Category Archives: Time Out

Time Out

The 40 most exciting things to do in the world in 2020

time-out-do-listMarvel at Morocco’s mystical master musicians
Joujouka, Morocco

What is it? A micro-festival in the tiny Moroccan village of Joujouka, dedicated in 2020 to the memory of Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones. It’s hosted by the Master Musicians of Joujouka, whom acid godfather Timothy Leary called a ‘4,000-year-old rock ’n’ roll band’. They’re a group of Sufi trance musicians who pass their skills from generation to generation in their home village, nestled in the southern Rif mountains of Morocco. They were much loved by the Beat Generation for providing a suitably trippy soundtrack back in the days when everyone wanted to join Crosby, Stills & Nash riding the Marrakesh Express.

Why go? Last year was the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Jones, who often played with the Master Musicians of Joujouka and did more than anyone to publicise their music in Britain. They’ve dedicated 2020’s event (running from June 5-7) to keeping the Rolling Stone’s mythical memory alive in song. Want to go? Act fast: with numbers strictly limited to just 50 total visitors, it’s a truly remarkable and unbelievably intimate experience.

Read the full list at Time Out.

Time Out

The Libertines: ‘Play the dodgy pub at the end of the street. You could get a blowjob.’

Libertines Pete Carl KEGP

‘We used to squat around here,’ says Pete Doherty, gesturing out of the window. ‘Albion Towers. There, the place opposite the Scala.’ ‘That was my little belfry,’ adds Carl Barât. ‘There’s a tiny little room at the top.’ We’re in the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel. It’s the perfect place for The Libertines to complete the circle: a London gothic fantasy. The Sir John Betjeman suite bears the stamp of its current occupants: the table is covered in empty cocktail glasses, one of which serves as a mausoleum for a steady stream of dead Marlboro Lights.

Barât picks up a book of the late poet laureate’s and reads from ‘A Child Ill’: ‘Oh little body, do not die…’ as we wait for our drinks; they’re called Ring of Roses, a potent concoction of vodka, champagne and elderflower. The summer evening is falling outside: all the scene needs is Chatterton dead on the couch. You can never accuse The Libertines of not staying in character.

A lot has happened since Doherty and Barât, along with drummer Gary Powell and bassist John Hassall, first stuck a needle in the arm of British rock ’n’ roll. Among music’s millionaire rappers and business-class casuals, the Libs wore their wit and mercurial intelligence on their sleeve. The press loved them: in 2002 the NME put them on the cover before they’d had a record out. Their vision of an English ‘Albion’ was a composite of Pete & Dud, ‘Steptoe and Son’ and ‘Oliver!’, with a distinctive London seediness and swagger. At their heart was the singular relationship between Doherty and Barât: loving, co-dependent, doomed. If Britpop had looked to the ’60s, the Libs were the Romantic poets, more Keats than Kinks.

And like the Romantics, they carried the shadow of their own destruction. They were – initially in the best possible way, subsequently in the very worst possible way – a shambles. Within two years of the release of their acclaimed debut, ‘Up the Bracket’, they had disintegrated in a mess of drugs, amateur burglary and prison. Doherty was appointed artist-in-residence to the tabloid media. A reunion looked unlikely.

But now they’re back, with a third album, ‘Anthems for Doomed Youth’. Recorded at Karma Sound Studios in Thailand, close to where Doherty recently completed rehab, the record represents a chance at redemption. After a triumphant set at Glastonbury, they’re headlining Reading Festival and Leeds Festival, and their return is a breath of smoky air to 2015’s clean-living music scene. Maybe we need their uncompromising devotion to the spirit of rock ’n’ roll more than ever. As new single ‘Gunga Din’ snarls: ‘It feels like nothing’s changed/Oh, fuck it, here I go again…’

Does this city inspire you?
Carl: ‘It’s endlessly a source of inspiration. It’s home, isn’t it?’
Pete: ‘My girlfriend has never lived in London, so all the time, when I take her out, I’m telling her stories and reliving things. It must get a little bit annoying for her after a while – “You worked there as well?”’

Was there a moment when the band’s relationship clicked again after the initial awkwardness of getting back together?
Carl: ‘By the time we were in Thailand there was no awkwardness. We were just really eager to get on with [recording the album]. I guess it all clicked when we pressed record and started playing “Gunga Din”…’
Pete: ‘Yeah, that’s true. Just playing together in a room like that.’

Have you noticed changes in each other?
Pete: ‘I never really used to take much notice before, but now we’re being asked to analyse the changes and the differences, just to placate the naysayers. I’m scared to share a microphone with him now because people say it’s a gimmick. Sometimes I do rush over [to the mic], but that’s only because after you’ve had a few drinks and smoked a certain amount you get that really nice smell on your breath. You know, like when your lover has got that winey, smoky taste. Not that Carl’s my lover… I’d rather toss off a frog.’
Carl: ‘That’s why he moved to France.’

Speaking of the two of you as lovers, have you read any Libertines fan fiction?
Pete: ‘Don’t mention that! He gets really annoyed.’
Carl: ‘I wouldn’t even know where to look for it.’
Pete: ‘He’s lying. Someone pointed us in the direction of it. It’s fucking weird, man, isn’t it? A lot of effort has gone into it. There’ll be a poetic stream of consciousness and then suddenly, BANG! My cock will appear in Carl’s ear. I think it must be written by someone close to us, because apart from the actual sex side of things, which obviously isn’t true, some of it’s quite close to life.’

You seem to be getting on better now. Are you older and wiser?
Carl: ‘I think we just understand things a bit better. We called down the thunder, and by fuck did we get it: like a piledriver that squashed the four of us. Now we’re realising a bit what things mean. How little time there is.’
Pete: ‘Maybe it’s the opposite. Maybe we really understood what things meant then, but things are different now in all our worlds. Carl’s got two little children who he loves. They call him daddy, because, well, that’s what he is. He’s a different person. There’s something in his eyes that wasn’t there before. Something fast approaching happiness.’

Now you’re back together, I see you’re still finishing each other’s…
Carl: ‘…Sandwiches.’

Exactly. How did you deal with being in the tabloids all the time?
Pete: ‘To be honest I’ve always been more of a TLS reader myself. I never really bothered. Sometimes you can’t avoid it, when it’s in your face when you’re buying milk.’
Carl: ‘I’m more interested in the crossword.’
Pete: ‘Or you find yourself in the fucking dock because someone’s taken a picture of you from a funny angle that makes it look like you’re doing something you’re not. The tabloids can fucking kiss it, man. As soon as I get 12 Number Ones I’ll buy them out and have a huge bonfire. All the fucking journalists will be tied up, gagged and bound in flammable gaffer tape. All the people saying “Pete Doherty’s put on weight”: they’ll see! I’ll lose a stone as the sweat pours from me while their carcasses go up in flames. The squeals of their last breaths…’
Carl: ‘It’s been a long day.’

You’re headlining Reading Festival. Will that feel like a homecoming?
Carl: ‘Reading is always a homecoming. It’s where I first stood in the mud and didn’t understand why someone was shouldering me to the ground. I got up with a bloody nose and realised that it was fun. It was abrasive love, and that’s what people do in front of a band that they love.’

Is there a pressure on you returning to the fans after ten years?
Carl: ‘A lot of them weren’t there then. You see a lot of 15-year-olds in the front row. We’ve just got to do what we do. If what we do is true but it isn’t good enough, then that’s a whole different issue.’
Pete: ‘Pressure really only exists when you have two opposing forces. If all the forces are pushing in the same direction then you just let the energy flow, and utilise it. There’s no one out there now to prove anything to.’

Does it feel more permanent now?
Carl: ‘We’re forever in the moment. There never has been any permanency to our state of mind.’

What advice would you give to a young band just starting out?
Pete: ‘You should start that question “Is there any advice…”’

Is there any advice…?
Pete: ‘No.’
Carl: ‘Nothing apart from “Keep the faith!” It’s the hardest thing in the world, and the easiest.’
Pete: ‘Just don’t listen to the naysayers who say that it’s a crap idea to put on this certain event at this certain place. Just do it. Play the really dodgy pub at the end of the street. You could meet a songwriting partner. You could get a blowjob. I don’t know.’
Carl: ‘You could get both, if you read the fan fiction.’

Do you still get nerves before big shows?
Pete: ‘That ain’t even the word, mate. “Nerves” ain’t even the word. Heebie-jeebies.’
Carl: ‘Fucking fear. Terror.’

It hasn’t changed with age?
Pete: ‘The day we just skip on [stage], we’ll knock it on the head.’
Carl: ‘That is the metaphor of “The Elves and the Shoemaker”. At the end, they’re given clothes and they all go away happy.’
Pete: ‘That’s what we’re looking for. The day the demons go away.’
Carl: ‘Then we won’t need to play songs any more.’

So that’s The Libertines in 2015: the same but different, as vital as ever. How long they will hold it together this time is anyone’s guess. ‘Gunga Din’ also contains a warning: ‘The road is long/If you stay strong/You’re a better man than I.’ What makes The Libertines unique also makes them uniquely fragile. The Ring of Roses cocktails arrive. ‘Chew the elderflower,’ advises Doherty. Then: ‘How old are you?’ ‘Twenty-nine,’ I reply.

He leans in conspiratorially. ‘Got any drugs?’

Originally published in Time Out, 25 August 2015.

Read in Russian at Time Out Moscow.

Time Out

Rudimental talk festivals, Ed Sheeran and Snoop Dogg getting smoky

imageRudimental are one of London’s great homegrown success stories. Their Mercury Prize-nominated 2013 debut album ‘Home’ spawned a slew of massive hits including ‘Feel the Love’, which launched the career of John Newman, and ‘Waiting All Night’ which did the same for Ella Eyre. Fresh from touring America in the company of their old mate Ed Sheeran, this summer sees Piers Agget, Amir Amor, DJ Locksmith and Kesi Dryden return to the UK to take the Friday headline slot at this year’s Lovebox festival in Victoria Park. They also have a brand new record primed for imminent release. We caught up with Amir Amor to find out how they’re handling their swift rise.

Continue reading at Time Out. 

Time Out

King Of The Swingers

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timeoutarcticmonkeys

Alex TurnerI’m sat in a coffee shop just off Shoreditch High Street when Alex Turner walks in, removing a pair of Ray Bans as he steps through the door. Everyone here is far too cool to stare, but there are turned heads and lingering looks as he makes his way to my table. He doesn’t swagger or strut. He’s wearing a brown suede jacket and skinny jeans, but what sets him apart are the details: the dark quiff that could have been sculpted by the King himself and the insouciance that can only really come from having headlined Glastonbury twice by the age of 27.

Right now he’s enjoying a rare month off. After we order coffee he tells me he’s been back at his place in east London, and that he spent the previous evening dusting off his CD collection. ‘I pulled out “The Songs of Leonard Cohen” and it still had a sticker on it. £14.99!’

Money well spent, I suggest. ‘Totally,’ he agrees. ‘Fucking “Suzanne”: what a song! I don’t have an Instagram account, but if I did I’d have grammed it, saying exactly that: “Money well spent.”’

It must be nice for him to be home, enjoying the simple pleasures of rummaging through old albums? ‘I’m not even sure where home is,’ Turner sighs. ‘Probably Terminal 5. There is a strange sense of calm about arriving back at Heathrow.’

He’s spent a lot of time in the air these last eight years. The Arctic Monkeys’ record-breaking debut ‘Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not’ launched Turner, drummer Matt Helders and guitarist Jamie Cook into the stratosphere almost overnight in 2006, with fourth member Nick O’Malley joining to replace original bassist Andy Nicholson soon after. Since then the gang of schoolmates have established themselves as Britain’s biggest contemporary rock ’n’ roll band. Last year’s heavy, sultry and tremendous ‘AM’ (their fifth album) topped the charts in nine countries and set them up for a pair of huge shows in Finsbury Park this week.

Some of the fans flocking to see them will be teenagers too young to remember the band as Yorkshire urchins, trackie bottoms tucked into their socks. There are others, however, who remember it all too well: critics who’ve accused the Arctics’ frontman of now pretending to be something he’s not. At the outset Turner wrote songs about drinking and dancing and falling out of taxis, and described those nights just the way you and your mates would, if only you were blessed with a sharper turn of phrase. Now Turner spends much of the year in LA, dates a model and dresses like a screen idol – somewhere between James Dean and Marlon Brando in ‘The Wild One’. Has he been blinded by the bright lights of Stateside success? Whatever people say about Alex Turner, who is he now?

Not a man who takes himself entirely seriously, it turns out. ‘I wish I could be that guy,’ he says, when I ask him about his International Rock Star persona. He tells me he’s happiest when he’s writing, plucking new songs out of the ether. What’s the hardest part of his job? ‘Probably the same thing,’ he deadpans, in that muttering, sub-Elvis drawl he’s cultivated. He’s taking the piss out of himself. He’s too self-aware, probably too Northern, to believe his own smooth rhetoric. ‘I wish I could be the guy who says those sort of lines,’ he says. ‘I catch myself too quick.’This February, at The BRIT Awards, that self-awareness landed him in the eye of a tabloid storm. Collecting the first of the band’s two awards, for Best British Album and Best British Group, Turner made a now notorious speech about how ‘rock ’n’ roll seems like it’s faded away sometimes, but it will never die’.

He was accused of arrogance (as if that’s such a sin in a rock star) but Turner maintains that the celebration of his genre needed voicing. ‘I was trying to present an option in an entertaining way,’ he says. ‘In a room like that, where we were the only guitar band, it’s easy to start feeling like an emissary for rock ’n’ roll. If that’s what people were talking about after the Brits rather than a nipple slipping out, that’s a good thing. In a way, maybe it is a nipple slipping out.’

Raised on a diet of Britpop, Turner can’t have imagined being in Britain’s biggest rock band and having to make that sort of clarion call. I ask him if he ever feels like the Arctics are an Oasis without a Blur to lock horns with. He laughs. ‘It would be really arrogant to say that there’s just us. There are others but there are very few bands on the radio. It doesn’t have to be that way. I think that’s where that speech was coming from.’

Turner is the sort of man who chooses his words carefully, occasionally retrieving a comb from a pocket so that he can attend to his quiff and buy a few more seconds of thought. Award shows don’t come naturally. ‘As perverse as this may sound, I don’t really enjoy being the centre of attention,’ he says. ‘It’s all right during a show, because I’d argue it’s the song or the performance that’s the centre of attention. It’s not like me opening my birthday presents in front of everybody. I’m not a big fan of that. I think making a speech falls into that category. It’s like getting a trophy for a race that you didn’t really know you were running. There’s a twisted side to it. I can come off as ungrateful, but fuck it. That’s just the truth.’

That subtle sleight-of-hand to keep a part of himself out of the limelight may also explain the bequiffed, leather-clad character he’s created, although he’s quick to dismiss the idea that the band are keeping it any less ‘real’ than when they started out. ‘Tracksuits are as much of a uniform as a gold sparkly jacket,’ he says. ‘We made a decision to keep dressing like that at the start. It’s as contrived as anything else. It’s a sort of theatre.’

So don’t expect him to dig out a pair of shorts for Finsbury Park (‘Unless I’m within splashing distance of water I won’t be caught dead in them, as a rule’). He’s happy that audiences seem more excited to hear tunes from ‘AM’ than old stuff (‘Still got it!’), but he’s self-effacing about what’s made this record such a success. ‘I think the production is what makes people move. The words are just me blabbing on, the usual shit.’

Our time’s up but Turner’s in no hurry. We sit and chat about books, and as befits the sharpest lyric writer of his generation he’s the sort of reader who can quote his favourite novels. He’s a fan of Conrad and Hemingway, but above all Nabokov. He recites a line about internalised anger from ‘Despair’: ‘I continued to stir my tea long after it had done all it could with the milk.’

After an hour or so, it’s time for a smoke. As we leave the coffee shop the manager stops us. He’s noticed the turned heads. ‘Excuse me,’ he asks me, ‘are you the singer in a band?’ Alex Turner laughs out loud. He doesn’t need his ego massaging. He’s a bona fide rock ’n’ roll star.

Cover story for Time Out, 20 May 2014.

Time Out

Pizza with Katy B

katyb‘It’s got lust and love and danger and jealousy on it. It feels “red”.’ Sadly, Katy B is not talking about the Big Red pizza bus where we’re sat in Deptford. She’s describing her second album ‘Little Red’, the follow-up to her rave-igniting, Mercury Prize-nominated 2011 debut ‘On a Mission’. After digging in to a rocket-loaded Giardiniera pizza, the south London R&B icon opens up about dating, dancing and her past life as Peckham’s answer to Vinnie Jones. 

Continue reading at Time Out.