Cigarette paper between his fingers, Van McCann is sat in the smoking room at the back of Catfish & The Bottlemen’s tourbus. It’s parked outside Schubas Tavern in Chicago, a 200-capacity room where the band are due onstage in less than an hour.

“I don’t know what to do,” he croaks.

Sat across from him is Catfish’s sound guy, Mike Woodhouse. “Your voice is fucked,” says Mike, “so the way I see it, you have three options. Option one: sing as normal. From what you’re saying, that’s not an option. Option two: get the audience to help you. Get them to sing like you did that night in Leeds. Option three: pull the gig, but…”

Van cuts him off. “We’re not pulling the gig.” Catfish & The Bottlemen have never pulled a gig. “People have paid their hard-earned money and they’ve already been waiting outside for hours,” Van says, gesturing to the snow piled up outside. “It’s fucking freezing out there.”

On their current American tour Van has been up at 9am every day to do live sessions for radio and local TV before the band’s evening gigs. He says that’s why his 22-year old voice currently sounds like a waste disposal pipe. He’s tried all sorts to save it. He’s tried not drinking. He’s even tried not smoking, and Van smokes likes it’s a dying art. Nothing made any difference.

“Our label says we have to do sessions if we want to be the biggest band in the world,” he says, “but it frustrates me that the competition winners at the session this morning are going to get a better show than the fans tonight. I’m only in this band to write songs and sing. It frustrates me when I can’t do it.”

The rest of the band and management once again propose cancelling the gig, even at this late hour. Van won’t hear of it. If Catfish & The Bottlemen have made it this far – two sold-out nights at O2 Academy Brixton, a Top 10 UK debut album in ‘The Balcony’, appearing on Letterman – it’s because of Van’s work ethic, about which he’s endearingly earnest. Catfish have been gigging hard since 2009. This is their second US tour and it too is completely sold out, but Van refuses to let anyone treat it like some kind of victory lap. If they want to keep reaching new heights, they have to be responsible about it. No slacking or hard partying. Schubas Tavern is a rung on the ladder to playing big shows: Van wants Oasis at Knebworth, The Stone Roses at Spike Island.

“I remember going to see Oasis at Heaton Park,” he says. “It was like everyone was going to the core of the earth. It was like Jesus was back. A couple of lads from Burnage did that? That looks good to me.”

The first thing Van McCann says when he gets onstage is: “I need you tonight, Chicago. My voice has gone completely so I need you as much as you can.” The band launch into opener ‘Rango’, which tilts at the stadium rock of recent Kings Of Leon songs, and Van starts thrashing around as he plays, as if hoping to make up for his lack of voice through sheer physical exertion.

“Thank you,” he rasps afterwards, then launches into an explanation that’s near enough word-for-word what he just said to Mike and the band in the bus: “I’m sorry my voice sounds so rough. I want you to know we don’t go out and get fucked up before shows. We’ve had to play sessions every morning. We love playing shows. We take this seriously. We’re professional. We’ve never pulled a show, because we’re prepared. I’m really sorry I’m not 100 per cent…”

They make it through the single ‘Pacifer’ unscathed, but Van isn’t done apologising. “I’m only here because I can sing,” he says. “I feel awful. If any of you want your money back afterwards you can have it. Or I’ll buy you a beer. I promise you I’ll buy the whole place a beer…”

A voice from the crowd cuts him off: “Shut up and sing!”

“You sound great!”

“We love you!”

They tear through ‘Fallout’ at full pace, and afterwards Van just grins. “Shit. Did I promise you all beers? I’ve just done the maths in my head. There’s a lot of you in here. Is this an 18-plus gig? So you’re all old enough to drink? Shit. I didn’t say anything about getting your money back, did I?”

The crowd laugh and shout for him to go on, but on ‘26’ his voice starts to drop out, and by the next track, the slower-paced ‘Business’, he sounds awful. The band’s tour manager runs onto the stage and puts his arms around Van’s shoulders and asks if he wants to pull the gig there and then, but Van won’t leave unless he’s dragged off.

He’s got to play the next song, because it’s ‘Kathleen’ and that’s the big radio hit. It’s the one the American fans all heard first. The one they played on the Late Show With David Letterman. The one that finds the sweet spot between The Strokes and The Cribs. Impossibly, something about ‘Kathleen’ seems to rejuvenate his voice. By the end of the song he’s full of confidence again, and signals for the other three members to leave the stage so he can play the introspective ‘Homesick’ on his own. Accompanied by just his guitar, his voice is now totally exposed and yet somehow healed. The band come back on and they roar through a couple more songs. Then, before the howling closer ‘Tyrants’, the tour manager reappears. He tells the room the band have put enough money behind the bar to buy everyone in the venue a pint.

The crowd look at each other. “Fuck,” someone says. “He wasn’t kidding!”

After the show, the band are back in the tourbus for just 13 brief minutes. Van and his best mate and guitar tech Larry shut themselves in the back room for a smoke, their post-gig decompression ritual, then open the doors and jump out into the snow to meet the fans clustered outside.

“We were going to invite them in and make them a brew,” says Van, “but imagine what people would think if they saw some picture of a young girl posing with us on our tourbus.”

So instead they stand around outside for an hour, even as the temperature drops down below minus 10. They separate off, and three concentric circles of fans form: one around bassist Benji Blakeway and drummer Bob Hall, one around guitarist Johnny ‘Bondy’ Bond, and the biggest around Van. A girl hugs him and says, “You changed my life!”

A 21-year-old guy called Nicholas tries to force a fistful of dollars into Van’s hand. “I just played the House Of Blues a couple of weeks ago with my band and I had bronchitis,” he explains afterwards. “I know how hard it is to go onstage and sing your heart out. When he said he was going to buy everyone in the venue a drink I got goosebumps from my toes to my fucking head. They just put on the best show I’ve ever seen, because it was so real. It’s humble, and it’s honest. The lyrics mean something to everyone. It’s not the overproduced bullshit that you usually hear on the radio. When he sings about being drunk and horny… I’ve been there. We’ve all been there.”

Only when absolutely everyone has got their selfies do Catfish climb back onto the bus. Van heads back to his smoking room, leaving the rest of the band to hang out at the front. At the end of last year Van told NME that the band aren’t really mates. After so long on the road, is that still true?

“I think we’re like brothers now. We get on,” says Bondy. He laughs, and continues: “Although saying that, I fight with my brother all the time.”

“There’s a family spirit,” says Benji, nodding.

Van re-emerges. After spending so much of the night worrying about his voice, he wants to think about something else. Talk turns to their next album, which he wrote months ago but first played to the band last night.

“It’s more widescreen,” says Van. “We needed to open our eyes a little bit. The album we’ve got is good, but it’s an 18-year-old boy trying to get out of a small town. When I listen to the first album now, it sounds angry. That was us trying to break out and get somewhere, and now we’re opening up and going, ‘Christ, we’re in America! This is class!’ We want to go to stadiums and play simple rock’n’roll songs. Put your girlfriend on your shoulders and your arm round your best mate. Dads can take their kids, like my dad used to take me. They’re still songs about normal life, but it’s less about John in Manchester and more about Manchester, y’know what I mean?”

The band head back into the venue to hit the bar. Van prefers to chill out on the bus. He hasn’t thought about anything other than Catfish & The Bottlemen for six years. “I’ve tried to slow it down because I realised I wasn’t enjoying it,” he says. “All the lads would be laughing and having a joke, but I’d be coming of stage thinking, ‘Fuck, I missed that note.’”

The idea is that it’ll all be worth it in the long run. Van has put every penny he’s ever earned from royalties into a separate bank account. “I’ve never touched it,” he says, “even if I wanted £40 to go to the pub. I’ve kept it all and when I have a kid I’m going to give it to them. That means every single song I’ve ever wrote will mean something to somebody. I want to be the best dad and the best husband, like my dad was to me.”

That’s why Van keeps writing songs. He wasn’t supposed to start writing that new album until April. Instead, he finished it while they were still recording the last one. Then he wrote 20 more songs. His friends in bands told him he should take advantage of his record label and get them to fly him to LA, so he hatched a plan to keep the new record a secret until April, then feign writer’s block and get a free holiday. He couldn’t do it. He shrugs. “I couldn’t hold it in.”

He loves being on tour in America, but he misses Britain. “I love pound coins,” he says, “and pasties.” Mostly he misses his “shitty cottage” in Chester, where he can write songs, play FIFA and smoke in the kitchen. That’s why, after he has eventually joined his bandmates for a few drinks, he tells them he won’t be going on to the next bar with them. Instead, he goes back to the bus with Larry, and they smoke and rewatch Austin Powers until Larry falls asleep. Then Van picks up his guitar, and he writes another song.

Originally published in NME, 14 March 2015.

Brandon Flowers, wearing a black leather jacket and grasping a mug of green tea, is stood in the centre of a mixing studio in West London unable to keep still as he listens back to some of the final mixes for his second solo album,

He nods his head to the calypso-influenced beat of ‘Still Want You’ and grins as we hear his backing singers come crashing in. “Nuclear distress, I still want you,” they sing. “Climate change and death, I still want you.”

The subject matter may be apocalyptic, but Flowers knows exactly where he wants these songs to end up. “I want to be on the radio,” he says. “I’ve never been ashamed to say that.”

The Killers frontman is putting the final touches to his new record, which will be called ‘The Desired Effect’, ahead of its release this spring. It’s currently being mixed at Assault & Battery studio in West London by Alan Moulder, who’s been working with Flowers since the first Killers album ‘Hot Fuss’ back in 2003.

A lot has changed since then, and Flowers knows that the radio is a very different place to the one where ‘Mr Brightside’ found a home. “I can’t believe where radio has gone,” he says. “It seems to be such a weird world now. Where I once seemed to fit in, now I’m seen as a little different. I used to be considered mainstream but now I’m almost avant-garde or artrock compared to what’s on the radio.”

His plan for ‘The Desired Effect’ was to make a grown-up pop record with singles that can get played on Radio One while also carrying some weight and meaning for his long-term fans whose lives, like his, have changed over the last decade. “I’m 33 years old and I have three sons, I’ve got to try to commit to myself and not embarrass myself,” he says. “A lot of these songs could be about a man and his wife. I’m coming up on 10 years of marriage, and it’s not a cakewalk.”

Flowers took his cues from his heroes: Genesis’ Peter Gabriel, The Police’s Sting and The Eagles’ Don Henley. He says they showed him how to mature away from the bands that made their names: “I think if you look at those people, they weren’t just catering to little kids. I think adults like pop music too, and we shouldn’t be – I’m speaking for all of us – we shouldn’t be listening to a lot of that music that we’re listening to! There has always been pop music but it can speak to you too, you know? I think we’re walking a line on my new record, and hopefully we’ve found a place where there’s sophistication to it but it also feels accessible.”

Having first emerged in the wake of bands like The Strokes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Flowers says that he’s been listening with interest to the solo records put out by his peers, like Karen O. He laughs off the suggestion that he could ever make an album as abrasive as Julian Casablancas’ recent record with The Voidz. “I don’t know if I have that in me,” he says. “It’s like Bowie doing ‘Tin Machine’ or something like that. I just can’t… I’m too much of a pop tart.”

One contemporary record he does admire is The War On Drugs’ ‘Lost In The Dream’, although he has one problem with Adam Granduciel’s work. “I’m with everybody else on the War On Drugs train,” he says, “but I just don’t know what the hell he’s saying. I just want to turn up the vocals. The vocal melodies are great, and I love what’s happening, but I just want to be able to hear the words. I love a song that I can sing along to.”

‘The Desired Effect’ will be the follow-up to Flowers’ 2010 debut solo album ‘Flamingo’. Many critics at the time noted that it sounded a lot like a Killers record, while NME’s review argued that it was “more that The Killers’ albums sounded like Brandon Flowers solo albums, with a bit of indie guitar on top.”

This time round, Flowers wanted to make a conscious effort to explore new territory. To that end he recruited producer Ariel Rechtshaid, who made his name working with the likes of Vampire Weekend and Haim. “I’m so much a part of that Killers sound,” Flowers says, “so for me to move away from it I had to give Ariel some freedom, a little bit more slack on the rope. A lot of times it worked, and when it didn’t I was able to have a strong enough hold on things to pull the rope and get it where I need to get it.”

While Flowers says the image he’ll be presenting with the album is still being figured out, there’s some clues in the fact that the video for lead single ‘Can’t Deny My Love’ has already been shot in the Nevada desert with Evan Rachel Wood and Richard Butler of the Psychedelic Furs. Having dismissed most treatments he got from video directors as “the worst ideas”, Flowers decided to create his own adaptation of ‘Young Goodman Brown’, a short story by 19^th Century American writer Nathanial Hawthorne. “It’s a little bit nerve-wracking to go out on a limb when you’ve had the idea,” he says, “but I love the story, so if we get it right it’ll be so cool.”

He’ll definitely be taking the record on the road, and he’ll have a similar touring band to his first solo album. There are already dates in Mexico confirmed, with more worldwide to be announced. He’ll also break from his personal schedule to headline a festival in Delaware with The Killers in June. Flowers confirms that whether or not ‘The Desired Effect’ has the desired effect of getting him back on the radio, he still sees a future for his band. “I like being in the Killers and I’m proud of what we’ve done,” he says. “I believe we still have something to offer.”

Originally published by NME, 28 February 2015.

What did it take for Blur to record their first new album in 12 years? Answer: the cancellation of the Tokyo Rocks festival in 2013, the persistence of Graham Coxon and the Chinese equivalent of Mr Whippy.

The band unveiled their eighth album, ‘The Magic Whip’, at a packed press conference at the Golden Phoenix restaurant in London’s Chinatown on February 19 –Chinese New Year.

Guitarist Graham Coxon explained that the Chinese influence on the album comes from the fact that the initial recordings were all made in Hong Kong during a five-day period that opened up after the cancellation of their Japanese tour date. “We had some downtime,” he said, “so we thought we’d find a few days to relocate into a studio to record our stuff there.”

While the band didn’t finish the album in that time, frontman Damon Albarn said it was Coxon who believed they had the makings of a new record. “Graham came to me and said, ‘I think we’ve got something here.’ I was like, ‘Brilliant. Go and have a look at it.’”

Albarn thought Blur had “run its course” and was busy with his solo projects, so admitted to “mixed emotions” when Coxon and producer Stephen Street played him back the new material. “I was like, ‘Oh no, this is really good.’”

With Coxon having quit the band by the release of 2003’s ‘Think Tank’, his influence will be far more apparent on this record – the first full-group effort since 1999’s ‘13’ – although, speaking to NME after the press conference, both of the band’s songwriters say their relationship on this album was more symbiotic than ever. “There were snatches of [lyrics from the original recordings] that you can grab hold of to get some sort of gist,” said Coxon. “It’s always been my job to glean what I can from what he’s saying and put it through a guitar.”

Albarn added: “And then once that happens I’ve got to go back and finish it. If he’s interpreted a word or a sound, it kind of helps finish the words. Basically it’s been a really great process this time round. I’ve never made a record in this way. On this occasion it’s worked really well for us. Whether we could repeat it again? Who knows? Probably not.”

Albarn completed writing the lyrics for the album by drawing on his visits to Hong Kong and China, and his wider travels, too. One song, ‘Pyongyang’, deals with his experiences visiting North Korea, and ‘There Are Too Many Of Us’ is not simply about urban overpopulation. “Probably the initial idea came from being in a very claustrophobic city,” he said, “but I actually finished the lyric after having come back from Australia. I was there the day they had the hostage situation in the chocolate shop, which was an extraordinary thing to witness. I was staying in a hotel where I could literally see what was going on outside and watch it on TV. I’ve never been in that position before, and as a songwriter that was a very interesting standpoint to have: to be seeing something on TV, and then out the window it’s happening. Seeing the reality of what was happening and how it was being distorted through the prism of [the camera] was kind of fascinating.”

The album’s title “can mean a lot of things, he added. It’s a folkloric conceit in traditional Chinese culture. It can be an ice cream. It’s a firework. It’s also a whip. The whip, for me, was very important because I always have a sense of the hidden control everywhere in China. I love its multifaceted madness, but you can’t help but get the sense of that element of control.”

The band also announced that they will headline the British Summer Time festival in Hyde Park on June 20, and Albarn revealed to NME that the band will play “gigs around the country prior to that… We’re going to play in Wales, in Scotland and in England.”

Having cited the new album as “the only reason” they’ve decided to play live again, Albarn said he’d like to play as much of the new material as possible at Hyde Park, although “we’ve got quite a few songs that we wouldn’t want to not play in a big field like that. There’ll be an element of editing the new material to work in context with the old material.”

Drummer Dave Rowntree believes the band now has the “challenge of taking the record and transplanting it into the four of us playing live”.

Bassist Alex James thinks it won’t pose much of a problem, though. “I don’t find the idea of that particularly challenging,” he said. “It’s a really exciting proposition to play live, because it’s just the four of us giving it the beans. 2012 was such a triumph, that Olympic show, so how do we take it up a notch from there? Well, here’s a bunch of new bangers. Let’s have a go.”

Originally published in NME, 28 February 2015.

Minutes before they’re due on stage in the back room of a pub called the Lincoln Imp in Scunthorpe, Palma Violets frontmen Sam Fryer and Chilli Jesson invite me out to their tour van to join them for “a round of Hare Krishna”. I agree, assuming they’re referring to some exotic new drug extracted direct from the adrenal gland of Hindu beauty queens and available solely on the intra-band black market.

Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna
Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare
Hare Rama, Hare Rama
Rama Rama, Hare Hare

They’re not. These days they really do spend the last 10 minutes before each gig chanting the 15^th century Maha Mantra, or ‘Great Mantra’, so beloved of orange-clad, shaven-haired monks. I’m sceptical, but I realise I’ll have to join in out of politeness. “Take a breath after every ‘Hare Hare’,” Sam reminds us. By the third cycle of the sixteen-word Vaishnava mantra I begin to understand. My head is clear, my heart is pure and my voice feels ready to belt out at least an hour’s worth of dirty punk rock songs.

“I think it’s saved the band,” says Sam as we head back inside. “I was reading a book about Hare Krishna and thought we should try it as a vocal warm-up. It really works. Neither of us are trained singers, so we needed to start doing something like this or we were going to destroy our throats.”

Tonight is the first of a handful of warm-up dates the band have lined up ahead of headlining the NME Awards Tour in February and March and the release of their second album, ‘Danger In The Club’, on May 4. The wild-eyed boys that first broke through with ‘Best Of Friends’ in 2012 may be taking better care of their voice boxes these days, but have they matured enough to write a genuinely classic new record? Will their fans still have something to pogo around the room to? And what the hell are they doing in Scunthorpe anyway?

That morning I’d met the bleary-eyed band outside Studio 180, the home base on the Lambeth Road they immortalised on debut record ‘180’. It’s 10am, unfashionably early for a rock’n’roll band to be up and about, but necessary if we’re to make the four hour drive up to Scunthorpe in time for sound check.

A town previously primarily famous in rock’n’roll circles for being the birthplace of Howard Devoto, of Buzzcocks and Magazine, and for being one of the few English place names with the word “cunt” in it, Scunthorpe doesn’t seem like an intuitive place to stage a comeback. After we pile into the back of the tour van and start heading north, Sam explains that the venue was chosen primarily to repay their mates Ming City Rockers for coming all the way down to Hitchin for last year’s Reading and Leeds warm-up gig. They’re what Chilli calls “the real deal”, and hail from nearby Immingham (an English place name with the word “ming” in it, it must be something in the water).

No sooner have we pulled onto the M1 than Chilli begins chanting a line about motorways that the band love from a live version of an old Brinsley Schwarz pub rock song called ‘Home In My Hand’.

Spend long enough with Palma Violets and you’ll overhear the phrase ‘pub rock’ more often than backstage at a Dr Feelgood gig on Canvey Island. “I love that era,” explains Chilli. “I’m a big fan of Ducks Deluxe and all those bands who started punk before punk. I would definitely consider us a pub rock band.”

The oft-overlooked genre, which gave starts to the likes of Joe Strummer, Ian Dury and Elvis Costello, is in tune with the band both in terms of their music and their love of playing small, sweaty venues like the Lincoln Imp. “You’d consider us a pub rock band, wouldn’t you Sam?” asks Chilli.

“Yeah!” nods Sam vigorously. “I think people just got confused at the beginning. Someone must have misheard us. It sounds a bit like ‘punk’, but it’s ‘pub’.”

The band have recently been working on a new song written by Graham Parker, whose group The Rumour were one of pub rock’s defining acts. After his daughter brought him to a Palma Violets show in America, Parker came to see them again at London’s Coronet and presented them with a song he’d been working on but didn’t quite fit on his new record. “He said he wanted us to give it a whirl,” says Chilli. “It’s called ‘Any Kind Of Weather’. He wrote it, without lyrics, or rather with what he called ‘nonsense lyrics’. We wrote some new ones, which was great because to us he’s a legend. We love his records, stuff like ‘Squeezing Out Sparks’. It’s not going to be on our record because we’re still working on it. It could be a great song, we just haven’t had the time to finish it.”

When we arrive at the Lincoln Imp mid-afternoon on Friday, the first thing landlady Lorraine Briggs tells us is that she’s been offered hundreds of pounds in cash for just one extra ticket. Demand for the gig has so outstripped available places in the room that the local newspaper, The Scunthorpe Telegraph, is reporting that “the Imp has been inundated with calls from female admirers offering to work the night for free as barstaff, glass collectors – and even bouncers!” Palma Violets don’t just have fans, they have fanatics. The same kind of dedicated lifers who would have moaned for Elvis or thrown jelly beans at The Beatles and fainted at airports.

These aren’t just screaming kids either. Before the show, one mum spots Chilli outside and runs over to him. “I promised my daughter that if I saw you I’d give you a kiss!” she tells him breathlessly before pecking him on the cheek. I ask her if her daughter’s at the gig as well. “No,” she replies. “I’ve put her on babysitting duty.” Another fan nervously shakes Chilli’s hand and tells him his Stones-mad grandfather had seen the Palmas on Jools Holland and told his whole family to check them out. “I watched it because I know he knows his stuff, and I was blown away. I thought: those are some crazy, drugged-up motherfuckers!”

“That’s us,” grins Chilli. Back inside, he shrugs off the fanaticism. “It’s just nice that we haven’t been forgotten about. You never know what’s going to happen when you go away to record an album.”

If tonight is supposed to be a lowkey way to make sure everyone can play the new songs in time, it’s doomed from the start. It’s carnage. About halfway through the set the two hired bouncers, who had been struggling manfully to keep the crowd off the stage, are suddenly joined by a wall of hardcase blokes who form a wall between audience and band. They barely distinguish between the two, at one point grabbing Chilli in a headlock. At least one person gets knocked out and there’s an ambulance waiting outside. Nobody has any idea where the hardnuts came from, until the landlady explains. “They’re the Ashby army,” she says. “Anybody causes any trouble round ‘ere, I call the boys in.” Considering the Imp is the sort of pub that has a spit and sawdust boxing ring in the basement, I don’t doubt her for a second.

By the end of the night fans are staggering around like they’ve just been involved in a mugging in a sauna. There’s a guy called Mitch whose shoes have fallen apart. He’s covered in sweat from head to toe, and most of it isn’t his. He’s got pupils the size of dinner plates and he’s so giddy and exhausted he can barely string a sentence together. Mitch doesn’t care. He’s found love. Mitch has just seen Palma Violets play in the back room of a pub to 150 people and they’ve blown his mind out through his ears.

“They were so good, man,” he mumbles. “Will even fixed my shoes.” He points down to where Palma’s drummer Will Doyle has wrapped gaffer tape around the guy’s shredded footwear in an act of rudimentary punk cobbling.

“It was chaos,” says Sam. “If you’re honest, you’ll write that we played shit tonight. It was a great gig, but we played shit. I had to keep moving the mic stand because I thought someone was going to smash into it and knock all my teeth down my throat.”

This is bullshit. They were on righteous form, despite the extenuating circumstances. “At some points I was playing every key on the keyboards at once,” adds Pete Mayhew. “Just because I was trying to hold them down and keep them upright.”

I don’t doubt that there’ll be further rehearsals ahead of the NME Awards Tour. Unlike ‘180’, which contained eleven and a half songs written together in sweaty basements and honed through relentless touring, their second album is a proper studio album. It was recorded at Rockfield Studios in Monmouth, Wales, where Queen recorded ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and Oasis made ‘(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?’ It was overseen by John Leckie, who produced ‘The Stone Roses’ in the same studio, and his influence as well as the band’s maturation as writers is presenting them with a whole new set of challenges as they return to life on the road.

“Some of the new songs are going to have to change a lot when we play them live,” says Chilli. “We’ve never had this problem before, because we recorded ‘180’ just as we’d been playing it. Working with John Leckie this time round means that we’ve been doing more with percussion and backing vocals, and Pete and Will have stepped up and started singing too.”

“Leckie wasn’t as encouraging as Steve Mackey had been on our first album,” says Pete. “He wouldn’t say, ‘That’s great, but why don’t you try this…’ he’d just say ‘I don’t like that.’ It was a shock at first, but I think it was what we needed. He hasn’t worked with an English rock band in a long time, so we really appreciated him almost coming out of retirement to work with us. He obviously thought it was worth it.”

“He turned the studio into his own little world,” says Will. “We’d write all day and then at the end of the day he’d play us records that he’d made, like Magazine’s first album ‘Real Life’ and a lot of The Fall, and the other stuff to push us like ‘The Four Horsemen’ by Aphrodite’s Child and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.”

“He helped us add something to our sound, but as Chilli says it means that even though we’ve finished the album we’re still working out how to play it live,” adds Sam. “It’s the complete opposite way of working to what we did on the last album.”

In Scunthorpe they play three new songs. There’s ‘On The Beach’, or rather ‘Girl You Couldn’t Do Much Better (On The Beach)’, to give it it’s full title. It features a strutting guitar riff as well as Sam’s favourite lyric on the album, “We’ll probably burn out and fail, but at least it’s a marvellous failure”, which Chilli explains was inspired by the inscription on Sex Pistols impresario Malcolm McLaren’s grave: “Better a spectacular failure, than a benign success.” Words to live by.

They also play ‘Matador’, which Sam calls “probably the strangest song on the album.” He describes it as: “like two completely different songs together. It’s definitely the saddest song on the album. It’s got a D minor in it.”

The final new song they play in Scunthorpe is the new record’s title track ‘Danger In The Club’. Both Sam and Chilli agree it’s among their favourites of the new songs. “For me, it sums up this record,” explains Chilli. “Musically and lyrically, it rounds this whole album up. Whenever I listen to it I’m always amazed, because it’s complex and there’s so many different things going on. I never thought we’d be able to write a song like that, and I think that’s one of the things that John Leckie helped us to do.”

“A fight breaks out in the middle of the song,” adds Sam. “It’s very punchy, like pub and glam rock mixed together.”

The morning after the adrenalin rush of the gig at the Imp we wake up on a truly dismal morning at a Travel Lodge on a roundabout somewhere outside Scunthorpe. We pile back into the van and head towards London and another tiny show at Bethnal Green’s Sebright Arms. Like the night before at the Imp, you could trade yourself just about anything you want for a spare ticket. Over 7,000 people tried to get themselves a spot in the 150 capacity venue. Also like the night before, Sam and Chilli spend the last 10 minutes before the show in a van chanting ‘Hare Krishna’. The band’s manager Milo Ross shakes his head in confusion as he watches. “Times have changed,” he shrugs.

Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna
Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare
Hare Rama, Hare Rama
Rama Rama, Hare Hare

Anyone lucky enough to squeeze themselves into the Sebright Arms will have heard another new song. ‘English Tongue’ is the band’s newest anthem, and one which sums up the band’s spontaneous way of working. The whole album had already been mixed and mastered when the band went into the studio for a couple of weeks to rehearse. Sam and Chilli decided to jam some ideas they’d been working on individually, and instantly sparked something. “It was a freak occurrence,” explains Sam, “because we both came in with the same idea. Different lyrics but the exact same melody and chords.”

“We just wanted to record a couple of demos,” adds Chilli, “but then Geoff and Jeannette [Travis and Lee from Rough Trade] came down and loved it so much they wanted to put it on the album.”

That left them with just a day to get the song properly recorded, mixed and mastered before the deadline for their record. “I was on one side of London doing the artwork and they were on the other side of London doing the mastering,” says Sam. “It all had to be done by 6pm. We were on the phone shouting at each other going: ‘What the fuck are we doing?’ It was an exciting way to finish it. A twist in the tail.”

“You have to realise, we thought we had the record done…” sighs Chilli.

Maybe it’s all those Hare Krishnas, but the Palma Violets of 2015 seem somehow older and wiser then the fresh-faced band who took the NME Awards Tour by storm in 2013. Now that they’re returning to headline it, I ask Chilli if he agrees the band see things differently now. “I think my reason for doing what we’re doing has slightly changed,” he nods. “I think when you start in a band you do it for certain reasons – for the fame, maybe, or to impress a girl. Getting the chance to record an album is exciting and anywhere you can play is a gift.”

This time round, they’ve got their sights on immortality. “Now it’s about wanting to leave something behind,” he says. “A legacy. There are bands out there who say they don’t care if people listen to their albums in 10 years time. That’s not how I feel at all. I think it’s about making something timeless. I really hope people listen to our records in 10 years. Maybe I’m chatting shit. I don’t fucking know, to be honest, but I’m proud. That’s the thing. I can listen to our new record and think that it’s great, because we spent time on it. And now we get to come and play it to people, in pubs and on the NME Tour. I can’t think of anything better than that.”

That’s a mantra to live by.

Cover story for NME, 21 February 2015.

Bez and his girlfriend Firouzeh Razavi have begun their week-long ‘bed-in’ protest which intends to raise awareness of the UK anti-fracking movement.

The protest, inspired by John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s two anti-Vietnam war protests in 1969, has the support of Ono herself. In 2013 she penned the anti-fracking anthem ‘Don’t Frack My Mother’, which was performed by her son Sean Lennon.

Bez told NME: “We’re off to a great start because we’ve already attracted the attention of the world’s media. The fact is that 69 per cent of our land has been licenced for fracking and it’s been done without consultation with any of us. We haven’t been told about the dangers.”

Continue reading at NME.

Between greasy bites of cod and gulps of ginger beer in a Soho chip shop, the man Pete Doherty calls ‘Biggles’ is telling the story of one of his new songs, ‘War Of The Roses’, in which a desperate drug fiend swaps his mutt for the last available white line.

“No, I’ve never swapped a dog for cocaine,” says Carl Barât drily, “but I have swapped the black dog for coke a few times.” That black dog would be the Churchillian metaphor for depression, with which Barât was all too acquainted during his wilderness years. “I’ve been very lost,” he says.

He knows just how close his self-destructive tendencies took him to the edge in the years between the dissolution of his last band Dirty Pretty Things and the return of The Libertines. It was in fact just after he and Doherty announced they’d be temporarily patching up their differences at Reading and Leeds in 2010 that he swung closest to rock bottom. “I had a pretty heavy lost weekend,” he says. “I don’t want to repeat that. I felt like I was willing myself to death, but I didn’t die. I spent a week taking everything I could get my hands on. I literally didn’t sleep. Meth is good for that. I was waiting for my heart to stop. It culminated at Glastonbury – obviously it’s easy to stay awake there. On the way home I was such a mess. We stopped at Danny Goffey’s house and I remember lying on the grass and finally shutting my eyes. After that, everything just fucking changed.”

Barât’s life since then has been one of second chances – both for him and for The Libertines as a band. “That was the moment I’d call my epiphany,” he says. “I realised then that I’d already met the girl who I was gonna be with. I turned my shit around.”

By the end of 2010, The Libertines had belatedly had their first proper taste of playing huge festival shows together and Barât’s girlfriend Edie Langley had given birth to their first son, Eli. Their second son Ramone followed late last year. These days Barât is writing with Doherty again and has marshalled his own new band The Jackals. He’s back on course to Arcadia.

There are still glimpses of the old black dog. He tells me he sees a therapist “now and again. I just turn up and rant,” but, at 36, he says it’s his sons who inspire him. “I’ve got beautiful kids and I owe it to them to do something worthwhile,” he says. “The more I think about mortality, the more I want to do. I’ve got unfinished business, and I could fall down a manhole at any time. I’m more productive now than I’ve ever been. I have two bands, two tours, two records and two babies. It’s full on, and that doesn’t give me any time to get depressed. I still get flickers of it, but on the whole I know where I’m bound now.”

At the moment where he’s bound is frequent trips to Thailand to see Doherty. He just got back and he buzzes with excitement about new songs ‘Belly Of The Beast’, ‘Anthem For Doomed Youth’ and ‘Woke Up Again’, hammering out the tunes on the table with his fingers. He’s thrilled not just to be writing Libertines songs again but also to be rebuilding burnt bridges with Doherty. “It’s been great,” he says. “We got some motorbikes and sped about the place, making new memories. That’s the most important thing. It’s about being on the same page and getting our synergy back up to speed.”

He’ll spend another week out there writing and then a month recording the album, probably in April. The next job is finding a producer, and Barât wants a Mancunian candidate: “I’m going to email Noel Gallagher. I know he’s really busy, but hopefully he’s got a bit of time for The Libertines who love him so. He’s expressed an interest, and Noel’s Noel isn’t he? I’d love to work with him. He’s hilarious, but he has such clarity of vision as well. That’s something The Libertines could certainly use. We’d defer to his brilliance.”

From the outside it appears that Doherty has taken to this latest stint at the Hope Rehab Centre with more fervour than any of his previous attempts to get clean. “I just take every minute as it comes,” says Barât. “We never told him: ‘You must become teetotalitarian’. We said: ‘We’ll take you as you are’. He’s happy and wholesome, as good as ever before.”

The band have just announced their first major festival headline slot of the summer, at T In The Park in July. They should have plenty of new material to perform by then, but questions remain: will Doherty need a minder on tour to keep him out of trouble? Will they have to tour dry? “I don’t think so,” shrugs Barât. “We’ll work it out. I’ll do whatever he wants, whether that’s boozing or not boozing. Well… obviously not heroin.”

It comes back to that idea of second chances. For Barât that means the opportunity to deliver on the promise they once looked like frittering away. “We’ve both had plenty of lost time,” he says, by way of understatement. “Now we want to make beautiful things that we’re proud of and that stand the test of time. I hope we can do that. To us, we already have. Our old songs stand up as much as they did when we first put them down. If we’ve got that in us, why rob ourselves of it, let alone anyone else?”

Before his Libertine summer there’s the small matter of ‘Let It Reign’, his first record with new band The Jackals. It’s scrappier, heavier music than Barât aficionados will be used to – a chance for the old romantic to channel his anger and vitriol into song. He’s tells me he’s been inspired by the apathy he sees around him to kick against the pricks. Especially those responsible for transforming his beloved London into an oligarch’s playground.

“I’m disgusted,” he says. “To me, it’s like seeing a museum smashed up and turned into a McDonalds. It offends my deepest sensibilities. We’re losing Buffalo Bar and Madame JoJos. I’ll do my bit where possible. Hopefully we’ll get a gig down the 12 Bar.”

He calls the approaching General Election “pigs in a sty jostling for food”. He’s a supporter of Russell Brand’s critique of the status quo, and could “acquiesce” to vote Green for lack of a better option. There’s a dystopian mood to the record, which Barât says draws on Evelyn Waugh, Terry Gilliam’s ‘Brazil’ and Orwell’s ‘1984’. He points over my head to where a flashing blue police light outside is illuminating the chip shop tiles. “I think Big Brother is getting closer and closer. The march of the neo-puritans is upon us.”

The video for lead single ‘Glory Days’ is dedicated to the 306 soldiers who were shot at dawn during World War I for “cowardice” or “desertion”. Theirs is a plight that Barât is genuinely moved by: “If I pull you out of your house from your family, put you in a bull ring and tell you to fight a bull, and you don’t, so then I shoot you, that’s murder. That’s state-sanctioned fucking murder.”

Barât can trace these questions about glory and patriotism right back to his childhood. He was raised by separated parents: a father who worked in an armaments factory, and a mother who was a member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and lived in Teepee Valley, a tented hippy commune in south Wales.

“That’s my life all over: schizophrenic,” nods Barât when I mention his unusual upbringing. “It was like parallel lives. A council estate with Victorian strictness on one side, and hippy-dippy lostness on the other side.”

Despite the powerful sense of British identity that runs through the record, Barât actually recorded it in Los Angeles during a series of margarita-fuelled sessions with The Bronx guitarist Joby J. Ford. The bulk of the record was laid down there, featuring the likes of Killers’ violinist Ray Suen and Beastie Boys percussionist Fredo Ortiz. Then they came back to London, where he brought in his newly-auditioned Jackals bandmates to finish it.

After our fish supper we wheel away through a cold night in Soho to Wardour Street to find them. Barât maintains an office here, a war room of sorts. There are Union Jacks on the walls and a finely detailed map of France. “I apologise,” he says, “for the fact it looks like a National Front headquarters.”

Barât introduces me to guitarist Billy Tessio, drummer Jay Bone and bassist Adam Claxton, none of whom should be mistaken for mere yes men. “As much as I respect Carl as a fellow musician, and adore his past work, I don’t want to put him on a pedestal,” says Tessio. “There’s four of us in this band now, let’s see what we can do.”

They shrug off the idea that the Libertines reunion puts them in an awkward position. “I’m as excited about a new Libertines album as anybody else,” says Bone. “This band is an outlet for some of the things Carl wants to do that don’t fit The Libertines. We’re heavier, with grunge influences and louder guitars.”

“What’s good about Carl,” adds Claxton, “Is he treats this project with as much respect as he treats that project. He’s as hungry and thirsty for it as we are.”

That much is clear. Barât has that Libertine glint in his eye once more, and The Jackals have helped chase the black dog from the door. Earlier, he’d told me another Churchill line worth remembering in times of darkness: “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

Originally published by NME, 14 February 2015.

The first Palma Violets record was, in many ways, a homage to their ramshackle London pad, Studio 180, where the band lived, recorded and hosted their riotous early gigs. The cover of ‘180’ depicted the studio’s front door, and the words painted on it: “In times of turmoil, find a home to attack from”. But the follow-up sees the four-piece plotting attack from a very different home base: Rockfield Studios in Monmouth, Wales.

Full piece in NME, 24 January 2015.

Hundreds of festival bookers descended on a sleepy, sodden Dutch town last week hoping to spot the bands with the potential to do great things in 2015.

Everyone’s looking for something different of course. The French techno bookers probably only pass the Hungarian metal-fest bosses in the queues at the hash coffeehouses, but if anyone was even vaguely interested in punk with something to say then they’ll have gone home raving about Bad Breeding. The Stevenage four-piece tore through a late-night set at De Spieghel on Friday sounding a little like The Stooges would if they’d grown up in suburban England and had met Damon Albarn instead of Iggy Pop. Frontman Christopher Dodd ends up off the stage and down in the mosh pit, yet even when the sweat is dripping off him his lyrics remain raw but eloquent – “living in a town where nothing really happens, except nothingness itself,” he yells in ‘Age Of Nothing’ – as if someone kidnapped Art Brut and made them listen to hardcore records and read Chomsky.

Continue reading at NME.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading at NME.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally published in NME, 13 December 2014.

From NME, 29 November 2014:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From NME, 20/27 December 2014:

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

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

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

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

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

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

They want to make something else go viral?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally published in NME, 22 November 2014.

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

Full piece in NME, 15 November 2014.

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

Full piece in NME, 15 November 2014.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally published in NME, 1 November 2014.

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

Full piece in NME, 1 November 2014.

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

Full piece in NME, 18 October 2014.

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

Continue reading at NME.

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

Full piece in NME, 11 October 2014.

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

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

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

Continue reading at NME.

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

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

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

Continue reading at NME.

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

Full piece in NME, 27 September 2014.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally published in NME, 23 August 2014.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally published in NME, 16 August 2014.

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

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

Full piece in NME, 9 August 2014.

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

Full piece in NME, 9 August 2014.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally published in NME, 2 August 2014.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally published in NME, 26 July 2014.