In episode four of Mare of Easttown, Kate Winslet’s surly detective sprints over to her mother Helen (Jean Smart) as she’s being wheeled into an ambulance. “Is that it?” says Mare, with typical tact, when she sees the cut on her mother’s forehead. “‘Is that it?!’” shoots back Helen. “Well, I’m sorry I’m not more MAIMED for you.”
It is just one of countless scene-stealing moments for Smart, whose impeccable comic timing gives the grizzly whodunnit some much-needed levity. A palpable hit with both critics and the public, the 69-year-old is currently enjoying something of a “Jean Smartaissance”.
In 1987, a 25-year-old backing singer and aspiring songwriter from Missouri gatecrashed her way into the Los Angeles auditions for Michael Jackson’s first ever solo world tour. “Hi Michael, my name is Sheryl Crow and I just moved here,” she announced. “I’m a former music teacher and I would love to go on the road with you.”
A month later Crow was onstage at the Korakuen stadium in Tokyo, her ears filled with the deafening roar of 75,000 fans. It was the first of 123 concerts over the next 16 months, during which she performed in front of a staggering 4.4 million people. Each night Crow, wearing a bustier and voluminous Eighties curls, harmonised with Jackson and shared the limelight on songs like “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You” and “Man in the Mirror”. It should have been a dream come true.
“Naiveté is such a beautiful thing,” says Crow, now 59, a nine-time Grammy winner and one of the most successful artists of her generation. She is speaking on a video call from her home in Nashville, her bedroom walls behind her filled with the art and arcane curios she collects from around the American south. An acoustic guitar lies at rest on the antique couch by her bed. “It was incredible in every way, shape and form for a young person from a really small town to see the world and to work with arguably the greatest pop star,” she says. “But I also got a crash course in the music industry.”
Above the desk of the great British screenwriter Bruce Robinson there is an old, yellowing copy of a photograph taken during an FA Cup match in 1988. It’s not even that Robinson – who made the peerless Withnail & I, before winning a Bafta for The Killing Fields – is a particularly die-hard football fan; he just has a keen interest in the ways humans try to gain and hold power over each other. That’s what draws him to the famous picture of Wimbledon enforcer Vinnie Jones reaching back one-handed to squash Newcastle playmaker Paul Gascoigne’s testicles like ripe plums. “That’s one of the funniest photos ever taken,” Robinson once told me. “If someone’s got you by the knackers, you’re fucked.”
Jones is not your typical cinematic muse. He has a glare like someone’s just bad-mouthed his mum’s cooking and a giant granite head like he’s just pulled himself out of the dirt on Easter Island. Still, Robinson is far from the only filmmaker to find inspiration in the man who was once booked for committing a foul just three seconds after a game kicked-off.
There are certain summers when the energy of a whole generation seems to come to a head. It happened in 1967, when 75,000 young people descended on San Francisco for the first Summer of Love in search of psychedelic rock, mind-expanding substances and a different world to the corrupt and venal one they’d inherited. It happened again in 1988, as British ravers rode the wave of ecstasy and acid house that became known as the Second Summer of Love. As live music and festivals return after the last summer of isolation – and given that many of us haven’t cut our hair in a year – is it too much to hope that 2021 could herald a return to that sense of hippie idealism and utopian hedonism?
If anyone knows what it takes to spark a Summer of Love, it’s Carolyn Garcia. As an 18-year-old in 1964, she was recruited into One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest author Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, the technicolour troupe who paved the way for the Summer of Love by touring America in a psychedelic school bus handing out LSD like sacrament. Known as “Mountain Girl”, because she lived in the woods and rode a motorcycle, Garcia had a child named Sunshine with Kesey and was immortalised in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test before shacking up with (and eventually marrying) another icon of the era: Jerry Garcia, the shaggy-haired ringleader of The Grateful Dead.
Garcia, now 75, has remained true to the free-spirited ideals of her youth. Down the line from her home in Oregon, she remarks on how pleased she is that the state has recently legalised the use of psychedelics. “I just had my tiny microdose of psilocybin this morning,” she says breezily. “It makes me a little bit loquacious.”
When they first became friends a decade ago, before they were even in a band together, Twenty One Pilots vocalist Tyler Joseph and drummer Josh Dun would sit around at home in Columbus, Ohio watching videos of bands playing huge sets at Reading and Leeds Festivals, fantasising about whether their music might take them to those hallowed stages someday.
“We were looking at those crowds and trying to wrap our minds around the British music listener,” remembers Dun. “We’ve always had such respect – and kind of a fear – of coming to the UK and playing our music. Reading and Leeds was always a big dream, and a high benchmark.”
When the pair were asked to headline the legendary twin festivals for the first time in August 2019, they decided to do something special, marking the occasion by paying tribute to the giants of British music. They did this by covering ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’, and it’s safe to say the choice went down well. “I’ll never forget it,” says Dun. “It was one of my favourite moments of our career.”
For Joseph, the band’s songwriter, playing the Oasis classic and hearing the crowd come together in one voice to sing it back was equally memorable – but it also made his competitive streak itch. “Playing that song, man, it made me want to go: ‘Why can’t I write a song that good?’” he says with a self-deprecating laugh. “I still think of that performance. It impacted me so much watching the fans connect with that song. We didn’t even need to be there. We just happened to usher that song to them, and then they interacted with it. That sort of connection is something I’m still pursuing and searching for. Those shows at Reading and Leeds specifically have influenced decision-making and songwriting that we’ve done since then, so they’re very special to us.”
On 3 April 2011, Ai Weiwei was going through customs at Beijing Capital International Airport when he was stopped by plain-clothes members of the secret police. They told the dissident artist that they just wanted to talk, but instead they took him outside to a van, put a black hood over his head, and drove him in darkness for two hours to an undisclosed location.
When Ai realised he was being held in a detention centre, he had no idea how long his stay might last. “They told me I would be sentenced to over 10 years,” says the man who six months earlier had filled Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall with 100 million hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds – seemingly identical, but each totally unique. He remembers his interrogators emphasising the cruelty of their threat. “At that time, my son was less than two and they said that when I was released he would be 13. The secret police told me very clearly: ‘Your son will never recognise you as his father.’ That touched me.”
This was just the latest in a long series of harassments that Ai suffered after he angered the government by collecting and publicising the names of 5,219 children who had died when their shoddily built schools collapsed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. He is a vocal critic of the Chinese authorities, and there have been brutal consequences. In 2009, he was punched so hard in the head by a secret policeman that he suffered a brain haemorrhage.
In the end, Ai spent 81 long days and nights in a padded cell measuring 12 feet by 24 feet, a size he estimated by counting the floor tiles. If the intention was to crush the rebellious spirit that has defined his defiant 35-year art career, it failed. Ai has the build of a boxer and the mentality of a fighter. Rather than crumbling as the state flexed its power, he found purpose in reflecting on his relationship with his young son and with his own father, Ai Qing, a celebrated poet who was denounced during Chairman Mao’s purges in 1957.
“I said to myself: ‘I have to write down what happened to me, and to my father, so that I can leave it to my son,’” he says. “It was only in detention that I realised there were so many things about my father I didn’t know. This is often the way with parents and children – you think you know everything, but you don’t. You never really investigate or ask questions directly, so that became a sorrow in my life because it’s something I can never catch up on.”
Before Flying Lotus was Flying Lotus – genre-defying musical innovator and founder of influential label Brainfeeder – he was Steven Ellison: an anime-obsessed teenager sketching his favourite Dragon Ball Z characters in the margins of his school books. Now, together with The Boondocks co-director LeSean Thomas and recent Oscar-nominated actor Lakeith Stanfield, the 37-year-old is bringing his lifelong passion to the screen as an executive producer, writer and composer for the new Netflix anime series Yasuke.
“It’s weird, I never thought I’d be on some shit like this ever in my life,” a still bemused-sounding Ellison tells me over the phone from his home in Los Angeles. “I’ve been a fan of anime for forever, but I never thought the day would come where I’d be part of this world.”
In any year, the line-up assembled for Global Citizen’s Vax Live concert – filmed on Sunday night to be televised next weekend – would be an impressive one: performances from Jennifer Lopez, Foo Fighters, J Balvin, Eddie Vedder and HER interspersed with speeches from Prince Harry, Selena Gomez, Ben Affleck, Jimmy Kimmel, Chrissy Teigen and David Letterman. In May 2021, it represents something even more significant: the first time live music has been played in front of a mass audience in LA County since the outbreak of the pandemic in March last year.
If you were looking for an ideal venue to signify a fresh beginning, the SoFi Stadium in Inglewood would be it. The $5bn new home for Los Angeles’ NFL teams the Rams and the Chargers had been scheduled to open last July with a pair of Taylor Swift concerts. After the pandemic put paid to those best-laid plans, the stadium finally opened for NFL games in September but as yet, they’ve all taken place behind closed doors. That made Vax Live’s invited audience of 27,000 key frontline workers – a fraction of the 70,000 capacity – the first crowd to ever enter the suitably futuristic stadium, which resembles a giant stainless-steel cross-section of an internet router. As Letterman put it from the stage: “Honest to God, I’ve never been in a spaceport before. You could play football in here!”
It took ten years for Jodie Turner-Smith to become an overnight sensation. In 2009, aged 22 and having never acted professionally, she quit her job as a corporate banker in Pittsburgh and bought a one-way ticket to Los Angeles. A decade of modelling, TV work and bit-parts later, the Peterborough-born actress landed her first leading film role opposite Daniel Kaluuya in outlaw road movie Queen & Slim. All that hard work paid off as her sensational, multi-faceted performance established her as one of the most in-demand actresses on the planet. “It’s been completely mad,” she says, now 34 and struggling to find the words to describe all the ways her life has transformed since then. “The last three years have been… wow. Very wow. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I’m just going with it, leaning into it and trying to learn as much as I can.”
By the time Queen & Slim hit screens in November 2019, Turner-Smith was already in Berlin shooting her next film, Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse. Playing a Navy SEAL in a big-budget military action-thriller couldn’t be further removed from the breakout role which made her name, but Turner-Smith says she was attracted by the opportunity to play another “strong, complicated Black woman” – and by the chance to work with the film’s leading man. “I really jumped at the idea of doing a film like this with Michael B. Jordan,” she says. “That was really what brought me to the project. As we know, he already has a very successful franchise in Creed and he’s, you know… the Sexiest Man Alive!”
Jordan was indeed awarded that lofty title by People magazine last November, and in Without Remorse it’s easy to see what they saw in him. In one particularly testosterone-heavy scene – already put to good use in trailers for the film – Jordan strips off his shirt to reveal an unbelievably ripped torso before kicking the living shit out of a bunch of riot cops. “That’s such a great scene!” says Turner-Smith with a grin. “It all looks so cool, and then when he takes his top off it’s like…” She raises her voice to a yell: “‘Give the people what they want!’” but barely gets the words out before collapsing into a fit of laughter.
One afternoon in the spring of 2018, Anthony Bourdain sat down at his dining table in the Manhattan high-rise apartment he’d lovingly styled after a bungalow at one of his favourite hotels, the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood, to begin work on his first travel guide. Across the table, armed with a longlist of every country the former chef had visited since 2000 while making his acclaimed gonzo travel shows A Cook’s Tour, No Reservations and Parts Unknown, was Laurie Woolever, Bourdain’s longtime assistant and co-author, whom he often referred to as his “lieutenant”.
Woolever and Bourdain first met in 2002 when her former employer Mario Batali recommended her to him as a recipe tester and editor for his first book of recipes, Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook. They next worked together in 2009, after Woolever had a child and decided to leave her job as a magazine editor. An optimistic email looking for part-time work sent to various contacts brought just one reply: from Bourdain, who empathised as his own daughter was just a year older, and offered her a job as his assistant. Her role grew over the years and after co-writing the best-selling 2016 cookbook Appetites, Bourdain and Woolever were looking for another project. A travel guide seemed a natural next step. “We wanted to bring together some of the best and most interesting places that Tony had seen in all his time travelling the world,” remembers Woolever. “He was extraordinarily busy, so to get that hour [to work on the book] felt very, very precious. I had no idea at the time that that would be it.”
Paris Jackson is tired of being told how normal she is.
World famous from the moment she was born, Michael Jackson’s only daughter says she has become accustomed to battling preconceived ideas about her character. ‘I’ve had more than a handful of people tell me, “Wow, when I met you I thought you were gonna be a bitch!”’ she says, the expletive barely past her lips before she starts trying to reel it back in. ‘Excuse my language. They’re like: “When I met you I thought you were gonna be a spoiled brat.” While that’s nice to hear, it’s also like, oh, people already think that before they even meet me. A lot of times I don’t have a chance to show people who I really am.’
Now aged 22, Jackson is taking her chance to show the world her true self — musically, at least. Her debut album, Wilted, is a collection of melancholy indie-folk inspired by the likes of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Californian band Grandaddy. While that may sound like a far cry from her father’s remarkable pop oeuvre, she counts his work among her influences, too. ‘I think he’ll always influence everything I do in some way, whether it’s subconscious or intentional,’ she reasons. ‘I was around that creativity all the time, so I’m sure I learnt a lot of what I have from that.’
Of all the nights Serj Tankian has stood on stage surveying a crowd of 50,000 faces roaring his own words back at him, there is one that the System of a Down frontman will never forget. On 23 April 2015, the metal band gave a two-and-half hour, 37-song set to a rapturous audience in Republic Square, in the heart of the Armenian capital Yerevan. For a band formed in the diaspora community of Los Angeles’ Little Armenia in 1994, the occasion could not have been more significant: they had been invited to perform in the country for the first time as part of events marking the centenary of the Armenian genocide, in which an estimated 1.5 million Armenians were killed between 1915 and 1922. “The overwhelming feeling was of belonging,” says Tankian, 53, speaking from his airy home studio in Los Angeles. “It felt like we were created 21 years earlier so we could be there that night.”
For Tankian, whose outspoken political activism often animates his songwriting, seeking international recognition of the Armenian genocide has been a lifelong and personal campaign. On stage that night in Yerevan he told the story of his grandfather Stepan Haytayan, who was just five years old when he saw his father murdered in the atrocities; he later went blind from hunger. Between songs, Tankian railed against Barack Obama’s resistance to using the term “genocide” to describe the atrocities after taking office, before turning his ire on Armenia’s authoritarian president, Serzh Sargsyan. “We’ve come a long way, Armenia, but there’s still a lot of fucking work to do,” Tankian told the audience, before calling out the “institutional injustice” of Sargsyan’s administration and demanding the introduction of an “egalitarian civil society”.
Jesse F. Keeler and Sebastian Grainger are so in love they’re having another baby. Their fourth record as Death From Above 1979, christened ‘Is 4 Lovers’, is due this week after an unexpectedly extended gestation period. Written and recorded in 2019, the release is one of the many to have been put back by the pandemic. The eventual arrival of their latest little miracle is exciting news for the proud parents, especially when you consider that 15 years ago they hated each other so much even the prospect of joining the biggest tour of their lives couldn’t keep them together.
“NME, I’m gonna tell you a secret that nobody knows,” says Keeler, the band’s luxuriously mustachioed bassist, speaking over Zoom from his farm a couple of hours outside of Toronto. “When our band broke up, we decided in 2005 to stop playing together but we hadn’t told anybody yet. That’s when Daft Punk’s manager Pedro [Winter] asked us to open for them on that tour with the pyramid [the 2006/2007 Alive world tour]. I told him: ‘Dude, you’re too late!’”
When it comes to Jamaican music, Patricia Chin has heard it all. The 83-year-old, known as “Miss Pat”, has been a fixture of the island’s music industry for over 60 years. Today she runs VP Records, the world’s largest reggae music and distribution company, making her a crucial music mogul for the island’s music. DJ Kool Herc, who along with his sister Cindy Campbell is considered the founder of hip-hop, once said of the sweet-natured 4ft 11in entrepreneur: “What Berry Gordy was to Motown Records, Patricia Chin is to the reggae industry.”
It all started in a former ice cream shop in Kingston, which Miss Pat and her husband Vincent opened as Randy’s Record Mart in 1959. In her new memoir, Miss Pat: My Reggae Music Journey, out this week, she describes how it was there she developed her legendarily encyclopaedic knowledge of ska, rocksteady, reggae, dub and dancehall. It was there, too, that Jamaica’s homegrown musical explosion in the Sixties and Seventies took place, bringing those sounds and styles to the world.
In October 1999, Alan McGee was the most famous record label boss in Britain. Creation Records, the tiny indie he’d co-founded in 1983, had put out era-defining albums by Primal Scream, My Bloody Valentine and Teenage Fanclub before the Scottish impresario even got around to stumbling across some band called Oasis. After Britpop made him a household name, McGee was recruited as an adviser by the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who was trying to make ‘Cool Britannia’ happen. When Blair invited him for dinner at fancy country manor Chequers, McGee wasn’t sure what to expect – but it certainly wasn’t the gurning, cigar-wielding spectre of Jimmy Savile.
“He bowled in going: ‘Now then, now then’ and proceeded to run the whole fucking dinner,” remembers McGee, who at the time had no idea about Savile’s years of predatory sexual abuse. “I didn’t know he was a fucking paedophile or anything like that, but I was sat there thinking: ‘This guy hasn’t been famous for 15 years, what in the fuck is he doing here?’ His behaviour was letchy. He was a fucking horror, man.”
That bizarre glimpse inside the British establishment is just one moment from McGee’s rollercoaster ‘90s that makes it into Creation Stories, a new biopic directed by Nick Moran from a script by Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh. In the film, Savile’s sinister presence is used as evidence of the rot eating away at the heart of Blair and his ‘New Labour’ project. In truth, the real McGee’s feelings towards the former Prime Minister are more ambivalent. “Irvine put his own viewpoint into the film and Blair gets cunted off,” he says. “I didn’t change what Irvine was saying because it fit with his script, but I have zero problem with Tony Blair. I know him personally and I quite like him.”
Bunny Wailer, the last of The Wailers, has died in Jamaica at the age of 73. Affectionately known on the island as Jah B, he was a devout Rastafarian, the creator of peerless solo records such as ‘Blackheart Man’ and, along with Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, a crucial voice in the group that did more than any other to introduce reggae to the world.
Wailer was born Neville O’Riley Livingston in Kingston, Jamaica on 10 April 1947. While he was still a child, his family moved to the village of Nine Mile in St. Ann Parish in the north of the island. His father, Thaddeus ‘Toddy’ Livingston, preached at the Revivalist church, and young Bunny got his first taste of performance by banging the drum during services.
In St. Ann Wailer attended the Stepney All Age School, where he first met Bob Marley. “I knew Bob from a very early age – maybe from nine or 10 when I went to live in the country,” he told NME’s Paul Bradshaw in 1984. “He was at the same school as I. When I left the country and came back to town, we later came to live in the same neighbourhood. So, it’s a long relationship. You couldn’t forget Bob.”
In 1963, aged 16, Wailer formed a group with Marley and Peter Tosh, variously called The Teenagers, The Wailing Rudeboys and The Wailing Wailers, before they eventually settled on just The Wailers. They had their first Number One hit in Jamaica with ‘Simmer Down’ the following year, and in 1965 released ‘The Wailing Wailers’, a collection of their best early recordings. On the cover, all three wear shiny suits and have short cropped hair, and are described simply as “Jamaica’s Top-rated Singing Sensations”.
Their sound evolved rapidly, in spite of setbacks – like the 14 months Wailer served in prison for cannabis possession from June 1967. The gorgeous harmonies the trio produced became part of the signature sound that developed under the guidance of producer Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry on 1970’s ‘Soul Rebels’ and 1971’s ‘Soul Revolution’. In 1973, after signing with Chris Blackwell’s Island Records, they released not one but two classic records: ‘Catch a Fire’ and ‘Burnin’’.
Their music spoke to a young audience not just in Jamaica, but around the world. On tour in England that year, Wailer told NME’s Sebastian Clarke: “Right now youth consciousness is causing turbulences all over the earth. As soon as the youth starts realising the truth he starts to tell it, and as soon as the old folks hear it, they start making trouble for them.”
While the group were at a creative peak, Wailer was unhappy that international touring put him at odds with his Rastafarian faith and felt his artistic contributions were being minimised as the group was rebranded as Marley’s backing band. Wailer quit and went to live in a ramshackle cabin by the beach, where he survived by catching fish and writing songs.
Some of those songs would be included on 1976’s ‘Blackheart Man’, Wailer’s debut solo album and one of the essential roots reggae records. Both Marley and Tosh sang backing vocals for their old friend on tracks like ‘Fighting Against Conviction’, a song about Wailer’s time in prison. The album’s title is a reference to a fable from his childhood in Nine Mile.
“We all grew up hearing about this Blackheart Man,” Wailer told MOJO in 2009, “and we were told that you had to be careful of strangers who might walk up to you and invite you into a situation, or you might be found in the lonely countryside, or in the gullies, or anywhere that this individual might have shown up – and then he would take your heart out. So it brought fear on all the youths of that time when they heard the name ‘Blackheart Man’. So I did the album based on my experiences.”
Wailer’s musical output – mostly released on his own Solomonic label – was prolific and varied. In 1980 he released ‘Bunny Wailer Sings The Wailers’, which saw him reinterpret many of his old group’s classic songs in a roots reggae style with the backing of legendary rhythm section Sly Dunbar & Robbie Shakespeare, while in 1982 he experimented with disco on his album ‘Hook Line & Sinker’. He won the Grammy for Best Reggae Album three times: for 1991’s ‘Time Will Tell: A Tribute to Bob Marley’; 1995’s ‘Crucial! Roots Classics’; and 1997’s ‘Hall of Fame: A Tribute to Bob Marley’s 50th Anniversary.’
The awards were well-deserved, but to Wailer reggae was about more than entertainment. The seven-inch singles he released in Jamaica during the ’70s, with titles such as ‘Power Struggle’ and ‘Innocent Blood’, showed that music could be as potent as any political broadcast.
“It’s a people’s concept,” he told NME in 1984. “If you’re not doing it for the people, it doesn’t make sense – it wouldn’t be music. Reggae, apart from most music, is a little bit more relevant to the everyday life and activities of the people. Not only I, but most of the artists try to deal with their experience and the experience of others to try and soothe the stress and the tension by letting them know that their feelings are shared. It’s like sharing a weight; that’s what reggae does.”
The record label PR looked both ways over her shoulders and handed me a scrap of paper under the table. It was April 2013, my first time in Hollywood, and things were already getting weird. Further down the Sunset Strip I could see the front of Whisky a Go Go plastered with images of Daft Punk’s helmets, halved then spliced together. I had flown to California to talk to the duo about their new record, ‘Random Access Memories’, for the cover of NME. The album was due in a month but was still being treated so secretively nobody could even say what tracks would be on it. I opened the scrap of paper in my hand and saw a list of 13 song titles, written in pencil. “We’re not allowed to send it electronically,” said the PR. “I’m sure you understand.”
Frankly, I didn’t understand at all. Surely they knew I could just type their precious tracklist into a computer? The whole situation seemed absurd until I realised that what I was dealing with was a case of Van Halen’s M&Ms. David Lee Roth once explained that the band’s rider request to be provided a bowl full of M&Ms with all the brown ones taken out was actually an eminently sensible way to make sure venues were reading the small print and that their complex technical and logistical requirements were therefore more likely to be met. This was something like that: a deliberately over-the-top instruction from Daft Punk to remind their label that loose lips sink spaceships.
I went back to the friend’s place where I was staying and called Pharrell Williams, who had clearly gotten the message about not letting too much light in on Daft Punk’s mysterious new project. I cross-examined him for a while, but it was as much use as interrogating Johnny Tightlips. After 15 minutes not only would he not tell me any details about the makings of ‘Get Lucky’, already by then the most talked-about song on the planet, but he wouldn’t even accept the proposition that Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo are actually human. “I’m very excited for the robots, man,” he said, the only way he would ever refer to the pair. “This is all a part of their masterful calculation. I’m thankful to just be a digit in their equation.”
Given the fog of mystery Bangalter and de Homem-Christo had cultivated around themselves, I had little idea what to expect from the interview itself: I half-expected them to insist on keeping their helmets on throughout. I got my answer a few days later in Palm Springs. The pair were there to attend Coachella incognito, and were staying at Bing Crosby’s $3.5 million estate – notable for being the location where JFK and Marilyn Monroe are rumoured to have consummated their affair. When I arrived the front door was open so I let myself in and walked through an opulent living room which opened onto an outdoor pool, where the longhaired de Homem-Christo was doing lengths in a pair of tiny black shorts. Bangalter was in the kitchen, pouring a bottle of champagne into glasses of Pimm’s while wearing an equally skimpy pair of bright blue shorts. At least I didn’t have to spend any longer worrying about their helmets.
The three of us ducked out of the desert heat and found somewhere shady near the pool to talk – or at least two of us did. It might be an exaggeration to say that Bangalter and de Homem-Christo’s relationship is akin to Penn and Teller’s, or Jay and Silent Bob’s, but not by much. The loquacious Bangalter spoke expressively about the the record while de Homem-Christo sat mostly silently, the picture of Gallic cool, waiting for the opportune moment to drop a bon mot. This personal interrelationship mirrors the way they worked in the studio: Bangalter the ideas man, constantly creating new sounds and demos. De Homem-Christo the editor: This works. This doesn’t. Let’s try it like this. It was easy to see how their brains worked in tandem, whether they were making songs or cracking jokes. A one point, de Homem-Christo offhandedly suggested that he’d spent a long time assuming all EDM music had been made by the same DJ. Bangalter provided the punchline without missing a beat: “Maybe it’s just one guy called Eric David Morris.”
The news that Bangalter and de Homem-Christo are officially calling time on Daft Punk after 28 years is sad, but not a surprise. They haven’t released a record since ‘Random Access Memories’, and even back in 2013 they were already feeling their age. “We’re music lovers, and we realised that bands who’ve been together for 20 years usually don’t put out their best records,” Bangalter told me.
Their solution at the time was to reinvent themselves by moving away from their electronic roots to record ‘Random Access Memories’ entirely with live musicians. Back then the question on everyone’s lips was whether they’d tour as a live band. Bangalter told me they “hadn’t thought about it”, and yesterday’s announcement would appear to confirm they never will. Perhaps that’s for the best: they’d already set an impossibly high bar for their live shows. Purists will say a pair of DJs with no instruments can’t claim to have pulled off the greatest tour in history; anyone lucky enough to have borne witness to the neon pyramid from their 2007 ‘Alive’ tour, in all its glory, will know differently.
Their split marks the end of an era. For a time Daft Punk were harder, better, faster and stronger than anyone else putting out records. For now, at least, their work is over.
Nick Kent started writing for NME in 1972, which was a good year to be a rock’n’roll writer. And no writer in Britain was more rock’n’roll than Kent, who was soon as notorious for wearing a perpetually ripped pair of leather trousers and dating Chrissie Hynde as he was for writing novelistic profiles of enigmatic figures such as Syd Barrett and Lou Reed.
Even now, almost half a century on, stories of Kent’s escapades and expenses-claims get passed down like lore at NME. There’s a good one about the time he flew to LA to profile Jethro Tull in 1975 and somehow wound up on a bender with Iggy Pop. Holed up in the Continental Hyatt House hotel on Sunset Boulevard, they hit upon the cunning wheeze of telling visiting drug dealers that they could help themselves to whatever they wanted from the luxury shops in the lobby and charge it to Kent’s room – leaving poor old Jethro Tull to pick up the tab. Truly, a grift for the ages.
Kent published the best of his collected rock writing in 1994 as The Dark Stuff and followed that essential tome in 2010 with his ‘70s memoir Apathy For The Devil. He’s just published his third book – his first novel – The Unstable Boys, which concerns the unhinged frontman of a mostly-forgotten ‘60s band appearing on the doorstop of his biggest fan after many years in obscurity. Over a video call from his home in Paris, Kent – 69 and just as louche as ever – discussed the book’s origins and held court about a life spent at the unforgiving coalface of rock’n’roll.
On his no-fucks-given style
Things weren’t looking good for NME when Kent first slouched through its doors in ‘72. Sales were so bad that the editors had been given just 12 issues to save the magazine. They hired Kent and other new writers such as Charles Shaar Murray and Ian MacDonald from the alternative press. The magazine then saw a huge jump in sales – but not for the reason Kent wanted to believe.
“The assistant editor Nick Logan called me into his office at the end of the year and said, ‘Well, we’ve got great news – we’re outselling the Melody Maker’, which was a big deal at the time,’” remembers Kent. “He said: ‘In fact, we’re the biggest selling music weekly in the world!’ Pats on the back all round! I was standing there thinking he was gonna say: ‘It’s all you, Murray and MacDonald, you wonderful, beautiful people!’
“Not at all. He said: ‘We’ve done a survey of new readers to ask them why they buy the thing. They don’t buy it for the articles. They don’t read the articles, except for the quotes. They might look for a David Bowie quote, but they’re not interested in what the writers are writing. The only thing they actually read is the gossip column on the last page.’ What they really wanted to know was: What did Bowie’s latest haircut look like? And were Led Zeppelin playing a gig near where they lived?
“After I picked my wounded ego up off the floor, I came to the very quick conclusion that I was writing for an audience with an extremely short attention span. I realised I had to go to extremes, because I would not be ignored! 300,000 people were buying the NME and the idiots weren’t reading it! That affected the way I wrote. You’ve got to grab them with the first sentence and say: ‘The action starts here’ you cannot not read this.’ I’m living proof that going to extremes gets results. The problem is that they may not be the exact results that you set out to attain.”
Access All Areas
Kent went to extremes on the page and off it, where he found that the road of excess led not to the palace of wisdom but to a debilitating heroin addiction. His best work included an epic feature about the tortured genius of Brian Wilson, which ran to 10,000 words and was published across three issues of NME. He was also granted unprecedented access to a Rolling Stones tour and wrote memorably about the strange, distant atmosphere backstage and the darkness lurking in Jagger and Richards’ “numb, burned-out cool”.
“There’s this whole idea that the writers of that time were the reason why the NME was so successful,” he says, “and that’s partly true, but the main reason was that we had more access back then to Bowie, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and the other big names of the ‘70s. There was a kind of give-and-take there, and I was lucky enough to get into that.”
That time he was a Sex Pistol
Kent first met punk impresario Malcolm McLaren in December 1973, when he went to France to interview the New York Dolls and found McLaren among their entourage. The pair became close and regularly dined together – along with their partners, Vivienne Westwood and Hynde – at what the writer describes “the only Indian restaurant in Clapham South”. When McLaren sacked guitarist Wally Nightingale from an early line-up of The Sex Pistols because he didn’t think he fit the band’s look, he asked Kent to replace him. Kent spent three months playing with guitarist Steve Jones and drummer Paul Cook, but says he never quite matched the Sex Pistol temperament.
“What I learned from playing with The Sex Pistols was that there’s a big difference between a middle-class guitar player and a working-class guitar player,” says Kent. “For a working-class guitar player, it’s all about repetition. It’s like that Johnny Ramone thing of playing the same chords over and over again. If you’re a guy like me, I’ll play a three chord riff like ‘Louie Louie’ for a minute but then I’ll get bored and throw something a bit jazzy in, and immediately that’s like going into Radiohead-land! My Sex Pistols experience taught me that I’m a middle-class guitar player.”
On the rocker who reminds him of Trump
Kent’s new novel The Unstable Boys centres around the titular band’s grotesque, narcissistic frontman, known as ‘The Boy’. Given his abrasive personality traits, it’s no surprise that The Boy idolises Donald Trump – and Kent says he noticed plenty of parallels between the former President and some of the more self-absorbed rock stars he’s encountered over the years.
“The rock star that really reminded me of Trump is Axl Rose,” says Kent. “I went out to America in 1991 at the height of Guns N’ Roses mania. They were the biggest group in America at that time. At almost every gig they played there would be a riot. Axl would usually be late, and then he’d come on stage and spend 10 minutes putting down whatever celebrity had said something in the press about him. I saw him once put down Warren Beatty because Warren Beatty had dated his girlfriend.
“We got 10 minutes of: ‘What an arsehole!’ He was using the stage as a forum for his own narcissistic shit fits, just like Trump. At least Axl Rose could perform and could sing well, whereas Trump has neither talent. He doesn’t have any talent! He’s the ultimate huckster.”
And the horror story behind The Unstable Boys
In The Unstable Boys, things take a turn for the worse when ‘The Boy’ turns up at the home of a wealthy crime writer who also happens to be his band’s biggest fan. Kent says he was inspired by a real tale involving the British rock’n’roller Vince Taylor, who sang the 1959 hit ‘Brand New Cadillac’.And the horror story behind The Unstable BoysIn The Unstable Boys, things take a turn for the worse when ‘The Boy’ turns up at the home of a wealthy crime writer who also happens to be his band’s biggest fan. Kent says he was inspired by a real tale involving the British rock’n’roller Vince Taylor, who sang the 1959 hit ‘Brand New Cadillac’.
“He was one of the best early British rock singers – one of the only ones, actually,” says Kent. “He’s probably best-known now because he became the inspiration for Ziggy Stardust. Bowie had met him in the ‘60s and became fascinated by him. By the ‘70s, Taylor had gone from bad to worse and he was basically penniless. He would just turn up on the doorsteps of people that he imagined were fans of his. He turned up on the doorstep of his fan club president in Switzerland and of course the guy invited him in – this was his hero! Things didn’t go well. Before long his wife left him, his dog disappeared and his pub burnt down.”
Kent adds that he’s been working on the novel in some form or another since his wife Laurence first told him Taylor’s story back in 1990, so he’s delighted to finally see the story in print three decades on. “When I’d finished it, for about two or three hours afterwards I felt really, really good,” says Kent. “High in a way that eclipsed all the drug highs I’ve ever had.”
Rivers Cuomo is a man of many talents, but clairvoyance is not one of them. The moustachioed 50-year-old Weezer frontman is at home in Santa Monica, sitting between his computer and his piano, explaining the sequence of unforeseen circumstances that led his band to delay the release of heavy metal record ‘Van Weezer’ by a full year and in the intervening time put out a whole new orchestral pop album, ‘OK Human’.
It all started in 2017, when Cuomo sat down in that same spot at his piano, beneath his hanging garden of creeping vines, to begin work on what he calls a “quirky, personal, non-commercial album with no big guitars”.
It was just as that record was nearing completion that the band – Cuomo plus drummer Patrick Wilson, rhythm guitarist Brian Bell and bassist Scott Shriner – learned that they’d been booked to play the Hella Mega Tour, a huge jaunt around the world’s stadiums alongside fellow rockers-of-a-certain-age Green Day and Fall Out Boy, from March to August last year. Cuomo says their excitement at hitting the road to play in front of such vast crowds was tempered by an immediate and troubling realisation: “We were like, ‘Okay, we just made the worst possible type of album you could make before a stadium rock tour.’”
Outside Guns Direct in Burbank, California, 21-year-old Elliott Smith is waiting to buy his first firearm. He’d been debating the decision with his family for some time before finally being convinced by the scenes from the Capitol. “It’s just my precautionary tool,” he says. “My personal belief is that I wouldn’t use it unless there was a civil war.”
Behind the counter, James Janya, a 41-year-old former Marine, says he’s noticed an “uptick in customers”, though nothing like the scale of the early days of the pandemic, when lines frequently snaked around the block.
By his estimate, around 80 per cent of customers over the past year have been first-time gun buyers, and the number of women has also sharply increased. “Everybody is scared right now,” he says. “Businesses are closing down. Crime is on the rise. People are saying: ‘Defund the police.’ Well, then who’s going to protect me? That’s why people are buying guns.”
Things are quieter at nearby Burbank Ammo & Guns, which employee Eric Fletcher attributes to record sales in 2020. “I think everyone who was looking to buy a gun has already done it,” says the 34 year-old. “The supply of guns and ammunition is still low because of the extreme demand last year.”
This demand is being driven by both sides of the political spectrum. “We see a diverse mixture, including people who come in wearing clothing that says things like: ‘BLM’ or ‘FTP’ [F— the Police],” says Fletcher.
Look, we know you’re only reading this because you want to know if the new season of American Gods is any good or not, but it seems impossible to start telling you anything about a show that largely concerns the Norse God Odin trying to start a war in America without first acknowledging that a few days ago we all watched as a deluded man wearing Viking horns and covered in Odin tattoos stood inside the US Capitol screaming that a war is coming.
American Gods takes place in a world where mere belief is enough to think terrifying power into existence, which certainly makes it relatable. The arrival of the show’s third season couldn’t feel more timely, dealing as it does with an aging, once-powerful megalomaniac whose lust for control sets him on the path to violence. Ian McShane’s Mr Wednesday, Odin by another name, is such a charming man that it’s easy to lose sight of quite how hell bent on all out war he is. In the new season’s opening episode, he offers our hero Shadow Moon (Hollyoaks‘ Ricky Whittle) his side of the argument. “I’m just trying to save the human race from itself,” he claims, and he’s perfectly convincing – but then a trickster God would be, wouldn’t he?
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.”
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.
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.”
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.”
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.
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.”
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.”
“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.”
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.”
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.”
Few writers understand the violence lurking in the American psyche better than Carl Hiaasen. For more than four decades, the 67-year-old has been vividly chronicling crime and corruption in his native Florida, first as a reporter and columnist for the Miami Herald and then in a string of savagely hilarious crime novels. Still, nothing could have prepared him for the devastating events of 28 June 2018 when Jarrod Ramos, a lone gunman with a grudge against Maryland newspaper The Capital, entered its newsroom in Annapolis carrying a pump-action shotgun and killed five people, injuring two more. Among those left dead by the largest killing of journalists in US history was the paper’s assistant editor, Rob Hiaasen – Carl’s younger brother.
With Ramos still awaiting trial, Hiaasen began the slow process of returning to writing while carrying a grief that threatened to overwhelm him. “It took a long time after Rob was killed to start up again, I’ll tell you that,” says Hiaasen, speaking from his home in Vero Beach, 140 miles up the coast from Miami. “You have to cauterise your feelings to sit down and write something funny when, believe me, nothing about my life was funny.”
The resulting novel, Squeeze Me, is dedicated to Rob’s memory. It’s also very funny indeed. Hiaasen says he felt he owed it to his brother to keep going. “He had the best sense of humour of our whole family, and he would have been pissed off if he thought that I stopped writing those kind of books just because of what happened,” he says. “In this country, sadly, the community of people who have lost family members to mass shootings or street violence is absurdly huge. It’s like a tidal wave that never stops breaking through your family.”
In spite of this tragic background, Squeeze Me is vintage Hiaasen. Since making his debut with 1986’s Tourist Season, his novels have frequently pitted the natural world and those who defend it against grotesque, avaricious villains. In Squeeze Me, both sides are drawn straight from our stranger-than-fiction reality. In one corner, the fugitive Burmese pythons that have made their home in the Everglades since the early Nineties. In the other, America’s grotesque and avaricious president.
In the 1960s, Frederick “Toots” Hibbert didn’t just give the emerging genre of reggae its most soulful voice – he also gave it a name. A slip of the tongue while rehearsing with his group the Maytals one day and “streggae” – Jamaican patois for someone in ragged clothes – became “reggae” in Toots’s mouth. When the Maytals released “Do the Reggay” in 1968, they intended to name a passing dance craze. Instead the newly minted word stuck to the sound they and the Wailers were helping to shape: a faster, brighter evolution of the rocksteady beat. “I never knew it was gonna be so prevalent, or so good,” says Toots, now 77, of reggae’s worldwide success. “But it feels good to know I was the one who put the ‘R’ in the music.”
Today he’s at home in the yellow-walled studio he calls the Reggae Center, part of his pink stucco compound in the Red Hills area of Kingston. Endearingly he’s listening to his own new record, Got to Be Tough, his first in a decade. Who can blame him? The album is a joy: a riotous platter of not just reggae but also R&B, funk and soul that showcases Toots’s impressive range. He says the album comes with a timely message. “I’m giving a warning and telling you that you gotta be tough,” he explains. “Towards this Corona thing that’s going around, you have to be tough. To overcome it, you have to be strong.” He’s a little hazy on the specifics, and avoids even calling his songs protest music. “I don’t call it political,” he says. “My music is just a story that tells the truth.”
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.
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.”
The Guyanese-American artist first composed the colossal breakout hit back in 2015 – originally as a pitch to Beyoncé. After she declined, he decided to half-sing, half-rap melodies in his own smoky tone. Roses, which initially dropped in July 2016, proved slow-burning success, and found a devoted audience in Russia and the former Soviet republics. Last year, a 19-year-old train station worker from Kazakhstan named Imanbek Zeikenov gave it a remix, working in a thick, catchy bassline and new club-ready beat, before throwing it back into the world.
Now, Roses is one of the biggest songs on the planet. The Imanbek remix has been the most Shazamed song in Britain this year and in March it spent two weeks at number one in the UK charts. Future and J Balvin are among those who’ve eagerly hopped on the various remixes. Worldwide, Roses has racked up over 796 million Spotify plays and has become wildly popular on TikTok, where clips of the song have been used over five billion times.
Shirtless on a 60ft balcony overlooking Los Angeles, Saint Jhn is enjoying his moment of vindication. He’s looking back on how far he’s come since the days as a songwriter-for-hire, selling his musical ideas to the likes of Usher and Hoodie Allen. “When you’re playing for a team you don’t own, you’re just practising,” Saint Jhn muses. “It was like gladiator school. I was sharpening my sword at somebody else’s cost. It forced me to create things that you couldn’t deny. When I arrived at that point and people still weren’t hearing me? That’s when I was willing to bet on myself.”
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.”
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.”
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.
In September 1968, songwriting titans Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller were on the hunt for a singer for their curious new composition Is That All There Is? The song was something of a departure for the writers of Hound Dog and Jailhouse Rock. It had been inspired by Thomas Mann’s 1896 short story Disillusionment, which deals with what Leiber called “the existential hole that sits in the centre of our souls”. The fatalistic spoken-word verses describe the narrator watching their house burn down, losing their first love, and even facing death, “that final disappointment”, with sanguine grace.
The pair felt the song needed an actress to sell it so offered it to Marlene Dietrich and Barbra Streisand before thinking of Peggy Lee. After catching her show at the Copacabana in New York, they handed Lee a demo. She called them the moment she listened to it. “I will kill you if you give this song to anyone but me,” she said. “This is my song. This is the story of my life.”
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.
Kevin EG Perry is a writer for The Independent, The Guardian, GQ, NME, Empire, Wallpaper*, Vice, Lonely Planet Traveller and other reputable publications
Kevin EG Perry: Collected Works 