Wolfmother are a band in demand. My interview with them before their sold-out show at the London Scala tonight is delayed and then cut short as their late arrival means cramming my demented inquisition in alongside my better paid but clearly inferior peers at the NME and several representatives of the international press. Whilst bassist Chris Ross has seemingly baulked at the gruelling schedule of interviews, playing truant at today’s proceedings, the band should be no strangers to attention. They are already superstars in their native Australia, where their debut album has garnered massive success which has been reflected by critical praise. Influential Australian radio station JJJ awarded them their ‘album of the year’ award and the band also had an unprecedented six songs voted on to their annual top 100 list.

When drummer Myles Heskett and Andrew Stockdale, the band’s impressively afroed lead singer and guitarist, finally arrive they are both laid back and happy to chat away, although this could be to do with the fact that they both seem very very stoned. Indeed, some critics have attempted to pigeonhole their sound as ‘stoner’ rock, but they tell me that they’re ‘not that absorbed’. To my ears, they are ‘everything-but-the-average’ rock, drawing influences from countless genres. They say ‘We want to take elements of stoner and mix it in with elements of punk, or take the finger plucking from country and mix it with straight out rock. We take things from hip-hop or anywhere else. I wouldn’t want to designate one scene.’ Myles cites Kyuss, and his subsequent discovery of Pink Floyd as key influences, whilst Andrew seems to naturally draw influences from anywhere he can find them, saying that even at school he could socialise with any scene, and listened to anything and everything from Black Flag to the Blues Explosion. This openness to eclecticism has made for an album with some unusual highlights. ‘I don’t see why people freak out over panflute solos,’ says Andrew, ‘I think for our next album we’re gonna get an entire flute orchestra together.’ Their debut LP was recorded in Los Angeles with Dave Sardy, a big name producer who’s worked with the likes of Oasis, The Dandy Warhols and Marilyn Manson. Andrew tells me that their openness to his ideas helped the band to progress, and to move on from the level they had already achieved after the years of jamming and rehearsing which had led up to the EP they self-released and which brought them so much attention. They are coming towards the end of this tour, and feel triumphant that their work has brought fresh recognition.

It’s been a far cry from the nightmare gig that followed their last visit to London. As Myles recounts the tale, Andrew seems physically pained, wincing “I feel like we shouldn’t even talk about it, I don’t wanna go there” Apparently a hectic departure from London, en route to New York, involved a very stoned Andrew and Wolfmother’s tour manager breaking into his old flat in order to retrieve his passport, then flying half way around the world to a photo shoot which involved sitting in the snow for several hours. By the time they played their New York showcase Andrew had lost his voice and Myles was suffering with flu and finding that his rented drumkit disintegrated mid-show. As their PR shuffles them off to sound check, I hope that the Scala will be kinder to them. By the time I next see them, striding onto the Stage to an exultant roar, they are changed men. Gone is the laid back, not a care in the world attitude, and in its place is classic showmanship. The show is pure foot-to-the-floor rock. Part Zeppelin riffs, part Sabbath howl and part Floyd psychedelia, they unite a diverse audience of hairy head-banging AC/DC fans, huge sweaty skinheads apparently on loan from Millwall riots and skinny girls with blonde pigtails, awakening an initially lethargic Tuesday night crowd. They roar through a crowd pleasing set, with Apple Tree, Another Dimension and Mind’s Eye particular standouts. Be sure to catch them at the Koko for their final British date next month, because as they exit stage right, world domination surely awaits.

Originally published in the LSE’s The Beaver, 14 March 2006.

‘If Tony Blair was in front of me, I’d fucking lamp him.’ Benjamin Zephaniah is back, and he’s angrier than ever. His new album ‘Naked’ is his first since ‘Belly of De Beast’ a decade ago, and he begins our interview by explaining that he never gets himself tied into a record or book deal, so you know that if he’s got material out then it’s because there’s something he needs to say, not because he’s fulfilling a contract. However, he tells me that there could be another record not too far away, simply because there’s so much going on in the world that he feels the need to speak out about. He may be best known as a poet, but his albums allow him to combine music with the performance poetry that comes naturally to someone who favours the oral tradition over dull textbooks. ‘Naked’ sees him at his very best, ‘undressed’ and ‘looking at the truth’.

Despite his righteous anger, I get the feeling that Benjamin Zephaniah is something of a reluctant radical. He’s as laid back and easy going as they come, and happily tells me that he’d much rather be ‘writing comedy and having lots of sex’. Unfortunately for the Tony Blairs of this world though, he’s the sort of person who couldn’t live with himself being apathetic.

On the title track of his new album he says ‘I hate dis government as much as I hated the one before it and I have reason to believe that I will hate the one to come’. It’s a powerfully delivered statement, but I ask him if he ever feels depressed about the lack of difference his message, and those of people like him, has made. ‘Yes, in a word. One of the most frustrating things is that there are no alternatives.’ He tells me about his experiences in South Africa after the fall of Apartheid, where he experienced the rare phenomenon of people actually being excited to vote for someone, rather than voting for the lesser of two evils. The end of Apartheid in South Africa was an issue that was close to Zephaniah’s heart. In the early 80s he recorded a protest song for Nelson Mandela with the Wailers, becoming the first artist to record with them after Bob Marley’s death. He tells me that the issue of South Africa brought them together, and the song was heard by Mandela, who asked to meet him when he was released from Robben Island. Zephaniah cannot help but remark at the way Mandela’s image has transformed in the West ‘You have to remember that at the time, the ANC were Al Qaeda, and Nelson Mandela was Osama Bin Laden, except that he’d been caught!’

Africa remains a central theme in Zephaniah’s writing. On ‘Rong Radio Station’ he says ‘I waz trying to convince myself that I could ease my conscience, If I gave a few pence or a few cents to a starving baby in Africa, Because African babies need me so, Because African babies needed my favours, Because Africa is full of dictators, and oh yeah, Globalisation will bring salvation. I’ve been listening to the rong radio station’ I tell him that while I agree that giving money to charity may not be the long term way to solve inequality, it must have an important role to play for the people suffering right now. Anyone who received the Kenyan Society’s recent urgent email regarding the drought that has hit the Horn of Africa will know that it has been estimated that eleven million people there will require food aid, but is the urge to give them our loose coins any more than middle class guilt? Zephaniah thinks that charitable giving is short changing African nations ‘If you have a stab wound, you don’t try and cover it up with a plaster do you? I’m not saying that people who give to charity are bad people, I’m saying that they should get political. Too often people give to charity and think that that counts as being political, because they’re scared of being revolutionary or radical.’ He compares the difference to that of not being a racist, and of being actively anti-racist. ‘If you’re walking down the street and you see a guy getting beaten up by a racist, do you walk on and say ‘That’s bad, I wouldn’t do that’ or do you actually get involved and do something to stop it? It may not be directly confronting the racist, but just anything to actively stop it happening. The same applies to charities. There’s more to stopping inequality than putting money in a tin.’

Issues of inequality are never far from Zephaniah’s mind, which is hardly surprising given his personal journey from spending time detained at Her Majesty’s Expense to being invited to the palace to meet HRH in person and collect his OBE, an ‘honour’ which he famously declined. He wrote at the time ‘Me? I thought, OBE me? Up yours, I thought. No way Mr Blair, no way Mrs Queen’ He rejected it on several grounds, not least the fact that an Order of the British Empire would be an unwieldy honour for someone who is ‘profoundly anti-empire’. Today he stands by his decision, describing those who accept one as ‘getting into bed with government and monarchy’ He says ‘I mean, I got a letter from Tony Blair inviting me to Downing Street. If Tony Blair was in front of me, I’d fucking lamp him. I’m a vegan, and when I was offered the OBE it was like someone who knew that offering me a steak, I’d fucking hit them, y’kno?’

He tells me that the years he spent in prison were formative for him. He says ‘Prison gave me time to think. Screws always have this thing where they’ll be like, ‘I’ll give you a year, you’ll be back’ When they said that to me, I said, ‘I’m not saying I won’t be back, but if I am it’ll be political.’ I realised that stealing off of the working class guy wasn’t achieving anything, but political activism could.’

Honours that he has been happy to receive are the honorary doctorates that have been bestowed on him by various Universities scattered across Britain. He counts ten proudly displayed on his wall, and tells me that for someone who left school at thirteen, being told your work is influential is an especially great honour, and one with some unexpected privileges. ‘After the first one I went to give a talk to some school kids and they introduced me as Dr Benjamin Zephaniah. I said, ‘Oh No, You don’t have to do that’ but the kids seemed impressed. I told them that I had had it put on my drivers licence so that every time I get stopped, the policeman has to call me ‘doctor.’

Freedom of speech has always been a key issue in Zephaniah’s writing, but he says that he thinks the recent uproar over cartoons published in a Danish paper highlights the ‘responsibility that comes with the right’ to free speech. Furthermore he tells me that he believes portraying the prophet as a suicide bomber perpetuated the negative stereotype that all suicide bombers are Muslim. He tells me that when he was in Palestine there was a suicide bomber who was a Christian, but ‘the media reported that he was a ‘Palestinian suicide bomber’, and never mentioned the fact that he was a Christian. It just fits in with this blinkered view that all suicide bombers must be Islamic.’

Musically speaking, ‘Naked’ is Zephaniah’s most diverse album. Every track stands out as an experiment in a different genre. He switches effortlessly from drum’n’bass to hip-hop and from garage to reggae dub. He tells me that whilst previous albums have been mostly reggae orientated, like ‘Belly of De Beast’ which was produced by the legendary Mad Professor, the new album ‘experiments with any genre of music that will enhance the words’. This openness to experiment has seen the involvement of a couple of talented collaborators. Preceding the release of the album is a remix EP by Rodney P, a friend of Zephaniah’s who ‘demanded’ that he got involved after he first played him the album. The album itself, unlike so many of the cheap and mundane CDs on the market, is physically a work of art. It is presented as a mini book of poetry, something Zephaniah says was intentional to ensure that the poems could stand alone from the music, and features the artwork of genius graffiti artist Banksy, whose work has become notorious worldwide and is ‘displayed’ everywhere from Palestine to LA and in several places close to the LSE campus. Zephaniah praises the alternative viewpoint that Banksy’s art provides. ‘He’s subversive and gives you another way of looking at the issues, which complements my poems.’

You sense that whilst he is very much a performance poet, he is at heart a wordsmith. I ask him how he sees himself. ‘I describe myself as a ‘Griot’. It’s a West African term which has no exact translation in English. Probably ‘Troubadour’ or ‘Bard’ would be closest. It’s someone who travels from village to village. Maybe they’ll tell a story in one village, sing in the next and perform a poem in another. Sometimes they aim just to entertain, but sometimes their aim is to get people off their asses and ready to storm the government.’ At a time like this, we need Griots like Benjamin Zephaniah more than ever.

Originally published in the LSE’s The Beaver, 7 March 2006.

A lot can change in a year. Twelve months ago Pope John Paul II was still happily popeing around, part-time horse impersonator and full-time home wrecker Camilla Parker Bowles was preparing herself to marry into our glorious monarchy and I was living in a hut in the vast, desert-like stretch of land that surrounds the remote Indian town of Lucknow. The only means I had of keeping tabs on Prince Charlie’s equestrian pursuits or surveying the spread-betting on the date and time of JP’s demise was scalpeled from The Hindustan Times, a decent and upstanding publication with many fine English-language articles and an unintentionally hilarious section in which desperate parents seek spouses for their children. However, this is certainly not the time or place or page in which to discuss the merits or otherwise of arranged marriages, as it was on this date, exactly a year ago, that The Hindustan Times was to bring me news of the death of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. He had, the Times informed me, put a gun into his own mouth and ended a life that had brought him literary notoriety as well as a reputation for personal excess, no holds barred journalism and fire-and-brimstone prose.

The front page of the paper carried the quotation “The best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism” It was wrongly attributed to Thompson, the words in fact first being written by William Faulkner, but they were often cited by Thompson and influenced the genre of writing which he carved out alone. He called it ‘Gonzo’, a form of journalism where the writer not only brings their own experiences and opinions into the writing, but also becomes the protagonist. Hunter Thompson didn’t simply report the story, he was the story.

This is a man whose ashes, six months later, were loaded into huge flares and fired, along with enough fireworks to celebrate every Guy Fawke’s night for the rest of the decade, out of a cannon topping a 150-foot tower shaped like a fist with two thumbs and clutching a peyote button, an hallucinogenic cactus native to the south-west of the United States of America.

It’s an horrifically pathetic cliché to say something along the lines of “if you looked up crazy in the dictionary, his picture would be there” but his picture and biography actually appeared in text books about manic compulsives. He was a maverick, a dangerous lunatic and in my opinion at least, the best thing to happen to the written word since cavemen first took up pointy sticks and carved crude approximations of their grunts into the earth.

He first rose to infamy in 1966 when he established himself as a journalist who was not constrained by ordinary boundaries by riding with the Hell’s Angels in San Francisco, imbibing gallons of alcohol, guzzling prescription drugs and LSD and eventually getting his face pounded into the asphalt. Then writing a book about it. Whilst shocking and controversial at the time it was published, in contrast with his later work it is in fact remarkably conventional journalism.

The success of Hell’s Angels secured him work with a number of American magazines where he began to hone his trademark style. The most high profile of these was Rolling Stone, who serialised his most famous work, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in 1971. Starting life when Sports Illustrated gave him the chance to travel to Las Vegas to cover the Mint 400 motorcycle race, Thompson hit the road with Chicano lawyer Oscar Zeta Acosta and a veritable pharmacy of illegal narcotics alongside him in a huge red convertible. The “mean gibberish” he sent back transformed from race coverage into a “Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream” and was predictably refused out of hand by Sports Illustrated. Rolling Stone proved to be more accommodating and the book went on to critical and commercial success.

‘Fear and Loathing’, like all Thompson’s ‘Gonzo’ work, blurs the lines between fiction and journalism, but as Thompson himself said “only a goddam lunatic would write a thing like this and claim it was true.” As such, identities are always thinly but necessarily masked. Thompson becomes Raoul Duke, an alter ego he used on several occasions, often in the third person, and Acosta is referred to as Doctor Gonzo, or simply “my attorney”, and transformed from a Mexican into a 300-pound Samoan.

The book itself starts at a ferocious pace which never slackens. Like a drunk on a powerful motorbike, Thompson twists the throttle without let up, and as his passengers all we can do is cling on for dear life and hope that this unstoppable force manages to keep tyres to tarmac. Ostensibly about Thompson’s attempt to cover the race, and later the district attorney’s drug conference, the themes the book explores capture the zeitgeist of an era. It deals with the death of the dream of a non-violent revolution, which the sixties had seemed to promise, and sees the American Dream itself being killed off by war in Vietnam and the election of the crooked Richard Nixon. However, the book is much more than a period piece, it is a book about the human condition, in particular our desire to anesthetise ourselves as insulation from ugly realities.

By second half of the book the narrative has broken free from its shackles and has set about destroying itself, like a scorpion doused in alcohol, insane and stinging itself to death. Part two’s ninth chapter opens with an editor’s note informing the reader that the author is no longer in a fit state to lash the prose together, and there follows simply a transcript of Thompson’s recorded conversations. The narrative re-appears in time to close the book, emerging blinking into the cold light of day in fittingly hung-over, but unrepentant, style. Alongside the vivid imagery of the prose, Ralph Steadman’s hectic illustrations, which originally accompanied the articles, have become inseparable from the novel.

He followed what he called “my Vegas book” with Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail in 1972. Unlike most of the jaded hacks covering the race for the presidency, Thompson actually had experience of running for office. Two years earlier he had been a candidate for Sheriff of Pitkin County, Aspen in Colorado. He ran under his own “Freak Power” banner and proposed renaming Aspen “Fat City”, a ploy designed to discourage the developers who sought to turn the town into a money-spinning ski resort, and also, somewhat predictably, proposed the decriminalization of the possession and sale of recreational drugs. In order to subvert his image as a hippy he promptly shaved his head and during public debates referred to the crew-cut-sporting Republican candidate as “my long haired opponent”. He lost the election, but only by a handful of votes.

Even in his later years he continued to publish and stood out amongst the pantheon of global social commentators. On 12 September 2001 he memorably wrote ‘The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country.’

A common criticism of his work as a serious body of literature has been his own, and by extension his protagonists’, vast narcotics consumption and many critics have used this as an excuse to dismiss the uncomfortable truths that Thompson frequently voiced. However, unlike comparable authors, notably William Burroughs, Thompson never baffles the reader or slips too far into his drug induced stupor that he becomes incoherent. While drugs undoubtedly inform the text, it is his intellect which drives it.

The biggest criticism of Thompson, however, and it is a major one, is that by his success and his genius in writing about truth and what it means to be alive, he has inspired hundreds of fucked up morons with drug habits to think that they can write, and it is for that reason that papers like The Beaver have to endure contributions like this one.

On that note it only remains for me to drain this bottle of Wild Turkey and cram these pages into the mojo wire. Only his own words can come close to being big enough to serve as an epitaph. “Too weird to live, too rare to die.”

Res Ipsa Loquitur. Mahalo.

Originally published in the LSE’s The Beaver, 21 February 2006.