalis Almanzar – began taking music seriously, leading some to assume that her rapping was merely a gimmick to bolster her celebrity. They were wrong. Her hit ‘Bodak Yellow’ was the biggest song of last summer, while this April the 25 year-old broke a record previously held by Beyoncé to become the woman with the most songs in the US charts simultaneously. Debut album ‘Invasion of Privacy’ proved that inside that ‘nice body’ was a sharp and savagely funny lyricist. In a culture dominated by the famous-for-being-famous, Cardi B is that rare thing: the reality star who turned out to be more talented than the competition. The Amish Market’s loss is everyone else’s gain.
Originally published in British GQ, August 2018.
Raising Arizona
The first thing I notice as I step off the plane is the desert heat. On average, Phoenix has 299 days of sunshine every year, while nearby Yuma is not just the sunniest place in the United States, but actually holds the world record for average annual sunshine: an incredible 4,300 hours of sun each year.
The heat and light make up not only the city’s climate, but its character. It was the temperature that drew the celebrated architect Frank Lloyd Wright to Phoenix. He first arrived in 1928 to work as a consultant on the Arizona Biltmore hotel, and returned a decade later, after his doctor told him that the weather would benefit his health, to build Taliesin West, his winter home, school and studio.
Taliesin West remains open to visitors, even though it still operates as one of the best architecture schools in the United States. Taking the guided tour of the school is an excellent route to understanding how Wright built his reputation as one of America’s great architects, and in particular to appreciating his ability to bring the outdoors inside. Sunlight streams into the drafting room where Wright drew up plans for his most famous work, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and where students continue to work and learn from his example.
If they need further inspiration, the Phoenix Art Museum is a good place to start: the gallery sprawls over 26,500 square metres, and houses work dating from the Renaissance right up to the modern day. Highlights include a portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart, modernist work by Georgia O’Keeffe and Anish Kapoor’s acclaimed sculpture Upside Down, Inside Out.
Even the greatest artwork struggles to compete with the majesty of the natural landscapes that lie on the doorstep, however. As I head out into the desert, I feel as if I have arrived in the Wild West of my childhood fantasies: giant saguaro cactuses dot the land, instantly familiar from cowboy films.
Saguaro grows an average of a foot per decade, so those that climb to 20 or 30 feet will have been standing on that same spot for around 250 years. It is easy to picture yourself as one of the early pioneers – although it is worth bearing in mind that widescreen depictions may not have been wholly accurate. In John Ford’s Three Godfathers, John Wayne finds himself stranded in the Arizona desert and hacks open a barrelhead cactus in order to drink the watery pulp. In reality, it would be so full of acids you would be likely to become very ill, so don’t forget your water bottle.
Of course, no visit to Arizona would be complete without paying a visit to the Grand Canyon. Entry to the national park – a three-and-a-half hour drive north of Phoenix – costs £24 per vehicle, a tiny price to pay for the majesty that awaits.
It is hard to describe the experience of standing on the cusp of The Abyss, the name given to one of the canyon’s many look-out points. What is remarkable is not just the size and scale of the canyon, but also the swathe of history it illuminates. It has been six million years since the Colorado River first found its way to the Gulf of California and began working its way down through the dirt and rock. The river now runs more than 1,500 metres below the Grand Canyon’s rim.
There are two very different ways of experiencing the Grand Canyon. One is to hike down into it. The most popular route, the Bright Angel Trail, descends 1,370 metres to the Colorado River, which means you have got to climb all the way back up. The other, rather more leisurely way to get inside the canyon is by helicopter. Maverick Helicopters depart from the airport near the small town of Tusayan, on the south side of the park, and 40-minute flights start from £140.
From the vantage point the flights provide, it is possible to see as far as the Painted Desert and to follow the river before diving through the Dragon Corridor, the widest and deepest part of the canyon. The most heart-stopping moment, however, is early on, when you are flying 15 metres above the Ponderosa pine treeline, and then suddenly there is nothing beneath you except the rushing waters almost a mile below.
But to visit Arizona and only see Phoenix and the Grand Canyon is to barely scratch the state’s surface. To the east of the National Park is the incredibly photogenic Horseshoe Bend, where the curve of the river has carved out a spectacular landmark. Nearby is Antelope Canyon, a narrow and now dry slot canyon, which creates an otherworldly landscape for visitors. Inside the canyon, photographers jostle for position, no surprise considering the world’s most expensive photograph was taken here: Peter Lik sold Phantom, an image of dust in the canyon appearing to take the form of a ghost, for $6.5m in November 2014.
Improbably, Arizona is also home to a burgeoning wine scene. Despite the heat, vineyards have sprouted up in the Verde Valley, near Sedona, and the food and wine being produced here is almost as spectacular as the red rock formations that loom over the town.
With all this and so much more to explore, and with direct flights already taking off from London, it looks like it’s time to get to Phoenix.
Legalise it: Damian Marley, Professor Green and more discuss medical cannabis at Parliament
Your story to tell: How Pamela Des Barres paved the way for #MeToo
“She’s a good girl, loves her mama. Loves Jesus and America too. She’s a good girl, crazy ’bout Elvis. Loves horses and her boyfriend too. It’s a long day, livin’ in Reseda…”
I meet Pamela Des Barres for lunch at a Mexican restaurant in Reseda, the San Fernando Valley neighborhood where she grew up and now lives. She can’t say for certain whether Tom Petty was thinking of her when he wrote those lines, but it seems likely. ‘Free Fallin’’ was released two years after Pamela published her explosive memoir ‘I’m With The Band’ in 1987, and those lyrics echo the early chapters. “I always thought he must have written that song after reading it,” she says as we take our seats. “The girl growing up in Reseda, loving Jesus and horses. That’s all in the book, although I don’t know for sure.”
‘I’m With The Band’ became an instant bestseller, making Pamela the most famous groupie on the planet. “Groupie is just another word for love,” she tells me today, “And love of music and musicians.” Her memoir provides a window into something everyone wanted to know about: what it was like to be right there on the Sunset Strip, at the heart of the 60’s musical, cultural and sexual revolution. To be fought over by Jimmy Page and Mick Jagger, huff solvents with Jim Morrison and find yourself living out debauched fantasies with Keith Moon. These days, however, Pamela says people are more interested in hearing horror stories.
“People are always trying to make me say that musicians abused me and used me, and it just didn’t happen,” she says, defiantly. “I’ve said that all along. It was equal. There was an equal exchange of love and energy and fun between us and the musicians.”
She did have her own experiences of harassment, but they came later – particularly when she was trying to establish herself as an actor, in situations where the power dynamics were very different. In the book, she recounts the story of auditioning for a director who then offers her a massage and comes at her with a vibrator. “There was tonnes of that in my whole life,” she tells me. “There were so many assholes! I related so much to the women who came forward finally, having been through so much of that shit myself. I have plenty of ‘Me Too’ moments, plenty, but none with musicians.”
Pamela is rightfully entirely unabashed about her youthful escapades, but she was above the age of consent by the time she entered the swinging world of groupiedom. By contrast, in 2018 it’s shocking to read her stories of Jimmy Page going off with the then 13-year-old Lori Maddox, or her actor boyfriend Don Johnson leaving her for 14-year-old Melanie Griffith. Pamela tells me it’s impossible to judge that era by today’s standards, adding: “I was repulsed by it. I was totally turned off by it in many ways, but it was what was happening. You deal with what’s put in front of you. At that time, no-one thought: ‘Oh, we better call the police.’ It just didn’t happen that way. Lori’s mom knew what she was going on. Lori is a very good friend of mine, and has been for decades now. She’s proud of her history, she’s happy with it, she has no qualms about it, no regrets whatsoever. That’s what happened in those days.”
She doesn’t think there will ever be equivalents to the Operation Yewtree convictions for the rock stars of that era. “People ask me: ‘Do you think so-and-so is going to go down?’ No, they’re not going down,” she says. “The girls aren’t complaining. No women have come forward and said: ‘David Bowie abused me.’ It’s not going to happen. So that’s why. These women [in the #MeToo movement] came forward and felt abused and taken advantage of. In music, it was an equal exchange, and a very different dynamic.”
Pamela’s own introduction into the world of rock’n’roll came when a school friend, Victor Hayden, introduced her to his cousin Don Van Vliet – better known as Captain Beefheart – who in turn introduced her to Frank Zappa. “Zappa and Beefheart were my mentors!” says Pamela, letting out a laugh at her own good fortune. “Just that alone! They fed off each others’ genius, you know? I came across them so young that I was really sparked by their brilliance.”
It was Zappa who encouraged Pamela to form her own group, The GTOs (Girls Together Outrageously… or Orally… or Occasionally… or Often… these were such free times that even acronyms resisted consistent definition). Their sole record, ‘Permanent Damage’, was released in 1969 and remains a trippy, fascinating document of the Sunset Strip scene at that time. “Zappa always wanted to capture moments in time,” remembers Pamela. “He found this nutty group of dancers and he wanted to encapsulate our world. He thought we had something fun and interesting and useful to say. That encouraged us so much, that someone of his calibre would find us intriguing. He was a master at pulling stories out of people. He helped our creativity by believing in us and then encouraging.”
The emergence of The GTOs helps explain how Pamela went from fantasising about Mick Jagger at home in Reseda to making him her lover. “By the time I met him, he wanted to meet me,” she says. “I was in that situation with The GTOs. There was no internet, no Instagram, none of that, but people were talking about The GTOs. We were the first all-girl group in that rock’n’roll, far-out Zappa way. All the bands were very curious about us, especially the British bands.”
Pamela, of course, has plenty more rock’n’roll war stories, both exuberant and somber: watching Led Zeppelin from atop Page’s guitar amp, seducing Waylon Jennings, taking acid at the Joshua Tree Inn after the death of Gram Parsons or the moments after Altamont when a shaken and distraught Mick Jagger seriously considered leaving the music industry for good. For those, you’ll have to get your hands on ‘I’m With The Band’, which has just been republished in a revised edition. She has also written four more books, and continues to teach a writing workshop for women which has produced award-winners like the author Emma Cline.
It’s her writing that is her most important legacy. She might be best known for the people she partied and slept with in the 60s – immortalised by caricatures like Penny Lane in ‘Almost Famous’ – but really the line between Pamela and the current era of Me Too is a direct one. At a time, and on a subject, when women were expected to stay silent she decided to tell her own story loudly and proudly. She defined her own experiences, on her own terms. “I’m perceived as a loose, freaky woman, and I was a wild child I admit that,” she says, with a playful smile, “But I’m really proud that I was able to express myself in the book. It was the first time you could do that as a woman, in our timeframe.”
Ramble On: Meet Greta Van Fleet, the post-millennial Led Zeppelin
There’s this moment three minutes and twenty-five seconds into ‘Black Smoke Rising’, the last song on Greta Van Fleet’s double EP ‘From The Fires’, where the music has built with such unstoppable momentum that when singer Josh Kiszka roars: “YEEEAAAHHHHH” it feels as inevitable and powerful as an avalanche, or a tornado. It is rock’n’roll as elemental force. It is the sort of sound which makes this writer leap into the air to attempt an ill-advised scissor kick while his cat eyes him warily. It is very good.
I tell this to Greta Van Fleet when I meet them backstage at Marathon Music Works in Nashville and Josh, a curly-haired, handsome cherub of a man, reassures me by saying he was feeling pretty much the same way when he first let out the aforementioned “YEEEAAAHHHHH”. He was responding instinctively to the music. “The song will, in a fashion, speak to you,” he says. “And you kind of just go with it.”
Alex Turner: Star Man
What do you mean, you’ve never seen ‘Blade Runner’?
Alex Turner lives for moments like this. The strangled incredulity in the voices of those who simply refuse to believe that in this age of instant on-demand entertainment he’s never sat down to watch Harrison Ford hunt replicants. He loves it so much he wrote the line into ‘Star Treatment’, the opening track of the Arctic Monkeys’ sixth album ‘Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino’.
“When it’s at it’s absolute best, that scenario,” he says, with pure glee in his eyes, “And I’ve only seen this happen a couple of times, but it goes beyond: ‘What do you mean you’ve never seen ‘Blade Runner’?’ and gets to: ‘Oh my God, I envy you!’”
The memory of this makes him throw back his head and laugh, the sound echoing around the Masonic Lodge in Los Angeles’ Hollywood Forever Cemetery where in a few hours the band will play out on the lawn. He’s wearing a tan safari suit, a pair of yellow-tinted shades and a white shirt open so low you wonder why they even bothered putting buttons on it in the first place.
“I fucking love that shit,” he says, composing himself. “When it goes there, that’s like a fuckin’ slam dunk. ‘Oh I envy you!’ People are so involved in that stuff, aren’t they?”
It’s rare to see Turner this unguarded. Usually the 32-year-old talks like he writes: slowly, marshaling his thoughts in long pauses and choosing every syllable precisely. Yet back at the start of 2016, he found himself at a complete loss for words. He had no idea how to follow the multi-platinum international success of 2013’s ‘AM’. He was rattling around his home in Los Angeles, with his model girlfriend Taylor Bagley and their dog Scooter, not watching ‘Blade Runner’. Instead he was watching Fellini’s 1963 meta masterpiece ‘8½’.
If you want to understand how Turner arrived at ‘Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino’, ‘8½’ is the key to unlock it. It’s a film about a director with writer’s block, struggling to make a science-fiction movie – a towering spaceship set is under construction – but all the while being haunted by flashbacks of his youth.
“I’m not sure if ‘haunted’ is exactly the right word,” suggests Turner. There he goes again, always interrogating language. “It seems inherently negative and I don’t think it has to be, but yeah, things from his past are coming in and out, and it’s writing about writing.”
‘8½’ showed Turner a way forward. It combined a lot of the things he was struggling to talk about: his own writer’s block, the memories of his youth, and the science-fiction vocabulary which would allow him to explore it all without leaving himself too exposed.
So he went down to the old spare room, which he would later start referring to as the ‘lunar surface’, and which now contained a Steinway Vertegrand piano that the band’s manager Ian McAndrew had given him for his 30th birthday. Sitting down at the piano, he experienced his own Fellini-esque flashback. He tumbled back through time to before the house in LA, before headlining Glastonbury twice and the millions in the bank, back before even the electric excitement of that first album, to little 8-year-old Alex learning to play the piano with his dad, David.
“There’s something about the stuff I wrote on piano that definitely reminds me of the types of thing he would play, and still does even now,” he says. “There’s this bit in ‘One Point Perspective’, the sort of jazzy bit of that, that every time it comes around, when I sit there, it feels like something he would play. That’s the thing I’ve been playing whenever I’ve sat on a piano stool since I was a kid, but I never thought it would find its way into my compositions as much as it has on this record.”
As he sat there, playing his dad’s old chords, he experienced another flashback, to a now-teenage Alex in his parents’ garage writing ‘Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not’. There is only one time in our conversation when Turner doesn’t pause or hesitate to answer, and it’s when I ask whether he thinks this record is lyrically the closest thing he’s ever written to their first.
“Absolutely I do, absolutely,” he cuts in, before the words are even out of my mouth. “I can’t put me finger on exactly why I think that, but I have been saying it a lot recently. It’s set in a completely different place, obviously, but there’s something in the lyrics that reminds me of something in that writing. I’m tempted to say that it’s something to do with how blunt it is. I think that was something I was trying to get away from, and perhaps I’ve returned to it now.”
So it makes sense that the album opens with one of the bluntest lines he’s ever written: “I just wanted to be one of the Strokes, now look at the mess you made me make.” He has found himself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful girlfriend, and he asks himself – how did I get here? “The first thing that line does is make me think about then and how much time seems to have suddenly passed,” he says. “I expected to change it, but by the time I got back around to it it seemed like it was exactly where it needed to be, and I was obviously attracted to how blunt it was.”
The album is littered with lyrics just as frank and direct as that one. On ‘Science Fiction’, he sings about his own creative process: “I want to make a simple point about peace and love but in a sexy way where it’s not obvious… So I tried to write a song to make you blush, but I’ve a feeling that the whole thing may well just end up too clever for its own good, the way some science fiction does.” If it wasn’t for the trappings of the fictional lunar hotel that he set about constructing around himself, this could have been a purely confessional, autobiographical record.
“And you could say because of those trappings, it’s allowed to be,” he suggests. Then he laughs to himself at what he’s just given away. “I just walked right into that one didn’t I? I think the way in to that was that I became interested in the idea that these worlds are created in science fiction stories that allow you to explore things that are rooted in this world.”
Things he would have found hard to explore without that device?
“Almost impossible,” he agrees.
One of those subjects is his own personal failings, a topic he keeps prodding like a wound that won’t heal. He sings about: “Things that I just cannot explain to you and those that I hope I don’t ever have to”, and the album closes with the line: “I’ve done some things that I shouldn’t have done. But I haven’t stopped loving you once.” Rather than writing more songs about love and lust, did he find himself drawn to writing songs of regret?
“Oh, you devil!” he laughs at this line of questioning. Understandably, he’s not going to be drawn on the specifics, but he did think it was time to stop singing about love. “I think ‘Sweet Dreams, TN’ from the Puppets album seemed like the place to leave that, for the time being,” he says. “All that is is a love letter, I don’t know how much more detail you could go into. Also, it was suggested to me by a friend: ‘What about not doing that for a moment’. I think I was arriving at that place meself anyway.”
As well as allowing him to be more introspective, the science fiction setting also gave Turner space to write about modern life. One of the album’s best tracks, ‘Four Out Of Five’, concerns a taqueria on the roof of the titular lunar hotel complex with the unlikely name: ‘The Information-Action Ratio’. It’s a phrase Turner lifted from Neil Postman’s 1985 book ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death’, which also heavily influenced Father John Misty’s ‘Total Entertainment Forever’ on last year’s ‘Pure Comedy’. Turner says the phrase ended up as the name of the taqueria by happy accident. It just so happened that the words came in on the backing vocals he recorded with drummer Matt Helders just as the lyrics mentioned the taqueria.
“The implication of course is that that’s the name of the thing,” he explains. “But what a wonderful name for a taqueria on the roof of a lunar hotel complex! But you’re more interested, I think, in why that phrase leapt out at me. I think one of the things I liked about that phrase is that you sort of know exactly what it is right away.”
The Information-Action Ratio is Postman’s prescient analysis of the way that a tidal wave of information and entertainment renders all of us on the receiving end utterly helpless as to how to decipher which of it is useful or useless. In other words, you’re not alone if you feel overwhelmed by 24-hour rolling news coverage, Twitter feeds and the constant, pinging updates on your phone.
“Exactly,” he says. “And phonetically it’s quite alluring, I think.”
Once Turner had corralled all these disparate ideas into ‘Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino’, he assembled the band – Helders, guitarist Jamie Cook, bassist Nick O’Malley and producer James Ford – and they decamped first to Vox Studios in Los Angeles and then to La Frette, the 19th century mansion-cum-recording studio in northern France where Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds recorded ‘Skeleton Tree’. There, the five were joined by a host of other musicians including their touring keyboard player, Tom Rowley, Tame Impala’s Cameron Avery, Klaxons’ James Righton, Mini Mansions’ Zach Dawes and Tyler Parkford, and drummer Loren Humphrey. They all played together in the same room, inspired by the lush recording sessions for the Beach Boys’ ‘Pet Sounds’ and the idea of Phil Spector’s ‘Wall of Sound’, as heard on Dion’s ‘Born to Be With You’ and Leonard Cohen’s ‘Death of a Ladies’ Man’, some of Turner’s favourite records. “You see those images from those recording sessions and it just looks so exciting,” says Turner. “Primarily I think I love those albums and I wanted my album to be a bit like them.”
Yet when it came to the vocals, they found that it was the lines Turner recorded on his vintage 8-track Tascam 388 in splendid isolation at home that needed to be retained for the record, impossible to better wherever else they tried them.
In a way, that’s fitting. ‘Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino’ is full of songs which sound like they’re being narrated by a reclusive rock star. On ‘One Point Perspective’, he’s dancing at home alone in his underwear, only distracted by the suggestively named “Mr Winter Wonderland” who keeps making him lose his train of thought. Like David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ and Elton John’s ‘Rocket Man’, these are songs that are ostensibly about space travel but use that as a metaphor to talk about the isolating nature of fame.
Where ‘Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino’ joins the dots is by extending that idea to all of us. These days we’re all isolated, living in our own bubbles overwhelmed and rendered apathetic by the alienating stream of information pouring in on our screens. We seek refuge in frivolity. “Everyone’s on a barge floating down the stream of great TV,” as Turner sings on ‘Star Treatment’. We can have everything we want delivered to us on-demand. “You push the button and we’ll do the rest”, the slogan from a very early 1888 Kodak advert, repurposed for ‘The World’s First Ever Monster Truck Front Flip’, that could also describe every app on whatever device you’re reading these words on. Is Turner telling us that in 2018 we’re all becoming more like reclusive rock stars, sat in our pods with every form of entertainment ever devised available to us at the push of a button, slowly realising that having our desires met instantly may not actually make us happy?
“I find it hard to disagree with anything you’re saying,” he says finally, after another of those lingering pensive pauses. “I can’t resist. I’m trying to think of something that I can say that relates that I didn’t say on the record. Of course, I suppose. Of course.”
Hollywood Forever: The Arctic Monkeys return
Johnny Ramone, Jayne Mansfield, Cecil B. DeMille: The stars were out last night at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles, the silent majority joining the lairy still-living to see Alex Turner unveil his latest sashay towards songwriting immortality.
The Arctic Monkeys release their sixth album this coming Friday. Titled Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino, it is in parts a sort of glam, retro-futuristic concept album about a lunar hang-out where Bowie’s “Starman” and Elton John’s “Rocket Man” might meet up for a martini. Counter-intuitively, it’s also Turner’s most introspective collection of songs to date.
The experience: Stay silent for 10 days
Published in N by Norwegian, May 2018.
I Spent 10 Days at a Silent Retreat and Would Really Like My Phone Back Now Please
Imagine a world without sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll. Then remove cigarettes and alcohol from the equation. For good measure, why not banish meat too. And then to top it all off, let’s pretend that neither speaking nor reading exist on our plane. This is the reality of a Vipassana silent retreat, and in this world there’s only one thing to do: meditate.
Allegedly the same meditation technique that Gotama the Buddha harnessed in order to achieve spiritual enlightenment and reach nirvana, the practise of Vipassana stretches back about 2500 years into the past and its spread is global, even if its teacher is no longer with us here on Earth. Burmese Vipassana master S.N. Goenka passed away in 2013, but his wisdom now lives on in the audio and video recordings that participants on a retreat are privy to.
Chuck D: ‘51 per cent of the US voted pro-Trump, Kanye’s not alone in being crazy’
If you ever find yourself in a hip hop themed pub quiz, try to make sure Chuck D is on your team. Not only is he one of the greatest and most influential MCs in the history of rap, he’s also blessed with the sort of encyclopedic knowledge and staggering recall that places him among the genre’s foremost historians and custodians. Chuck was there, and he got receipts.
Born Carlton Douglas Ridenhour in Queens, New York in 1960, Chuck formed Public Enemy in the late Eighties. Records like 1988’s “It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back” and 1990’s “Fear Of A Black Planet” became instant classics, transforming the genre and proving that hip hop could simultaneously be politically incisive and sonically explosive.
He’s currently looking back on those early years with the launch of a new compilation album, Hip-Hop The Golden Era 1979-1999, which brings together 72 choice cuts from the likes of NWA, Run-DMC, Sugarhill Gang, Eric B & Rakim, the Beastie Boys and, of course, Public Enemy themselves.
But Chuck is looking forwards too. He’ll be back on the road this summer with Prophets Of Rage, a supergroup which also features Tom Morello, Tim Commerford and Brad Wilk of Rage Against the Machine, B-Real of Cypress Hill, and his longtime Public Enemy collaborator DJ Lord.
Here, he shares his memories of hip hop’s “golden era” before weighing in on the future of the genre – and why Kanye might not have ended up as a Trump supporter if he was following more than one person on Twitter.
Pa’l Norte 2018: Franz All Over The World
Alex Kapranos is wearing a jacket with Day of the Dead-style skulls embroidered on the chest, and that’s not the only way that Mexico is close to the Franz Ferdinand frontman’s heart.
“I think there’s a certain energy that we have to our music which really clicks with people in Latin America,” he says, leaning forward on a sofa in the band’s dressing room backstage at Monterrey’s Pa’l Norte festival. “There’s a real kind of openness and warmth to people here. It’s our natural environment, I think.”
They might be 5,000 miles from Glasgow, but they’re made to feel right at home by the 105,000 people squeezed into Parque Fundidora for the festival. Rock’n’roll that you can shake your hips to is very much the order of the weekend at Pa’l Norte, with Queens of the Stone Age and Muse also turning in sets that are seductive, rather than headbanging.
After the festival, Franz will be continuing their Mexican love affair with their own headline show in Mexico City – a place they’re returning to for the first time since one of their crowds trashed a venue. “It was a big arena, and the crowds in Mexico are really intense,” says Kapranos. “The first four or five rows of seats in the arena got completely destroyed. Hopefully we’re not playing a seated arena this time!”
The band’s love for this part of the world extends beyond the joy of playing to vast crowds. Drummer Paul Thomson has spent time in Puerto Vallarta, famous for being the town where Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor holed up while Burton was shooting ‘The Night of the Iguana’, while Kapranos recently explored the Yucatán Peninsula. “It’s incredible,” he says. “I hired a car and drove all around there. They have these cenotes, these underwater caves where you can swim completely underwater, and they have these strange albino fish that never see sunlight. The food down there is astonishing, things like Sopa de Lima. For me, in Mexico, but also in any city or country around the world, the best thing to do is get yourself lost. To turn the GPS off on your phone and see where you end up. Watch people, talk to people. Those are some of the best surprises you can get. The London perspective is often not to talk to strangers, but when you find yourself in other parts of the world that’s sometimes the best thing you can do.”
Now back at work, they’ve been introducing fans to tracks from new album ‘Always Ascending’, which was released in February. It’s an experimental, playful record – but Kapranos says it’s still been generating the requisite energy when played live. “It’s experimental in the sense that it’s lots of stuff that you haven’t maybe heard on our previous records, but it still sounds like Franz Ferdinand, and there’s still bangers on it,” he says. “It might sound different to our other records but people still want to get up and dance to it.”
The band will spend much of the rest of the year on the road – with key dates including a Glasgow homecoming at TRNSMT Festival at the end of June, a headline show at the Roundhouse in September and their first ever trip to Ukraine. “Nowadays, in the age of social media, you’re very aware of where your fans are,” says Kapranos. “We’ve had a lot of feedback from people from Ukraine for a long time. ‘When are you going to come?’ So finally this year we’re going to get to see it.”
For Franz fans who want to catch the band in an exotic locale without leaving Britain, they headline Festival No. 6 this September in Portmeirion, the curious Welsh tourist village that was designed by architect Clough Williams-Ellis in the style of an Italian village and featured in cult TV show The Prisoner. “I’m really excited about,” says Kapranos. “I’m a huge fan of The Prisoner, and I’ve never been to Portmeirion before.”
Thomson, though, has been before. “I went when I was 16 with a bunch of guys, because of The Prisoner,” he reminisces. “I’m not sure you’d call it a lads’ weekend. Maybe a virgin’s weekend? I’ll be returning a man this summer.”
Shame: ‘Everyone’s political – it’s just whether they choose to share it’
Backstage at the Teragram Ballroom in Los Angeles, Shame frontman Charlie Steen – still slicked with sweat after the south London five-piece’s thrillingly visceral set – is reeling off stories about how strange their first ever cross-country tour across America has been. They’re a band who collect outlandish tales like other bands collect hangovers and STDs.
“We were in Louisville, Kentucky,” he tells me. “Me and Eddie, our guitarist, went to the liquor store to get cigarettes and there was a guy stood next to us who was completely blue. We got carded, and the blue guy went: ‘Are you boys German or sumthin’?’ We said no, we’re British. Then he said: ‘Oh we’ve got a lot of them stationed here.’ He started going on about how North Carolina made the wrong decision. We didn’t know what he was talking about.”
It turns out they’d had an encounter with one of the Blue Fugates of Kentucky, an Appalachian mountain family who all carry the rare skin condition methemoglobinemia which turns their skin a shade of blue.
“The band we were on tour with, Protomartyr, said they look out for them every time they’re in Kentucky. We just stumbled upon him in the liquor store,” says Steen, still sounding as if he hadn’t quite believed his own eyes. “It’s like seeing a unicorn.”
Steen takes a pull on a beer while the rest of the band – guitarists Sean Coyle-Smith and Eddie Green, bassist Josh Finerty and drummer Charlie Forbes – prod at the wreckage of a birthday cake on the dressing room table.
The New Dutch Masters
Published in Lonely Planet Traveller, May 2018.
A Young Photographer Takes on Thailand’s Monarchy
Thai army soldiers entered an art gallery in downtown Bangkok one June day in 2017 and forcibly removed several pieces by the photographer Harit Srikhao. The 22-year-old’s work had clearly touched a nerve with Thai authorities, although he’s still not exactly sure why he was targeted by the dangerously overzealous critics.
“I’ve been offered a lot of explanations, official and unofficial alike, but none of them make sense,” he says. “It just goes to show the lack of freedom of thought in my country, and how ridiculously the government use their power to bully citizens. Most importantly, it is an affirmation that art is indeed a very, very powerful weapon.”
Srikhao wields this weapon with a hallucinogenic flourish. From his base in Pathum Tani, a northern suburb of Bangkok, he creates work that offers a savage satirical perspective on his country’s political landscape. His pictures depict a fantastical world in which traditional hierarchies are upended, the sanctity of the Thai monarchy is punctured and government propaganda images are rendered absurd. He alters his own photos by cutting and pasting by hand in hopes of revealing a deeper truth: “I use hand collage instead of Photoshop because I want to perform surgery on the pictures.” He explains, “I want to show the traces of how reality has been made oblique.”
Baaba Maal on being the sound of Black Panther’s Wakanda
To soundtrack the moment in Black Panther when we’re first transported to Wakanda, director Ryan Coogler and score composer Ludwig Göransson knew they needed something special. They found it in Baaba Maal, the legendary Senegalese singer whose unique vocals echo out as we soar over the country’s hilltops. Maal is singing in his native Fula language about the death of an elephant, a metaphor for a fallen monarch.
For the filmmakers, working with Baaba Maal was an opportunity to incorporate African music alongside Kendrick Lamar’s more high-profile soundtrack. For Maal himself, it was a chance to lend his voice to a new kind of storytelling about his home continent: “I like the story a lot, and the challenge of telling the story,” he tells NME. “I confess, I didn’t know the film would have the impact that it has had now! It’s unbelievable. I really, really like the film but I didn’t expect all of that!”
Maal, whose most recent album ‘The Traveller’ was produced by The Very Best’s Johan Hugo in 2016, knows all about combining traditional and modern forms of music and storytelling. “I’m very traditionalist, but also very modern in the way that I love electronic sounds and the way technology changes culture,” says Maal. “The way it comes across in the film is that the culture is ancient, but also it talks to the future as well.”
The collaboration came about after Göransson travelled to northern Senegal to meet Maal at his home in the town of Podor, and then spent several weeks learning about the music of the region. “I’m always touring in very remote places in Senegal, so when he arrived I told him I was going on tour and invited him to go with me,” says Maal. “We left from my hometown, Podor, and then we visited every part of north Senegal. I thought he’d enjoy the tour and also find some inspiration. Then when we came back we jumped in the studio and he recorded me as well as all the other musicians he wanted to record for Black Panther.”
When creating the sound of Wakanda, Maal says that Göransson was not just inspired by the shows he saw on tour but also by the music being made by the public. In Senegal, locals often pay tribute to important figures like Maal by playing drums for them outside their home or when welcoming them into a new town or village.
“When you follow a band like my band around Senegal, it’s not just the band themselves who are going to inspire you, it’s also the population,” says Maal. “Everywhere we go people welcome us and play music. There are a lot of ceremonies in the daytimes. If you’re there and you listen and watch it will give you a lot of inspiration. I think that sort of music is also connected to the story of Black Panther. He heard a lot of songs about kings, and about kingdoms, that have been passed down since ancient times, so I think that was good for him.”
Throughout the score, certain instruments are associated with certain characters. Michael B. Jordan’s Killmonger is often accompanied by the sound of a Fula flute. For Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa, the score uses the talking drum, a popular West African instrument which can mimic the tone of human speech. “The talking drum is an instrument which comes from far away in the past but leads to the future,” explains Maal. “When you play it, it sounds as if it could fill up the universe.”
Sister Nancy is the first lady of dancehall
It was 1982 in Kingston, Jamaica, and Sister Nancy – the first ever female dancehall DJ – realised that she needed one final song to complete her debut album. Recording at Channel One Studios with a band that included the legendary Sly and Robbie rhythm section, she went to the mic and freestyled ‘Bam Bam’ over Ansell Collins’ ‘Stalag 17’. It’s fair to say she nailed it.
‘Bam Bam’ went on to become one of the most influential reggae songs of all time, sampled at least 80 times on tracks including Kanye’s ‘Famous’ and Jay-Z’s ‘Bam’. More importantly, ‘Bam Bam’ itself has stood the test of time. Almost four decades on there is still almost nothing that sounds better played loud in the sun.
Yet Sister Nancy saw little reward from the song’s success. Contractually cut out from receiving any royalties, she left music behind and moved to New Jersey where she took a job in a bank. It was only in the last four years, after the song enjoyed another resurgence, that she was finally able to get her hands on some of her backdated royalties and return to playing live. Ahead of her European tour this summer, Sister Nancy shares her remarkable story:
How did you first get involved in making music when you were growing up in Jamaica?
“It was always a part of me. Music is a part of us, but it was my bigger brother Brigadier Jerry who motivated me to do something with it. I went to see him DJ, and I thought if he could do it then I could do it as well. I didn’t think about it, I just did it. It was always a part of my family. It’s not that my brother was encouraging me with words, I just followed what he was doing because I liked it.”
You became the first ever female dancehall DJ – were there other women working in music in Jamaica at the time?
“There weren’t many of us. There was one, Muma Liza, who was a harmonizer with Kojak, but I was the one who came and took it to the dancehall. I started off with three tracks: ‘Papa Dean’, ‘Money Can’t Buy Me Love’ and ‘Proud A We’. Then I did a couple more singles: ‘One Two’ and ‘Transport Connection’. After I did those, ‘One Two’ started to take off and was doing well so that’s when I was asked to do an album. So that’s how my album ‘One, Two’ came about.”
Is it true that ‘Bam Bam’ was a late addition?
“Yes that’s right, ‘Bam Bam’ was the last track I put on the album. I had nine songs done and I needed to do one more but it was very hard for me, you know? There was an older song called ‘Bam Bam’, so I decided to do a ‘Bam Bam’ too. So that’s how I did the last track and finished the album. I freestyled it, I only wrote it down after. It’s timeless. It’s been 36 years, and ‘Bam Bam’ is still there. It’s not going anywhere.”
Despite the huge success of ‘Bam Bam’, you initially didn’t see much money from it. Are you getting properly paid these days?
“Yes, I’m getting the royalties now. I wasn’t getting anything for 34 years, but in 2014 after they used it in a Reebok commercial I decided to sue them. Now I own 50% of the ‘One, Two’ album. At least I’m getting something now, I never used to get anything.”
So when Kanye sampled ‘Bam Bam’ for ‘Famous’ in 2016 did he have to ask your permission?
“No, he didn’t have to ask me because I don’t own the song. The song is owned by Westbury Music, who are based in England. Kanye would have had to go through them, and then they gave him authorisation to use it. Then they make sure I get my royalties from the sample too.”
That’s good. What did you make of ‘Famous’?
“It’s not the first time I’ve heard someone sample ‘Bam Bam’. When I heard him do it I just thought: ‘Well, that’s good for me.’ Whatever way he takes it, it’s very good for me because it keeps me moving. Do you know what I’m saying? It keeps me working. Then Jay-Z did the same thing. It’s a blessing.”
You went back to Jamaica with Jay-Z, didn’t you?
“Yeah that’s right. He wanted me to appear in the video for ‘Bam’ that he was making with [Damian] Marley. I spent three days down there with him. It was nice, but a man is just a man. Jay-Z is just a man, same as you. He’s no different.”
You’re playing the Positive Vibration festival in Liverpool this summer. At your shows do you still see a lot of young people getting into your music?
“It’s always been like that! Sometimes I wonder how they know about me after so long. I’ve been doing this for 41 years. I don’t know how they hear about me, but it’s mostly young people at my shows when I’m performing all over the world. There’s a few older folks like me, but mostly it’s younger people. They’ll have the ‘One, Two’ album or a couple of singles and they bring them to me to sign.”
What is it about your music that keeps connecting with new generations?
“I don’t know what causes it, but I’m going to say that they’re in love with the songs and they’re in love with me… or my voice! I think it’s my voice, and ‘Bam Bam’. You can’t not love ‘Bam Bam’. I don’t know what to say about it. ‘Bam Bam’ is just ‘Bam Bam’! Whatever it is, I’m grateful.”
The Art Of The Deal
“You guys are such dorks!” says Kim Deal, which is a fair assessment because I’ve just told her about the time teenage me and a friend went to see her band The Breeders in homemade T-shirts that said: ‘Cool as Kim Deal’.
Sure, I’m a dork, but I’m in good company. The former Pixies bassist inspires devotion, whether it’s Kurt Cobain naming Breeders’ ‘Pod’ as an album that changed his life or Thom Yorke saying he was uncomfortable playing after Pixies because it’s “like the Beatles opening for us.”
As The Breeders prepare to release fifth album ‘All Nerve’, Kim talks us through her rock’n’roll life:
- JOINING PIXIES (BECAUSE THEY MADE HER LAUGH)
In January 1986, a week after moving to Boston from her hometown of Dayton, Ohio, Kim spotted an ad in the Boston Phoenix placed by future Pixies bandmates Charles Thompson (Black Francis) and Joey Santiago. “Most of those adverts were guys going: ‘Looking for blonde singer aged 19-22. Hair must be between shoulder length and mid-back.’ or: ‘Looking for drummer with a PROFESSIONAL ATTITUDE’,” she explains. “So: ‘Looking for someone into Peter, Paul and Mary and Hüsker Dü. No chops.’ caught my eye. I thought it was funny.”
- HER IRONIC PSEUDONYM
On the first two Pixies releases, ‘Come On Pilgrim’ and ‘Surfer Rosa’, Kim was credited as Mrs John Murphy, taking her then husband’s name as an arch feminist joke. “Somebody said that when I worked in a doctor’s office,” she explains. “‘My name is not Ethel. My name is Mrs Howard Rosenstein.’ Holy shit! I need to show her respect by calling her by somebody else’s name!”
- WRITING THE BEST PIXIES SONG (AT LEAST ACCORDING TO KURT)
‘Surfer Rosa’ only featured one song with lyrics by Kim – ‘Gigantic’, a voyeuristic ode to a well-endowed man – but it made such an impression on Kurt Cobain that in 1992 he said: “I wish Kim was allowed to write more songs for The Pixies, because ‘Gigantic’ is the best Pixies song and Kim wrote it.” Kim reacts modestly: “Well, it’s better than somebody saying: ‘Oh God, you suck.’”
- FORMING THE BREEDERS
Kim formed The Breeders with Throwing Muses guitarist Tanya Donelly, and their debut 1990 album ‘Pod’ was hugely influential – not least on Nirvana. “I think they got Steve Albini to record ‘In Utero’ because they really liked ‘Pod’,” says Kim. “I remember Dave Grohl saying he really liked the drum sound, but I always felt bad for Dave because the drum sound for ‘Pod’ sounds huge because there’s so much empty space for the drums to ring out. Poor Dave had all these guitars and bass playing all the way through.”
- TOURING WITH NIRVANA
Nirvana were such fans that in 1992, a year after ‘Nevermind’ made them mind-bogglingly successful, they invited The Breeders to join their tour. It was an eye-opening experience for Kelley, who had joined on guitar, and new drummer Jim Macpherson. “The first show with Nirvana was one of Macpherson’s first shows out of Dayton, Ohio ever,” laughs Kim. “He asked Dave Grohl: ‘What are those big black boxes?’ Dave is like: ‘You idiot, they’re monitors. You listen to the band through them!’ I think that’s why Nirvana enjoyed touring with us so much: to see it through other people’s eyes.”
- MAKING ‘CANNONBALL’ WHILE PIXIES SPLIT
Black Francis unilaterally disbanded Pixies in 1993, but Kim had the perfect riposte. “I was in the studio literally recording ‘Cannonball’ when Kelley came down the hallway and said: ‘Pixies broke up’. I said: ‘Okay, get out of my way,’” remembers Kim. The song was named NME’s Song of the Year and 25 years on remains a timeless indie rock staple. “I don’t think anyone thought it would get played on the radio,” says Kim. “I wasn’t thinking: ‘This is it! This is my ticket!’”
- BECOMING AN INDIE ICON
The success of ‘Cannonball’ and second Breeders album ‘Last Splash’ helped seal Kim’s image as the embodiment of rock star cool. During the ‘90s she was the subject of tribute songs from the Dandy Warhols (‘Cool As Kim Deal’) and Japanese rockers The Pillows (‘Kim Deal’). “I loved it but was kind of horrified at the same time,” says Kim. “I’ve never heard the Dandy Warhols one. Are they actually saying I’m cool or are they being facetious? I’ve listened to The Pillows because I can’t understand what they’re saying. They’re probably singing about their cat called Kim Deal.”
- GETTING THE BAND BACK TOGETHER
In 2013, Kim reunited with Kelley, Jim and bassist Josephine Wiggs to play shows marking the 20th anniversary of ‘Last Splash’. When the year was over, they were offered more gigs. “That’s when my OCD kicked in: ‘Wait, that’s not the 20th anniversary anymore,’” says Kim. “Our friends told us we should release another album. We kept adding stuff to our setlist and that started the recording of the album.”
- TEAMING UP WITH THE GENERATION SHE INSPIRED
The result is ‘All Nerve’, a strange and visceral rock album which features, among many other things, a Courtney Barnett guest appearance on ‘Howl At The Summit’. For Kim, it was a chance to collaborate with someone she’d first heard of as a fan. “She’d covered ‘Cannonball’,” explains Kim. “They did a pretty good version: shambolic and kind of casual.”
- NEVER STOPPING
While it’s been 10 years since last Breeders album ‘Mountain Battles’, Kim says she hopes there’ll be another sooner and bristles against the suggestion she’s not prolific – pointing to her solo 7 inch series and busy touring schedule. “I want to defend myself. I do music constantly but sure, I’m ‘not prolific’,” she says, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “Let’s go with that.”
Oscars 2018: The artist behind the Harvey Weinstein statue speaks out
With just a couple of days to go before this year’s Oscars, a lifesize gold-coloured model of Harvey Weinstein perched on a ‘casting couch’ has appeared in Hollywood near the venue for the ceremony. In his right hand he holds an Oscar statue, suggestively clasped above his groin. The artwork is a collaboration between British-born street artist Plastic Jesus and Joshua ‘Ginger’ Monroe, the artist behind the naked Donald Trump statues. GQ caught up with Plastic Jesus this morning in LA:
GQ: What’s the message behind this piece of work?
Plastic Jesus: The idea behind this piece is that Harvey Weinstein was this iconic figure in the industry. In terms of profile, I don’t think there’s anybody to compare with him. I chose to come to LA, as so many other people do, pursuing a dream. There would have been so many people who came here hoping to be actors or actresses and the opportunity to get somewhere near Harvey for a meeting or a dinner would have been an absolute dream. For some, that dream clearly turned into a nightmare. The idea for this piece was that I wanted people to be able to come and sit down on the sofa next to Harvey. Knowing what we now know about Harvey, in terms of his abuse of power, sexual harassment and rape, what does it feel like sitting next to him? This icon who turned out to be a monster.
Dita Von Teese: ‘I’m not going to out the 75-year-old talk-show host who grabbed my butt’
The Tower Bar, near the eastern end of the Sunset Strip, is one of Hollywood’s most elegant celebrity hangouts. Tucked away on the ground floor of the Sunset Tower Hotel, in what was once the mobster Bugsy Siegel’s apartment, it’s the sort of place where it’s no surprise to see Dita Von Teese waiting in a corner booth, perfectly poised in a floral Zac Posen dress.
Already the world’s most famous burlesque dancer, not to mention a model and fashion designer, Dita Von Teese is about to add another string to her bow by releasing her first album. On the self-titled record, the former Mrs Marilyn Manson eschews her ex-husband’s goth rock in favour of sensual Gainsbourg-esque seduction, on songs which were written for her by contemporary French sleaze-pop merchant Sébastien Tellier.
Over a martini, she tells us how her collaboration with Tellier came about, the highest compliment Hunter S Thompson ever gave her and discusses her reaction to the Harvey Weinstein scandal and #MeToo.
Sex, Death and Social Media at the Annual Porn Awards
Sometime after the talking-head segment on how to make an award-winning anal scene, but before the stage invasion that led Lil Wayne to declare he’d “died and gone to heaven”, this year the AVN Awards – known as the “Oscars of porn” – spent a few minutes facing the reality and finality of death.
The ceremony, which was held on Saturday night at the Hard Rock Casino in Las Vegas, is not usually an arena which grapples with mortality. This time was different. When Greg Lansky, the creator of adult studios Tushy, Vixen and Blacked Studios, collected his Director of the Year award, he said only a quick thank you before inviting the producer Kevin Moore to speak in his place. Moore’s wife, the porn star August Ames, took her own life on the 5th of December last year at the age of 23.
The Mark E Smith NME obituary: 1957 – 2018
Mark E Smith, the singer, leader and sole constant member of The Fall, has died. While his cause of death has not yet been announced, last year he was forced to cancel tour dates due to what the band’s manager Pamela Vander referred to at the time as “bizarre and rare medical issues.” The phrase ‘bizarre and rare’ could equally serve as an epitaph for his life and singular body of work.
Smith was born in Broughton, Salford in 1957 before his family moved to nearby Prestwich while he was still young. He attended Stand Grammar School, which he left at 16. He got a job in a meat factory, and later worked on the Manchester docks as a shipping clerk. He experimented with drugs at a relatively young age, once claiming to have taken LSD even before he drank alcohol or started smoking.
The night I went out drinking with Mark E Smith
The barmaid at Gulliver’s, on Oldham Street in Manchester, spotted Mark E Smith walking in with me and had poured out a pair of double whiskeys before we reached the bar. That still left the question of what I was going to drink.
Mark E Smith, The Fall frontman who has died today aged 60, will be remembered as one of post-punk’s great frontmen, a poet with a genuinely unique and provocative style, and an occasionally combative interviewee. Along with his music, personally I’ll remember him most as one of the most entertaining men I was ever lucky enough to go for a drink with.
The Carnival Builders
In a disused factory in Marsa, a 15-minute drive outside the Maltese capital, Valletta, a man in a grubby tracksuit takes a circular saw to the sharp edge of a steel structure. Sparks fly around him, but the man, his eyes shielded only by plastic sunglasses, works with a determination born of obsession. The air is thick with the smell of hot metal, spray paint and cigarette smoke. To mark the last days before Lent, some people make pancakes. Roderick Zerafa builds Carnival floats.
His creation towers over him. At 20-feet tall and 12-feet wide, it’s bigger than the trucks on the industrial estate outside. The steel base supports a plywood skeleton, then the whole thing is covered with papier-mâché and painted neon bright. It has an engine for a heart, powering mechanisms that make each of the float’s gargantuan figures dance in robotic motion. The result looks like something from the fevered imagination of Terry Gilliam. It has taken 23-year-old Roderick nine months to build, helped by a team that started with half a dozen volunteers before swelling to five times that many in the weeks before Carnival. Tomorrow it will make its first appearance in front of both the public and the judges, who’ll decide which team of float builders will take home this year’s coveted Carnival crown.
Much like the concurrent celebrations in Rio de Janeiro and New Orleans, Carnival in Malta is a boisterous party that’s taken very seriously by the locals. The run-up to Lent has great significance for the largely Catholic population, who have no fewer than 359 churches to choose from, despite the fact that the Republic of Malta’s three inhabited islands – Malta, Gozo and tiny Comino – have a combined area smaller than the Isle of Wight. Sitting atop sandy-coloured cliffs, the islands’ fields and vineyards are punctuated by historic towns where it often looks as if little new has been built since the 1600s. Malta’s location in the heart of the Mediterranean, just south of Sicily, has historically given it such strategic importance that before claiming its independence in 1964, it had been ruled at various times by every empire that hoped to control the surrounding seas. The Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Moors, Normans, Sicilians, Spanish, French and British each left a trace of their culture behind, from the Baroque Roman Catholic cathedrals to the bright red phone boxes and pillar boxes which dot the streets as if they’ve been Photoshopped in from postcards of London, clues to the 164 years for which Malta was ruled from Britain.
If Roderick is nervous, he doesn’t show it. He’s not a professional artist. In fact, by day he’s an air-conditioner repairman, but he comes from a long line of Carnival builders. This year, he’s working alongside his father, Raymond, and it’s a significant anniversary, as 2017 marks 10 years since the death of his grandfather. ‘I never had any academic instruction – these skills were passed from father to son,’ Roderick says. ‘My grandfather used to make horse-drawn carnival carts, then my father developed from carts to floats.’
Every year a whole new float with an original theme must be built from scratch. Outside the factory, the remnants of last year’s constructions are disintegrating. Nightmarish heads and gnarled hands rise like ghosts out of bodies that have been turned to pulp by the elements, a reminder of Carnival art’s intentional transience.
This year, Roderick and Raymond have chosen as their theme the Maltese folk tales of Gahan, a sort of hapless but loveable village idiot character. The float depicts him in the midst of various misunderstandings. He carries a door, because he was told to ‘pull it behind him’, and he’s boiling baby chickens because his mother told him to keep them warm. Roderick has embellished the classic tale with contemporary allusions – the role of Gahan’s furious schoolteacher is modelled to look exactly like Norman Lowell, a far-right Maltese politician. ‘I wanted to include a bit of politics,’ says Roderick mischievously. ‘The Maltese like politics and festivals. We’re either celebrating or we’re sad, one or the other.’
Roderick’s ambitious vision has come at great personal expense. Not only have he and his team of helpers spent countless hours working without pay, they’ve also thrown a series of barbecues and other fundraisers in order to pay for the materials. In all, the float has set them back many times what they can possibly hope to win in the competition. ‘It’s cost us €20,000, the first prize is only €3,000,’ says Roderick. ‘My father always says, “That son of mine is going to ruin me!”’
What motivates the Carnival builders of Malta is a combination of family, tradition and a fierce competitive streak. Roderick’s float is just one of 21 being built this year. His chief rival for the top prize is Charles Briffa, who at that moment is across town hard at work putting the finishing touches to his own float, based on the Italian circus performer Moira Orfei. Charles has 27 years of float-building experience, working in his spare time around his job as a sales rep. ‘We used to say this was our hobby,’ he says, ‘but right now it’s more like a full-time job.’
First prize isn’t awarded for the float alone. The judges also consider the accompanying dance teams and their elaborate handmade costumes. At the Mystic Dancers school in Kalkara, across the harbour from Valletta, Stephania Gellel has just taken her team through their paces for the last time. They’ll be joining another float themed around The NeverEnding Story. Rehearsals started twice a week back in September, but since the beginning of January, they’ve been rehearsing every evening from Monday to Thursday, from 8.30pm to 10pm. On top of that, on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, they work on their costumes or help with the float. In a week’s time they’ll get their lives back, but Stephania isn’t sure how to feel about that. ‘At the end of the rehearsals, everyone is saying, “What are we going to do now?” We’ll miss the sense of community.’
Roderick, Charles and Stephania are all participating in a festival that dates back thousands of years. Humans have been celebrating the triumph of spring over winter since at least as far back as 10,000 BC. The Maltese islands are dotted with the remains of megalithic temples, predating Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids, where fertility rites would have taken place. Carnival in Malta, in its relatively modern form, can be traced back to 1470, and the festival took on particular prominence in 1535, during the reign of the Knights of St John. The Knights were an order of Catholic warrior monks who’d been forced to give up their previous home of Rhodes when it was invaded by the Ottoman Empire. In 1530, Charles I of Spain gave them the islands of Malta as their new home and five years later, Grand Master Piero de Ponte boosted the Malta Carnival with a series of lavish masked balls for the island’s nobility. Not wanting to be left out, local villagers made their own costumes out of sacks and sheets, and played uproarious music in the streets. Many dressed in drag and they delighted in satirising the ruling elite.
In some ways, little has changed. While the Valletta Carnival has Malta’s grandest procession, with the largest and most complex floats, the anarchic atmosphere of those early Carnivals is preserved on neighbouring Gozo. Located three miles northwest of the main island of Malta, for most of the year Gozo is a quaint and bucolic outcrop which looks as if a patch of Tuscany has somehow sheared off from mainland Europe. Its craggy coastline encircles a series of vineyards and sleepy villages, yet during Carnival, the small, conservative town of Nadur has gained an unlikely reputation as the zenith of Carnival weirdness. Teenagers and young people travel from across the Maltese Islands to join the party, dressing in homemade costumes and stumbling blind drunk down the cobbled streets. The atmosphere is somewhere between Glastonbury at four in the morning and a Halloween rave. While the floats in Nadur can’t compete with Roderick’s artistic expertise, they make up for it with savage satirical wit. This year’s procession is led by terrifying men in bald-headed goon masks, sloppily attempting to build ‘The Great Wall of Mexico’ and spraying wet sand from a cement mixer at anyone they pass. Following them, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton leer out from a float promising a re-run of the 2016 US election.
Behind them comes a traffic jam of party buses. You wait all year for one and then six come along at once, each pounding out their own soundtrack. To stand in the centre of Nadur Carnival on the Saturday night is to withstand an onslaught of music from every direction: the dance tunes from the buses almost drown out the rock band covering Led Zeppelin and Kiss, while in Pupu’s Bar, grandfathers with tambourines and harmonicas play traditional folk beats, and Batman and a Smurf polka dance with Frankenstein’s monster.
A Day-Glo troll shouts over the din. His name is Jonathan and he’s taken the ferry over from Malta. ‘I’ve been coming here for six years, since I was 18,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t go back to Carnival in Valletta now – it’s more for children. Me and my friends are in Gozo for three nights, we’ve even booked Monday off work.’
Back in Valletta on Sunday, crowds pack the streets as the sun beats down out of an afternoon sky the colour of old jeans. The city was built by the Knights of St John as a heavily fortified port, and its high walls and uniform grid design reflect its military origin. The straight, narrow streets fall and rise, and many have broad staircases designed to be climbed by knights laden down by heavy armour. Over the years, the 16th-century limestone architecture has been augmented with Baroque flourishes and colourful window boxes. The city’s main landmark is St John’s Co-Cathedral, whose imposingly blank exterior disguises the lavish decoration within.
After passing the Cathedral and squeezing down Archbishop Street, each float in turn emerges into St George’s Square, where a stage has been set up. When Roderick’s float arrives, he watches as his creation’s mechanical heart brings his characters to life. The gigantic Gahan spreads his arms wide in shock, while his mother lifts her petticoats and his schoolteacher brandishes his cane. On the stage, 35 dancers in traditional Maltese outfits twirl in perfect synchronisation. ‘Everything went well,’ he says with relief, but he’s not sure if his team have done enough to win. ‘There’s always something new, that’s what makes it a challenge. It brings out the best in everyone.’
The results are announced on the morning of Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. After a year of preparation and building, Roderick learns his team has won. ‘It’s a special moment for my family,’ he says. ‘I want to dedicate this to my grandfather.’
As for the €3,000 cheque, he says his first priority is to throw a party for everyone who was involved. ‘It’s my way of saying thank you,’ he says. ‘The families of our helpers have had to make sacrifices as well. I want to show them my appreciation.’
His thoughts, however, are already turning to next year. ‘We’ll start again from scratch,’ he says. ‘The boost we had this year just makes us want to get even better.’
As soon as Easter is over, Malta’s Carnival builders will go back to the drawing board. They’re living evidence that Carnival is about more than just a wild party. It’s a celebration of the ancient magic that occurs when people come together to build something bigger than themselves.
Published in Lonely Planet Traveller, February 2018.
Angela Lansbury: ‘I was more than just boobs and good legs’
Angela Lansbury lives a few miles west of Beverly Hills, in a house that looks as if it’s been uprooted from the Home Counties. The moment I arrive, she bustles me into her living room like a no-nonsense headmistress. Immediately, I glance a photograph of her with the Clintons, then the awards that cluster around her bookshelves – five Tonys and six Golden Globes, for roles as various as Jessica Fletcher in the long-running crime series Murder, She Wrote and Mrs Lovett, the pie-making accomplice of Sweeney Todd in Stephen Sondheim’s musical. On her mantelpiece sits her honorary Oscar, engraved with the words ENTERTAINMENT ICON. “Pick it up,” she says. “Isn’t that the heaviest thing you’ve ever felt?”
Twain, Hemingway and Waits: Bill Murray plays America’s Greatest Hits
There’s an old joke, famously repeated in Alan Moore’s Watchmen, that goes like this: “Man goes to doctor. Says he’s depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. Doctor says: ‘Treatment is simple. Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should pick you up.’ Man bursts into tears. Says: ‘But doctor, I am Pagliacci’.”
Yesterday Bill Murray, America’s foremost sad clown, offered a couple of insights into how he writes his own prescription for Pagliacci’s complaint. He self-medicates with music, poetry and literature.
Early in the day a video appeared in which Murray recounts the time Hunter Thompson advised a depressed Murray: “We’re going to have to rely on John Prine for his sense of humour.” Sure enough, the great folk singer’s song ‘Linda Goes To Mars’ proved to be the first thing in a long while to tease a laugh out of Murray.
Then last night, he appeared on stage at the Wiltern in Los Angeles for a very special performance accompanied by the renowned German cellist Jan Vogler, the violinist Mira Wang and pianist Vanessa Perez. Murray’s readings of hand-picked poems, passages from favourite books and a handful of songs were interspersed with the musicians’ performances of Bach, Schubert and Ravel. Think of it as a highbrow version of that unwatchably bad Netflix Christmas special he made a couple of years ago.
Remembering The Hawley Arms, the Pub That Became Indie’s 2000s Hub
Late on 9 February 2008, a Saturday night, I left a gig at Koko and made my way up Camden High Street in north London toward my house. I didn’t get very far before I was stopped by a policeman who told me that Camden was “on fire”, which struck me as unusual. Going the long way round, I found myself stood on a bridge over Regent’s Canal watching the most famous pub in British indie music burn.
Philip Glass: ‘I wanted to compose, not recover from last night’
On a bright, clear afternoon in Hollywood, Philip Glass is considering why it might be that, aged 80, he has outlasted his younger friends and collaborators, David Bowie and Lou Reed. He traces it back to the excesses of the Seventies, an era whose hedonism he deliberately observed from the sidelines.
“I didn’t have the money to corrode my body as some of my friends did,” he says wryly. “When I was a young man I was afraid of that lifestyle and I stayed away from it. I hate to put it so crudely, but I gained an extra 20 years of life.”
Hong Kong: A Tale Of Two Cities
TAKE A HIKE
IN THE CITY…
It’s still before dawn when the first joggers set off along the Lugard Road, the tarmacked path which circles The Peak, the highest point on Hong Kong island. It’s only when they reach a break in the surrounding canopy of trees that they see the city laid out below them. From this perspective, Hong Kong looks like a vast collection of toy skyscrapers, somehow amassed by a child, with over 7,800 high-rises reaching towards the heavens. As the sunlight breaks through the clouds it lifts the film noir gloom from the city, revealing the colours of the day. Looking down, the closest tower blocks are painted in muted beige and pink while beyond them tower the gleaming glass obelisks of the bustling commercial centre. Some of these joggers will soon be heading towards them to start their working days. For now, they continue to pad around The Peak as the dawn chorus intensifies with the sun and butterflies dart through the air. This is a city that rewards the early birds.
OR IN THE COUNTRY
A world away from the heaving crowds on the streets of downtown Hong Kong, on the MacLehose Trail you’re more likely to have your path crossed by a scuttling land crab. Chirping crickets replace the sound of traffic. The long and winding route curls around the Sai Kung Peninsula before heading west across the New Territories and is evidence of a startling, oft-forgotten fact about Hong Kong: despite being one of the planet’s most densely populated places, less than 25 per cent of its total area has been concreted. The vast majority of its land remains as it always has been: grassland, woodland and shrubland. This makes for unexpectedly fine hiking. Soon after setting out eastward on the MacLehose Trail, walkers are afforded perfect views down over the shimmering waters of the High Island Reservoir and up towards Sai Wan Shan, a grand peak which itself will be dwarfed further along the trail by the New Territories’ central mountains. When the trail reaches the coast it dips down towards the gorgeous wave-lapped beaches of Long Ke and Sai Wan, where sweaty hikers reward themselves by stripping off and splashing into the cool water.
ADMIRE THE ARCHITECTURE
IN THE AIR…
In the shabby courtyard a trash fire burns in a metal barrel. An old woman sweeps the dusty floor outside Cleanly Cleaners, just along from a salon named Hair Show and a little shop with an old neon sign advertising foot massages. In the centre of the square, a gaggle of tourists are taking pictures of one another on their phones, crouching low to the ground to find an angle which can capture the huge edifice behind their friends. This is one of Hong Kong’s most photographed buildings, yet it’s not a temple or seat of government. Yick Fat was built in 1972 as simply another public housing tenement block, but it’s become an emblem of a city where lives are lived bunched close, one on top of another. The building is just one of five densely built residential buildings on the block, together comprising 2,243 flats that are home to around 10,000 people. Above the heads of the amateur photographers, laundry hangs from windows on each of the 19 floors beside precariouslybalanced air conditioners. Satisfied with their photos, the tourists disappear, leaving behind the residents of this monument to urban living.
OR BY THE SEA
Hong Kong takes its name from a phonetic Anglicisation of a Cantonese phrase meaning ‘Fragrant Harbour’, although it’s hard to imagine anyone ever describing the traditional fishing village of Tai O as ‘fragrant’. In the quiet streets that run past market stalls, the air is thick with the smell of drying fish and octopus, fried fish bladder and fermented shrimp paste. Built around an inlet on the western coast of mountainous Lantau Island, Tai O is a time capsule of Hong Kong as it was before high commerce arrived. The Tanka people have lived here for centuries much as they do now, in simple homes built mainly from tin which jut out over the water on stilts with fishing boats moored alongside them like cars in driveways. They are the only motor vehicles to be seen as the narrow streets are fit only for bicycles, tricycles and wheelchairs. Nowadays most of the fishermen are retirees, like 77-year-old Mr Fung. He gave up work 30 years ago, encouraged by his three sons and two daughters. ‘It is very tough to be a fisherman,’ he says. ‘During my youth the catch was good, and we could sell it to mainland China. Then after a while the catch got smaller and my children asked me to stop.’ Mr Fung’s children now all work in the city, in construction, but still return home at weekends to see their dad and enjoy the simpler life outside the concrete metropolis.
RAISE A GLASS
IN THE CLOUDS…
In a city of tall buildings, the tallest of them all is the International Commerce Centre in West Kowloon. At its summit sits Ozone, which at 490m is by some measures the highest bar in the world. It’s so high, in fact, that the views of the distant city below are often obscured by thick banks of cloud which make the ground appear and disappear like a mirage. The bar’s signature cocktail, the HK Skyline, is designed to pay tribute to its lofty location. Served inside a smoke-filled glass container, the sweet, grapefruit-tinged concoction comes topped with champagne bubbles. It is made using rum from a mountaintop Guatemalan distillery that produces its spirit entirely 2,300m above sea level. Priced at a fittingly sky-high £32, it is a favourite of the local high-rollers who begin to gather amid the tourists at the end of the working day, throwing their money around and admiring the busy city far below.
OR ON THE STREET
Wan Chai is a frenetic neighbourhood just to the east of Hong Kong’s Central district, full of offices and teeming shops. However, one step into the retro interior of Tai Lung Fung and it’s easy to forget all that completely. The décor recalls the Hong Kong of the cult 1960 film The World Of Suzie Wong, with Chinese lanternshaped fairy lights, a dragon-like qilin head on the wall watching over everything, and menus designed to resemble old newspapers. The soundtrack is largely ’80s, featuring Cantonese synth pop such as Chinese star Alan Tam’s Love Trap, which seems to create a conducive atmosphere for regulars to hang out and swap gossip over cocktails. The place is co-owned by friends Lavina Smith and Sam Leung, whose pet African grey parrot taps along the bar and plays with her cat. Their signature drink is the Plum Classic (above right), made with plum wine sourced from a local woman. ‘Every season she gets fresh plums from the New Territories, so it’s 100 per cent made in Hong Kong,’ explains Lavina. ‘Every year we buy about 100 litres, so we have a very limited amount of cocktails that we can sell each season.’
SAIL AWAY
IN GRAND STYLE…
It is just after noon when the 92ft wooden junk sets off from Tsim Sha Tsui pier to start its first lap of Victoria Harbour. The boat’s blue and white sails flap in the cool breeze, decorated with stylised Ming dragons which give them the look of fine vases or ancient ceramics. Out on the water, their fluttering is the only sound above the chilled Balearic soundtrack emanating from somewhere below deck, while the smell of the air is tinged by salt. The boat is designed to evoke another age. For over 1,800 years, junks were used as everything from cargo ships to floating homes, but today this vessel simply hops between stops on a loop of the harbour, passing cruise ships and tiny fishing rafts as it goes, and offering the chance to see the city as once many first-time visitors did: from the sea.
OR IN COMMUTER STYLE
In the late afternoon, as the Star Ferry sets off to cross Victoria Harbour once more, it is carrying a broad cross-section of Hong Kong: young and old, locals and tourists, commuters and families. Small children clamber on the seats excitedly while, nearby, men in suits check their mobiles and pensioners doze. Each day the ferry takes more than 55,000 people back and forth between Kowloon and Hong Kong Island; that’s 20 million journeys every year. The ferries arrive and leave as regularly as subway trains and are exceptionally cheap. When they started running in the 1880s, the boats were powered by steam; these days the journey is completed on diesel-electric ferries decked out with wood-panelling and much needed air-conditioning. Arriving on the other side of the harbour in around five minutes, the great mingled masses file off as their replacements board to continue the ferry’s endless cycle.
HAVE A BITE TO EAT
ON TREND…
It’s Saturday evening and the customers perched on stools at the wooden counter that surrounds Little Bao’s openplan kitchen are being exquisitely tortured. They must wait and watch as their food is prepared right in front of them, and try to ignore the rich scent of frying Szechuan chicken wafting in their direction. Luckily, the diners’ torture is short-lived. This is Hong Kong’s unique take on fast food, the brainchild of celebrity chef May Chow, regarded as one of the best in Asia. ‘It’s American and Chinese together,’ explains her sous-chef Sam Ng. ‘We always use Cantonese food ideas and then give it a little twist.’ Their signature dish, the bao from which the restaurant takes its name, are Cantonese steamed buns that are served like burgers filled with chicken or pork belly. Their surprise hit has been ice cream bao, which sees smaller bao deep-fried like doughnuts and then filled to make a green tea or caramel ice cream sandwich. ‘We never thought the ice cream bao would be so popular, but it was mindblowing,’ says Sam. ‘People wait for two hours just to get the ice cream. Hong Kong people are crazy about desserts, they always have another stomach for it.’
OR IN THE PAST
At Joy Hing, a traditional hole-in-the-wall joint on a noisy commercial street in Wan Chai, they do things the old-fashioned way. Founded towards the end of the Qing dynasty, in around 1900, their speciality is char siu – Cantonese barbeque. The rich smell of roasting meats lures in passers-by, while barbecued geese and ducks hang by their necks in the window and a whole pig is suspended tail-up from a hook. In front of the carcass the chef works methodically with his cleaver, the sound of his chopping competing with the whir of ancient fans working overtime to cool the hot air. He serves up a plastic plate overflowing with meat plus rice or noodles, and a mug of milky tea, for just £3. This sort of food at those sorts of prices breeds a loyal fan base. Queues form around the block twice a day when the nearby offices release their workers. One man at a battered Formica table explains he’s been coming here for over 40 years. In front of him sits a plate of roast duck and noodles, cooked the same way it has been here for over a century.
TAKE IN SOME ART
IN A MODERN WAY…
Street art in Hong Kong didn’t really catch on until 2014 when an organisation called HK Walls started linking artists with walls they could legally decorate. Nowadays, an hour-long walking tour takes groups past work by a host of internationally acclaimed graffiti artists. Appearing early on in the tour is perhaps the city’s most famous mural: the layered stencil painted by local artist Alex Croft (above left). It depicts Kowloon Walled City, a densely packed den of prostitution, gambling and drug abuse, much of which was controlled by Chinese triad criminal gangs before its demolition in 1994. ‘It represents a way of life that was a lot different to what we know today,’ says Alex. ‘The rumours of what went on behind the walls of that building are still talked about today: a lawless place that if the police entered some of them might not come out. I didn’t plan for the painting to be up on the wall for as long as it has been but it has brought me good luck along the way ever since.’
OR IN A TRADITIONAL WAY
Reassuringly for the novice artist, traditional Chinese ink-brush painting is not overly interested in achieving photo-like realism. ‘We’re not so concerned with details,’ explains art teacher Carole Leung. ‘We’re just trying to capture two things: the form, and the spirit. How do you paint spirit?’ That’s a question she sets about answering in her lessons, at the end of which her students will have produced their very own piece of art to take home with them. Carole teaches in her intimate studio inWan Chai, with Spanish guitar playing softly on the stereo and endless pots of oolong tea on hand. As her students learn how to delicately render bamboo shoots and leaves using just black ink and different edges of a brush they are also introduced to the traditional artist’s meditative discipline. The artform dates back to the 5th century AD, and Carole is determined to keep it alive by passing on the lessons of her own teacher ShumWing Kwong. ‘He passed away last year, but his notes are like gold,’ she says. ‘I want to pass them on, but also to modernise them too by introducing more colour.’ Her own radiant work on the walls shows what is possible – although matching them might take longer than the allotted two hours.
ENJOY A DAY OUT
WITH THE GRACEFUL…
William Ng and Pandora Wu have discovered the secret of eternal youth, and they’re willing to share. ‘I’m 80 years old,’ says William with a grin after leading a tai chi class on a bakingly hot morning without breaking a sweat. ‘Doing tai chi can make you stay young,’ he explains. ‘Pandora is over 70. It’s unbelievable! She’s like a magician.’ The graceful martial art may be slow-moving, but William’s students go through a full-body workout requiring total concentration. They seem to have tapped into something deep and serene. If William is to be believed, that’s because the gentle exercise regulates and harmonises every part of your body from your blood circulation to your digestive system. William and Pandora teach classes in a park on the harbourside three mornings each week, often throwing in a little kung fu and qi gong, a similarly languid holistic practice. They say it’s not just good for their bodies and souls – it’s keeping a tradition alive. ‘When visitors come to Hong Kong they want to touch and feel Chinese culture,’ says William. Fortunately for future visitors, he’s got his very own elixir of life to keep him going. ‘I won’t stop until God says he wants to see me!’ he says, and lets out a childlike laugh.
OR WITH THE GAMBLERS
The Sunday afternoon air is so hot and muggy that it seems hard to walk through, never mind race horses in. Yet that’s exactly what the thousands of fans and gamblers out at Sha Tin Racecourse have come to see. There has been horse racing in Hong Kong since 1841 and it didn’t take long for this colonial sport, originally intended only for the British elites, to become incredibly popular with the locals. Nowadays the huge stand at Sha Tin has an official capacity of 85,000 – a figure which is easily reached at Chinese New Year, a time when it is considered auspicious to bet on a horse. Opposite the stand, white and pastelcoloured tower blocks rise, giving the course the perfect Hong Kong backdrop. As the race draws near, old men hoik and spit as they rustle their sporting newspapers and betting slips. There is a lingering smell of cigarette smoke, and nobody can quite keep still as nervous, fidgety energy fills the arena. Then, finally, they’re off. The crowd is quiet until the horses and their jockeys reach the last 100m. That’s when the shouting and hollering begins. They bellow the number of their pick in Cantonese as the pack nears the finish. Then number four – Booming Delight – surges forward and pulls clear at the line. The crowd is split: some curse, others punch the air. The victors head inside to collect their spoils.
Published in Lonely Planet Traveller, December 2017.
Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington memorial was a celebration of life
The memorials start even before you get to the Hollywood Bowl. On the freeway off-ramp, there are kids going car to car in the crawling traffic selling somber black T-shirts bearing the legend: ‘Chester Bennington 1976-2017’.
Those dates, just 41 years apart, serve as a reminder of just how dangerous we are to ourselves. Chester took his own life, as so many others do. In Britain, suicide remains the single biggest killer of men under 45.
Chester touched a lot of lives in his too-few years. Climbing the hill towards the entrance to the Bowl, the longest queue is not to get inside but to get to the memorial wall erected near the gates, where fans are signing their names and leaving messages about the impact the Linkin Park singer had on their lives.
It is difficult to get a handle on the tenor of the night. At times the fans are exuberant, sharing happy memories or marvelling at the long journeys people have made to be here. Other times emotions run high. The opening act DJ Z-Trip chokes on tears as he introduces his final tune ‘Walking Dead’, a song that he and Chester collaborated on. It is the first time in the evening Chester’s voice echoes around the Bowl, but not the last.
Can Desert Daze Be America’s Answer to Glastonbury?
It’s a hot, dusty Sunday afternoon in the Joshua Tree desert. I’m in a tent trying to hold my body in something I’ve just been told is called a warrior pose while Wolves In The Throne Room’s “Prayer of Transformation” gives way to Sleep’s “Holy Mountain”. This is black metal yoga at Desert Daze festival, and it’s surprisingly meditative. “Yoga teachers tend to focus on things that are light and positive,” explains Alissa Nelson, our black metal yogi, “That can be great, but when people are in a certain place that doesn’t resonate. Black metal can be dark and gory, but it plays on that dark aspect that’s in all of us.”
Black metal yoga is just one of a whole roster of strange events being held in the festival’s Mystic Bazaar. Next up is something promisingly called “plant activation meditation”, then a little later it’s the ominously titled ‘defense against the dark arts’. Elsewhere, an entire venue has been given over to a five-hour ‘deep drone cycle’. Make of that what you will, but only 50 miles from the site of Coachella it’s impressive to see a wholly different conception of what a music festival is and what it might be for. Along with the chance to see the likes of Iggy Pop, Spiritualized and Courtney Barnett & Kurt Vile, Desert Daze also offers probably the closest thing an American rock festival has to the hippy spiritualism of Glastonbury’s healing fields.
Why One of the World’s Biggest Rockstars Got Away with Child Abuse
When Ian Watkins was sentenced for his child sex crimes in December of 2013, they were described by the presiding judge as having “plumbed new depths of depravity”.
Among other offences, the former Lostprophets singer admitted he had attempted to rape an 11-month-old baby boy with the help of the child’s mother, and conspired with a second mother to rape her infant daughter. Watkins had also slept with and urinated on a 16-year-old fan of his band, among a string of other similar offences. The judge specifically commented on “the delight that Watkins evidently has when engaging in the most terrible offences involving tiny children”.
How to make a Brit horror film (with a killer soundtrack)
Published in NME, 13 October 2017.
CalJam 2017: How Liam Gallagher stole the show at Foo Fighters’ festival
The Californian sky was clear over San Bernardino and the temperature was touching 36°C as ‘Fuckin’ In The Bushes’ rang out and Liam Gallagher strutted onstage at CalJam. The day after the release of his debut solo album, Our Kid looked in fine fettle – as well he should. You could wait for a lifetime to spend your days in the sunshine.
The Tom Petty NME obituary: 1950 – 2017
Tom Petty died today in a hospital bed in Santa Monica. The songs he wrote – ‘Free Fallin’’, ‘American Girl’, ‘Runnin’ Down A Dream’ and many, many others – will live as long as there are people listening to rock’n’roll records.
‘He sings about things everyone our age feels’: how Rat Boy created a feverish youth cult
Jordan Cardy, a 21-year-old who goes by the name of Rat Boy, inspires the sort of fevered devotion that often seems to follow those with his initials. His fans start arriving six hours early for the launch of his debut album, Scum, gathering in the cold and damp, graffiti-covered tunnel beneath London’s Waterloo station. One of the first to arrive is 16-year-old Saskia, who deftly explains Rat Boy’s appeal. “He sings about being poor quite a lot, and I find that really relatable,” she says. “He’s singing about things everyone our age is feeling.”
The list of topics covered on Scum includes: signing on, fake IDs, worrying about a third world war, getting sacked from Wetherspoons and “living off mum”, Critics often compare Rat Boy to oik-rock precursors such as Jamie T, the Beastie Boys and early Blur – both Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon appear on the record – but his fans also see more highbrow influences. “He reminds me of Salvador Dalí,” says 16-year-old Luke. “His style is always a bit weird and abstract.”
Rat Boy is not merely reflecting millennial fears back to his fans; he is refracting their world through a surrealist prism. Through his hand-drawn artwork, the videos he storyboards himself and the fake radio station that plays between songs on his album, he has built a Technicolor universe, populated with garish characters and brands, that is inspired as much by Grand Theft Auto, Tarantino movies and Spike Jonze skateboard videos as it is by indie bands.
Kevin EG Perry: Collected Works 