On 18 February 1977 a thousand soldiers from the Nigerian army stormed a communal compound in Lagos that outlaw bandleader Fela Kuti had declared his own independent state: the Kalakuta Republic. They brutally beat Kuti, burned his home and studio to the ground and threw his mother Funmilayo from a second floor window, injuring her so severely that she died within weeks. What sparked all this carnage? A song called ‘Zombie’.

Released earlier that year, the track clearly touched a nerve with Nigeria’s ruling military junta. Over 12 minutes and 26 seconds of relentless polyrhythmic groove, Kuti took aim at the mindless obedience of his country’s military. This combination of irresistible music and insurrectionary politics would define Afrobeat, the genre Kuti created and made his own.

“Afrobeat is like taking a bitter pill with a sweet drink,” explains Kuti’s eldest son, Femi, speaking over Zoom from his home in Lagos. “The music and the rhythm is nice, but the message is hard. For you to be able to digest this very serious message, you need something sweet.”

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Sometime before he was first sacked by The Pogues in 1991, Shane MacGowan took so much high-strength speed while on tour in New Zealand that he began to hallucinate Maori warriors rising up from their graves. They commanded him to “Prove you’re with us!” by stripping naked and painting his pale and trembling body bright blue. Shane obliged. First he blue himself, to borrow a phrase from Arrested Development, then he blue his entire hotel suite.

Rock ’n’ roll tales of debauched excess like this pose a sticky problem for makers of biographical documentaries. Naturally, no video documentation of the event exists, and it’d be hard for actors to shoot this scene without the whole thing morphing into a twisted Crimewatch reconstruction. Punk director Julien Temple finds an elegant solution to this dilemma in his new film Crock Of Gold: A Few Rounds With Shane MacGowan. He animates each anecdote in the classic cartoon style best suited to the story. Thus we see the young Shane drawn like Plug from The Bash Street Kids during his school days, before he reappears in the psychedelic style of an R. Crumb comic as he embarks on an early acid trip. For the aforementioned ‘blue Maori’ escapade, Temple and his fellow producer Johnny Depp brought in Hunter S. Thompson collaborator Ralph Steadman to give the tale the authentically gonzo visuals it so richly deserves.

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The first thing Davido says down the line when NME gets through to him in the Nigerian capital Abuja is: “It’s a crazy time for everyone.”

He’s not wrong. It’s mid-October and Nigeria’s #ENDSARS protests are reaching a fever pitch. Just days after we speak, the army will open fire on peaceful protestors in Lagos, killing at least 12 people. Davido has travelled to Abuja to join the protests against the police’s violent Special Anti-Robbery Squad and to add his voice to the campaign wherever he thinks it can be useful. Case in point: he’s just managed to use his influence to arrange a meeting with the country’s Inspector General of Police, Mohammed Adamu, but he’s quick to point out that he’s not trying to cast himself as the movement’s leader.

“I just see it like I have the opportunity to be able to get to him,” says the 27 year-old Afrobeats star. “I went there to convey the message of the people. I’m not here to act as a leader, I’m just like everyone else that wants a change.”

Rather than leading protests, Davido is much happier soundtracking them. His single ‘FEM’, released in September, has taken on a new meaning because its title roughly translates from Yoruba as: ‘Shut up!’ That’s made it perfect for playing loud on marches and singing in the faces of politicians like Lagos State Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, whose speech was disrupted by vocal protestors. “I didn’t plan it!” says Davido with a laugh. “I dropped the song a month and-a-bit ago, and it’s been crazy to see how it’s grown to be used as a tool. It’s amazing to see.”

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Daveed Diggs is holed up in a hotel room in New York, hoping for the future but thinking about the past. It’s election day in America. As the country decides its fate, the actor best-known for playing the Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson in Hamilton is reflecting on a speech he’s made it his tradition to listen to each year on Independence Day. First heard in 1852, abolitionist Frederick Douglass’ ‘What, to the slave, is the Fourth of July?’ address is a barnstorming attack on the “revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy” of America, delivered by a man who had himself escaped a slave plantation.

“I think that speech is so important in terms of not forgetting the history of the country,” says Diggs, speaking over Zoom. “So much of it still scans as very true today, so getting to perform it was incredible.”

Diggs’ charismatic version of Douglass is in the middle of that fiery sermon when we meet him in The Good Lord Bird, a new historical drama premiering on Sky Atlantic this month. Based on James McBride’s award-winning 2013 novel, it tells the story of Onion, a young slave who tags along with a motley crew of abolitionist soldiers led by John Brown, a swivel-eyed man of God played with mouth-foaming intensity by Ethan Hawke. Think Robin Hood and his band of merry men, but instead of mugging off the Sheriff of Nottingham, they’re trying to provoke the civil war that will end slavery.

It’s an exhilarating ride, but also one Diggs says helped him understand a critical period of history he wasn’t taught much about in school. “I knew who John Brown was vaguely,” he says, “But I didn’t know all the little details about Brown, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. They’re real, and they’re wrapped up in this totally incredible story. Anything that brings to the forefront the American legacy of slavery is good. Not letting our foot off the throat of that institution is probably a good idea.”

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It was a billy club to the gut that convinced Hunter S. Thompson it was time to get personally involved in politics. After being beaten and tear-gassed by police thugs during the anti-war protests which surrounded the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, the inventor of gonzo journalism returned to his home in Woody Creek, just outside Aspen, Colorado, a changed man. “I went to the Democratic Convention as a journalist, and returned a raving beast,” he later wrote. “Suddenly, it seemed imperative to get a grip on those who had somehow slipped into power and caused the thing to happen.”

Thompson was also disturbed by the environmental destruction he saw happening around him in the Rocky Mountains, so the question he found himself posing half a century ago became one many of us are still asking today: in the face of obvious police brutality and the shadow of ecological disaster, how do we wrest control of power from those too corrupt to care? The answer Thompson came up with was a radical, local political campaign he termed ‘Freak Power’, and a run to be elected Sheriff of Aspen and the surrounding Pitkin County in 1970 under the banner of a six-fingered fist clutching a peyote button.

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Colson Baker knows how it feels to be the internet’s punchline. Back in January, a few months before he turned 30, the rapper known as Machine Gun Kelly went to a meeting at his label to make a surprise announcement: he was making a pop-punk record. This was no half-baked daydream. Baker had already recorded the bulk of the new album in private with Blink 182 drummer Travis Barker, christening it with the fate-tempting title: ‘Tickets To My Downfall’. Faced with “genuine confusion” from label execs in the room, Baker leaped onto the conference table and jumped around as his music played. Travis proudly posted a four-second video to Twitter, captioning it: “And just like that @Interscope will never be the same”, but it was hard to find anyone else on social media who shared his enthusiasm. The pile-on was quick and merciless. The most popular quote-tweet smirked: “When you’re 10 this is what you imagine being 16 will be like”.

“I watched the entire internet try to make a meme of me,” says Baker, who is soft-spoken in person, and more self-conscious than you might expect of a man who’s 6’4” and looks like he could sharpen knives on his cheekbones. “They were like: ‘Haha! Look at the guy on the table believing in himself!’ I’ve been the guy jumping up and down on the table believing in myself for-fucking-ever. I’m not up there tap dancing for some corporate label, I’m up there spreading my passion and my belief in the music I’m playing.” He takes a beat, then adds a punchline of his own: “Also, fuck you to any of the motherfuckers on the internet who tried to make a joke of what is now the number one fucking album.”

It’s safe to say Baker is having the last laugh. Releasing a pop-punk album in 2020 might have seemed like a gamble to his label, but ‘Tickets To My Downfall’ has spectacularly failed to live down to the promise of its name. It’s been his biggest UK chart hit by some distance, given him his first number one album in the US, and perhaps most significantly it’s so far the only rock album to top the American charts in 2020. Who would have predicted in January that Machine Gun Kelly would be the year’s biggest guitar hero? Maybe nobody, except the guy jumping on the table. “When I saw the reaction to that clip, yeah, that shit hurt my fucking feelings, but in my head I saw this moment already coming,” he says. “It took every muscle and bone in my body to not let my pettiness leap through and repost that video the day the album went number one.”

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With protests against police brutality ongoing across Nigeria, Afrobeats star Davido has told NME there’s much more at stake in his country than just reforming law enforcement.

“It’s about a lot of things now,” Davido said. “The government just has to do better.”

Davido was speaking before the events of October 20, during which Amnesty International confirmed that the Nigerian army and police killed at least 12 peaceful protesters in Lagos. The #ENDSARS protests initially began on October 5, after a young man in Ughelli was shot and killed by officers from Nigeria’s Special Anti-Robbery Squad, known as SARS. It was not an isolated incident. During the last three years, Amnesty International has recorded 82 cases of torture, abuse, and extrajudicial executions conducted by SARS officers.

“It started because the country was just tired of this division of the police that was really aggressive towards citizens, even to the extent of killing them,” explained Davido. “Now, it’s even past #ENDSARS. The government just has to do better. It’s been hundreds of years of the same thing, and this generation is just tired.”

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“They aren’t being charged?” asks Chuck D, frustration ringing in his voice. It’s early on Wednesday afternoon in California, where the 60 year-old Public Enemy frontman has been doing back-to-back phone interviews since 7am about their new album ‘What You Gonna Do When The Grid Goes Down?’. That means he hasn’t yet heard the news from Kentucky that the Louisville police officers who killed Breonna Taylor in her home will not face any charges related to her death.

When I clarify that the only charges being brought are for a single officer firing his gun recklessly into other people’s apartments, the frustration in Chuck’s deep, sonorous voice gives way to fury. “Of course, of course,” he spits. “It’s obvious. It’s dumb fucking police stupidity. They’ve failed to man or woman up and say: ‘Damn, our fucking mistake.’ ‘Our bad.’ ‘Our tragedy.’ We’ve got to reform this ridiculousness of police just fucking firing off at the handle at every jump of the nerve.”

It feels almost trite to say that the return of Public Enemy is timely, but you’re certainly not alone if you’ve been turning or returning to their incendiary music to help make sense of the world in 2020. Earlier this year, The Roots’ drummer and producer Questlove approached Chuck about remixing PE’s classic 1989 protest anthem ‘Fight The Power’ to open June’s BET Awards, drafting in new verses from Nas, YG, Rapsody, Jahi and Black Thought.

On the new version, both Rapsody and Jahi rap about the fight to deliver some semblance of justice in Breonna Taylor’s name. For Chuck, it’s no surprise that the track still resonates three decades on. “It’s a long time in culture, but a short time in real life,” he points out. “Since ‘Fight The Power’ first came out in ‘89, a lot of people have been born and a lot of people have died. You still attack the ills and the -isms with the same vigour, but you can’t say: ‘Damn, didn’t we do this before?’ The way I look at it is there are people that haven’t gone through this at all, so why not bring some of the things we’ve done before back in a new language? It’s a long life.”

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We are living in heinous times. Strange things are afoot in every direction. Bogus fiends stalk the corridors of power. A virus spreads through the air. The Arctic is burning. It’s easy to feel pessimistic about the future right now, but if movies have taught us anything it’s that whenever the balance of the universe is threatened a hero will emerge – or sometimes a couple of heroes. If anyone is equipped to defeat the cynicism of this most egregious year it’s the pure-of-heart Bill and Ted, who return to cinemas this week in Bill & Ted Face The Music.

From the moment lovable slackers Bill S. Preston, Esq. and Ted ‘Theodore’ Logan first air-guitared their way into our hearts in 1989’s time-hopping cult hit Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, the pair have embodied a spirit of pure, unwavering optimism that’s carried them through every seemingly insurmountable crisis. Even when they were thrown to their deaths by “evil robot us’s” in 1991 sequel Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey they greeted their mortal end with stoicism. Taking their cue from Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 existential classic The Seventh Seal, in which a knight challenges Death to a game of chess, they set about defeating the Grim Reaper at Battleship, Cluedo, Electric Football and then – finally and definitively – at Twister. By the end of their Bogus Journey through the afterlife Bill and Ted were resurrected and victorious, ushering in a new era of world peace with their band Wyld Stallyns. Death himself played bass.

For Alex Winter, who plays Bill, that seemed like the natural end of his and co-star Keanu Reeves’ excellent adventuring. Winter retired from acting in 1993 to focus on documentary filmmaking, but says his interest was piqued by the story Bill & Ted creators Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson pitched to their two leads. “Keanu and I had no intention of making a third Bill & Ted movie,” Winter says. “The thing that hooked us back was the idea that we could expand on these guys in an interesting way. We’re coming back to them 25-30 years later, and they’re not bros who are in a stunted adolescence. They are adults with wives and daughters who they love, but things have not worked out exactly the way they thought they would when they were young.”

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There’s a great moment in the new The Band documentary Once Were Brothers that captures Bob Dylan at his most bemused. The year is 1966 and Dylan and his backing group – then known as The Hawks, later simply as The Band – have once again endured a sold-out European show where they’d been angrily booed as punishment for Dylan’s crime of “going electric”.

In archive footage we see a frustrated Bob in the back of a car leaving a gig, posing a reasonable question to lead guitarist Robbie Robertson. “You know, I don’t understand…” says the baffled king, gesticulating with a cigarette. “How could they buy the tickets up so fast?”

54 years later, I’m sat with Robertson in his private studio at The Village in Los Angeles asking him the same question: did he ever figure out why so many people bought tickets to see them just to come and boo? “It became a ritual, I guess,” replies the 77 year-old.

Robertson’s dressed in electric blue plaid, his eyes shaded behind tinted glasses. He takes a pull from a bottle of green tea before pointing out that fans knew in advance what they’d be getting. “A lot of people felt he was their folk king and he was abusing the music, but if you don’t want it, don’t come! I’ve never heard of anybody of that calibre touring the world playing big halls and everywhere they play, they get booed. It took a while to understand that we were part of a musical revolution. We just didn’t know it yet.”

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The first time she went to Burning Man, Kate Raudenbush was not an artist. Not yet. She made her first journey into Nevada’s Black Rock Desert in 1999 and five years later built her first art installation there. In the decade-and-a-half since, her monolithic, immersive sculptures have become a regular delight in the temporary metropolis of Black Rock City as well as being exhibited in galleries across the world from the Smithsonian to Seoul. “Burning Man was truly an awakening for me,” says Raudenbush, speaking over Zoom from her home in New York. “I say I’m self-taught, but really, Burning Man was the school where I learned how to make art.”

Raudenbush is just one of the many artists featured in Burning Man: Art On Fire, a new documentary by BAFTA-winning director Gerry Fox which looks past the event’s famed orgiastic debauchery to instead focus on the incredible feats of creativity and ingenuity required to bring large-scale art to one of the planet’s most inhospitable environments. In doing so, it gets close to the heart of what makes Burning Man so different from other festival experiences. I’ve been going since 2014 – my friends and I run a British pub-turned-pink-hued-drag club there called the Queen Dick – so I’ve felt firsthand the magical way Burning Man converts its 80,000 attendees from wide-eyed gawkers into fully-fledged participants.

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Burna Boy was not a well-behaved student. Back then – before the Brit and Grammy nominations, the sold-out arena shows all around the world and the 600million streams of his irresistible music – he was Damini Ogulu, a recalcitrant schoolboy in southern Nigeria, skipping classes and getting into trouble. Looking back now, sat by the pool outside his luxurious home in Lagos, it’s clear to the 29-year-old where the roots of his childhood frustration lay.

“The schools in Nigeria would rather teach you another man’s history than your own,” he says. “We were angry, and that was the foundation for our rebellion. Our subconscious, our inner man, was telling us: ‘Bro, you’re being brainwashed’.”

He grows animated as he explains their curriculum was still littered with absurdities left over from the days of the British Empire. Take for example the 18th-century Scottish explorer Mungo Park, who Burna was told in school “discovered the river Niger”.

“That’s one of the fucking scams we’re taught!” he splutters. “This is a river that has been drank from and bathed in, and children have been given birth to in, for thousands and thousands of years. Now suddenly a man called Mungo Park comes from fucking England or some shit and ‘discovers’ the Niger? How do you discover something that people have their history in? Then you go and teach these people’s children that in schools! That’s something to fight against. That’s something that needs to be fucking blown up into fucking space.”

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Killer Mike is in Atlanta showing me his guns. In the next Zoom window over, his musical partner El-P is in New York holding forth about the hypocrisies of America’s founding fathers. To paraphrase Sam Elliott in The Big Lebowski: sometimes there’s a band, and they’re the band for their time and place. Run The Jewels fit right in here.

The two men – real names Michael Render and Jaime Meline, both a lot closer to 50 than they look – have become an indispensable part of the soundtrack to this moment in history. Within hours of their new record ‘Run The Jewels 4’ dropping in June, it was already being played loud at Black Live Matter protests, echoing out over cities all around the globe. In particular, Mike’s lines on the track ‘walking in the snow’, written about the 2014 death of Eric Garner, took on a horrific resonance: “And you so numb you watch the cops choke out a man like me / Until my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, ‘I can’t breathe’.”

The fact that those words were also repeated over and over again by a dying George Floyd, a Black man whose killing by a white police officer inspired the renewed BLM movement, is of course no coincidence. “You start to realise that it’s not happenstance,” says Mike. “These things didn’t just happen to be the same. That move that [Floyd’s killer Derek Chauvin] did is a move used by police all over the world. We’re setting up a system to repeatedly murder. I’m glad that it resonated with people, and I’m glad that in the moment it resonated with people they were in the streets burning down police stations.”

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Last Thursday, Ice Cube was due to appear on one of America’s most-watched breakfast shows. He’d been expected to crack a few jokes to promote glossy music biz comedy The High Note but in the early hours he pulled out of the interview. “I apologise to everyone expecting to see me on Good Morning America today,” he wrote on Twitter at 5:37AM. “But after the events in Minnesota with George Floyd I’m in no mood to tell America, good morning.”

You will probably know by now, but it bears repeating, that George Floyd, an unarmed African-American man, had been killed three days earlier in broad daylight in downtown Minneapolis by Derek Chauvin, a White cop who kept his knee pressed on Floyd’s neck for a horrifying eight minutes and 46 seconds. Two other cops, Thomas Lane and J Alexander Kueng, held Floyd down while a fourth, Tou Thao, stood guard. Chauvin was arrested and initially charged, leniently, with third-degree murder. Until yesterday, the other three had not even been charged. In the days since Floyd died hundreds of thousands of Americans have taken to the streets in cities across the country to protest this latest brutal act of state violence and to proclaim the simple truth, which must be repeated until it is heard, that Black lives matter. These protests against police brutality have in turn been met by yet more police brutality: tear gas, rubber bullets and mass arrests. “They’d rather arrest hundreds of American citizens than three of their own,” Cube tweeted on Sunday. “Very telling.”

Two weeks ago, when NME spoke to Cube via Zoom from his home in Los Angeles, George Floyd was still alive. Such is the frequency of racist murders in America that at the time we were discussing the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, the 25 year-old African-American man from Georgia who was shot while jogging. Three decades have passed since Cube described young Black men as an “endangered species” on his first solo record ‘AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted’. Precious little is different now. “Progress is slow,” says Cube. “Things have changed, but not fast enough. You can change the law faster than you can change people’s hearts.”

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A Thursday night in the divided city of Berlin in 1977: Iggy Pop and David Bowie are sat together on the floor of their Schöneberg apartment, having come to the conclusion that chairs are unnatural. They are watching their television set, waiting for the Armed Forces Network telecast, which will deliver them their beloved Starsky & Hutch. Before the show begins the network blasts out a series of beeps in an urgent rhythm that sounds almost like a Motown beat. Inspired, Bowie writes a chord progression on a ukulele and turns to Iggy. “Call it ‘Lust for Life’,” he says. “Write something up.”

Iggy, sensibly, did as he was told. The two albums he released that year under Bowie’s guidance, ‘The Idiot’ and ‘Lust for Life’, were the lizard-skinned punk icon’s first venture into solo territory since his band The Stooges had imploded in a hail of beer bottles, eggs and jelly beans at the Michigan Palace in Detroit three years earlier.

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There’s been a lot written recently about how viruses spread, but Mark Lanegan was somewhat ahead of the curve. His new ‘90s grunge survival memoir Sing Backwards And Weep documents, among other bracing anecdotes, the pioneering work done in that field by Soundgarden singer Chris Cornell. In the book, Lanegan remembers coming down with a terrible cold while in the studio when his band, Screaming Trees, were recording 1991’s ‘Uncle Anesthesia’.

“Cornell insisted I allow him to lick my bare eyeball to test his invented-on-the-spot theory of virus transmission,” he writes. “I was, of course, delighted to take part in the experiment. Chris never got sick. I can’t recall if this proved or disproved his theory, but it was an effective way of making me laugh.”

Don’t try this at home in the fight against corona, of course, but it’s a rare, sweet and playful moment in a life story that otherwise makes being an underground rock icon with a paralysing heroin addiction sound like a pretty gruelling way to earn a crust. One chapter, ‘Ice-Cold European Funhouse’, finds our Seattle-born hero in 1996 touring the continent while dangerously strung out. He drags himself shitting and puking through the streets of King’s Cross and then, a few pages, later he’s in Amsterdam, still trying to score, only to be repeatedly ripped off, mugged and humiliated. You have to laugh.

When Lanegan calls me from splendid isolation at his home in Glendale, just outside LA, I tell him that merely reading about his experiences has been enough to put me right off heroin altogether.

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The atmosphere at Post Malone’s Nirvana tribute livestream is a far cry from that of his mammoth stadium shows; it’s more like sitting around in a garage with your mates’ band rehearsing. The YouTube gig isn’t polished, but that’s the point: it’s intimate, loud and a fuckload of fun.

It helps that Post has assembled a pretty decent band for himself. He’s joined by “Sir Travis Barker on the tubs and skins”, guitarist Nick Mack and bassist Brian Lee. The latter earns high praise from Nirvana’s Krist Novoselić, who tweets early in the set: “Oh yes!!! “Lounge Act” — hats off to bassist.”

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The worst thing about Beastie Boys Story is that it’s basically just a TED talk in which Adam Horovitz and Mike Diamond tell anecdotes about their careers.

The best thing about Beastie Boys Story is that it’s basically just a TED talk in which Adam Horovitz and Mike Diamond tell anecdotes about their careers.

How much you enjoy this new Spike Jonze-directed live film of the show Horovitz and Diamond put together based on their 2018 memoir, Beastie Boys Book, written after the death of fellow Beastie Adam Yauch in 2012, will largely depend on how much the aforementioned format puts you off. For fans, the idea of Ad-Rock and Mike D waffling on about their iconic group for two hours will sound like a dream come true, but don’t come to this expecting much in the way of production values. Then again, given how sheepish the pair are about the 25ft dick-in-a-box that was once a staple of their live shows, maybe that’s a good thing.

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Mongolian heavy rockers The Hu have found themselves stranded in Australia while on tour, after the coronavirus pandemic led to their home country closing its borders. In an attempt to make the most of the situation, the band have hunkered down in a studio in Sydney to record new music for their follow-up to debut album ‘The Gereg’, one of 2019’s more unlikely success stories.

There’s not much chance that even the most advanced algorithm would have predicted that blending metal riffs, traditional Mongolian instruments and lyrics sung exclusively in their native language, delivered using the ancient art of ‘khoomei’ throat singing, would be the route to take for massive crossover success. Yet the numbers speak for themselves: The Hu’s videos for ‘Yuve Yuve Yu’ and ‘Wolf Totem’ have now been watched 41 million and 28 million times respectively on YouTube alone.

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Tory Lanez is walking through the streets of Hollywood, a blunt in one hand and a heart-shaped balloon bobbing from a ribbon in the other. An entourage of cameramen, managers and bodyguards trails behind him, weaving in and out of traffic like a shoal of fish. While NME’s photographer snaps away, a burly guy leans out of the window of a parked truck and hollers: “Dope ass music, my G!”

“Thank you so much, my guy!” nods the 27-year-old rapper, singer and producer, a modest smile creeping across his face. This is not the first time Lanez has been informed he makes dope ass music – it’s not even the first time it’s happened in the few minutes he’s been walking down this street – but even after hundreds of millions of streams and YouTube views (239 million for his 2015 hit ‘Say It’, another 174 million for 2016’s ‘LUV’, to name but two) these moments of personal connection still clearly mean a lot to him.

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“I’m sitting in the fucking house and I’ve got a big fucking bowl of cocaine on the fucking table,” says the figure in black who sits before me. “It was when Black Sabbath were doing ‘Vol. 4’ and we’d rented a house in Bel Air. I was sitting there thinking: ‘It’s fucking boiling in here.’ So I press a button on the wall, thinking it’s the air conditioning. 10 minutes later six cop cars come screaming down the driveway. It’s the Bel Air patrol. I’d pressed the alarm button. So I shout: ‘IT’S A RAID!’, grab the fucking dope and me and this roadie run into a back room. I’ve got the bowl of cocaine and I’m going…” The figure in black mimes furiously shovelling mounds of the stuff into his nostrils.

“I can’t fucking feel anything,” he continues. “My nose was caked in it. I was like this when I came out…” He makes his eyes huge, like a cartoon deer about to be hit by a 50 tonne truck. “They said: ‘It’s alright, it was a false alarm.’ I was fucking gakked to the gills. I had to have a fucking valium after to mellow me out.”

Ozzy Osbourne finishes his story and rocks back in his big brown leather armchair, grinning like a pirate on shore leave. “So that,” he says finally, “is where the song ‘It’s A Raid’ came from.”

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Inside an anonymous building on a quiet back street there’s a rehearsal room belonging to three 47-year-old guys who did just that something like a lifetime ago.

It’s a miserable day in Oakland. The northern Californian skies are 50 shades of shitty and the rain is lashing down, leaving puddles so deep the hipsters are probably wearing waders. You don’t want to be outside on a day like today. The only sensible thing to do in this sort of environment is stay in, get stoned and maybe form a punk band. Welcome to paradise.

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Prince was a singular talent whose influence has touched pretty much every conceivable genre of music. So it’s only fitting that the task of paying tribute to his life and work be taken on by a similarly diverse group of musicians. Foo Fighters, Beck, John Legend and Mavis Staples were all among the stellar list of artists gathered together by the Grammys and musical director Sheila E to perform at ‘Let’s Go Crazy: A Grammys Salute To Prince’, a TV special recorded on Tuesday night and set to hit screens in April around the fourth anniversary of the Purple one’s death.

Our host for the evening was Maya Rudolph, who opened the show with a hard-to-beat brag: she was in the room at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004 for the George Harrison tribute performance of ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, when Prince delivered that ridiculous solo and effortlessly blew the likes of Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne off the stage. Starting the night with that reference set a high bar: would anyone attempt something equally audacious as a tribute to Prince himself?

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It’s not Nirvana, but it’s Near-vana. Krist Novoselic and Pat Smear are making eye contact from opposite sides of the stage. Dave Grohl is beating the living shit out of some poor, unsuspecting drums. Between them, St Vincent and Beck are trying their best to work a sort of secular voodoo and summon up a little of the spirit of Kurt Cobain.

They opened with St Vincent taking care of lead vocals on a thunderous version of ‘Lithium’. Then it’s over to Beck, who stumbles a little through the lyrics of ‘In Bloom’ but saves himself with a series of blistering guitar solos. Afterwards, he waxes nostalgic. “That was a pretty good mosh pit,” he said. “I was in the most intense mosh pit of my life in this room. I remember being carried off my feet, and when I got out my hands were bleeding and I didn’t know why. The band was Nirvana.”

That would have been in 1990, when Nirvana played the Palladium a year after the release of ‘Bleach’. That was 30 years ago, so how can it be that when Beck leads the band into ‘Been A Son’ – which they played that night, along with ‘In Bloom’ – it still sounds so fresh, urgent and dangerous?

Continue reading at NME.

‘Twas five nights before Christmas, at a place called the Shrine, and a creature was stirring, in the LA sunshine. It had been 2,771 nights since this particular animal was last spotted in the wild (seven years, seven months and one day, to put it another way, but who’s counting?). The Halloween announcement that Gerard Way, Ray Toro, Frank Iero and Mikey Way were finally reuniting for a My Chemical Romance comeback show was met with mass hysteria. Tickets sold out in less than the time it takes to say ‘MCR’, to 6,299 unbelievably lucky fans.

6,299 lucky fans, and me. Sorry. It’s not that I didn’t like them, they just kind of passed me by at the time. I was a fraction too old when they first came out, and – as will forever be the case with music enjoyed by the age bracket just after yours, they always seemed terminally uncool. Still, it’s Christmas – a time when NME’s British staff can’t be parted from the warm bosom of their families/warm bottles of Jameson’s (delete as applicable), and I’m already in LA. So here I am.

Continue reading at NME.

1. Arctic Monkeys – ‘AM’

It all started with those drums. We don’t just mean the languid stomp of opener ‘Do I Wanna Know?’ or the showy solo at the start of ‘R U Mine?’. No – we mean the way that as soon as you heard ‘AM’ erupt out of your speakers for the first time it was clear that from now on the Arctic Monkeys were moving to a different beat.

They were thieves, of course, but they were good at it. The band cheerfully admitted to nicking a few ideas from the likes of Dr Dre, Outkast and Aaliyah, but what was really remarkable was the sheer range and scope of their rampant looting. They stole from hip hop, glam, Motown, rock’n’roll, R&B and even doo-wop with equal ease and evident delight. They picked Phil Spector’s pockets and mugged John Lennon. They lifted that “Mad sounds/In your ears” bit from a song by their early producer Alan Smyth. For the finale, they just straight-out plagiarised a John Cooper Clarke poem. Somebody should have called the police.

This disparate collection of pilfered genres and stolen sounds came together seamlessly with Turner’s too-clever-by-half lyrics about love, lust and the grey area in-between. It’s still hard to get over the elegantly sketched scene in the car in ‘Arabella’, which ends with the phenomenal line: “The horizon tries but it’s just not as kind on the eyes.” The man can chirpse. He had us at: “I’m sorry to interrupt/It’s just I’m constantly on the cusp/Of trying to kiss you.” But ‘AM’ was about so much more than just chat-up lines. What about the lovely, melancholy double meaning of: “Leave me listening to the Stones/2000 Light Years From Home”? The writing is sharply-observed, sometimes self-lacerating and often laugh-out-loud funny. There were a lot of great albums released in the 2010s but only one of them features prominent lyrical references to both Mean Streets and Thunderbirds. 

What it all amounted to was as good a portrait of what it was like to be staying out too late and getting into trouble in the 2010s as anyone wrote in any medium, with the added bonus that it was also really fun to dance to. That meant it connected with people. It sold more copies than One Direction’s ‘Up All Night’. It became the soundtrack for countless nights out, hook-ups and comedowns in every town and city of this country. It was the album of the decade.

Read the full list at NME.