Earlier this summer, guitarist Tony Iommi and bassist and lyricist Geezer Butler returned to Birmingham for the opening of an exhaustive exhibition about Black Sabbath, the band they formed in the city 50 years ago. Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery is currently home to a vast collection of both the band’s own memorabilia and a staggering array of fan tributes. Asked if there was anything not present in the collection that they expected to see, Butler couldn’t resist a quip: “Ozzy?”

Continue reading at NME.

Charles Manson hovers like a spectre in the background of Quentin Tarantino’s excellent new retro-romp Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, just as he’s haunted American popular culture ever since he orchestrated a series of gruesome murders in Los Angeles in August 1969.

The way his crimes came to represent the poisoning of the hippy ideal has given him an outsized reputation, making him appear far more powerful and terrifying than he really was. The truth is that Manson was a cruel and manipulative piece of shit, and like many pieces of shit before and since, what he really wanted in life was to be a rock ’n’ roll star.

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There’s been a spate of big, campy music biopics in the last few years, including films about Queen (Bohemian Rhapsody), Elton John (Rocketman), Mötley Crüe (The Dirt) and even one about that band of freakish Doctor Moreau rejects whose screams haunt my nightmares (Cats).

Back in 1991, however, music biopics could be altogether darker and druggier affairs. Oliver Stone’s The Doors portrayed frontman Jim Morrison as a death-obsessed shaman who wandered the Sunset Strip spouting lines like: “What’s a band for? Let’s plan a murder or start a religion” or “I don’t remember being born, it must have happened during one of my blackouts”. It also featured a memorable desert acid trip sequence that would be lovingly satirised in Wayne’s World 2 (“I have to ask, didn’t you think it was a trifle unnecessary to see the crack in the Indian’s bottom?”).

Now that music films are back in vogue, the film has been given a shiny new 4K polish and is being re-released today. To mark the occasion, we headed to Oliver Stone’s Hollywood office to see if he’d let us touch one of his three (three!) Oscars (Best Adapted Screenplay for 1979’s Midnight Express, Best Director for both 1987’s Platoon and 1990’s Born on the Fourth of July). When that failed, we settled for talking to him about how Val Kilmer managed to rack up a $20,000 massage bill on the set of The Doors, the best place to score acid in Sydney in 1968, and why Madonna’s lack of acting chops led him to walk away from Evita.

Continue reading at NME.

The week after Glastonbury is always tough. After a year as glorious as this one, even the drive home was more than I could bear. I got The Fear as soon as we got to a service station. Did we really have to come back to concrete civilisation? Couldn’t we just live in the fields? Where had all my serotonin gone? Why are there so many different types of crisps? Nothing made sense anymore.

I was lying flat across the backseat of the car in a cocoon of blankets and self-loathing when the email came through. I could hear my editors discussing it up front. Humongous, Grammy-bothering dance act Above & Beyond are apparently about to release a new album designed specifically for yoga and meditation, and they’re running a post-Glastonbury yoga session in a yard in Victoria. One of my editors jerked his thumb towards the back seat. “Kev’ll do it,” he said. I didn’t hate the idea. Maybe it’ll be just what I need to return my broken body to some state of normalcy. What they don’t tell me is that it starts at 8am. Bastards.

I’m late, obviously. The organisers have saved me a spot right in front of the DJ decks, but it’s hard to be inconspicuous when you’re wearing space cat leggings. I try to sneak straight into a surreptitious downward dog but before I know it a serene figure in white has appeared next to me. “That was quite the entrance,” she breathes. I’m far too fragile for all this.

Still, my Columbo-like powers of deduction are functioning enough that I gather this ethereal presence must be Elena Brower. One of the world’s leading yogi (not the bear), the story goes that she met the guys from Above & Beyond at Burning Man (where else?) in 2014. She led a yoga session in front of the Robot Heart soundsystem in the deep playa while Above & Beyond DJed (The set has now been streamed over two million times on Soundcloud). It was, by all accounts, such a profound and powerful experience for everyone involved that they ran it again five or six times at various other festivals and parties and eventually  decided to collaborate on a new album, ‘Flow State’.

The record itself is a continuous ambient instrumental mix, but there’s also a second version featuring a lengthy spoken word piece by Elena. The threat of a ‘spoken word yoga album’ is usually the sort of thing that makes me delete an email faster than you can think of a rhyme for Jeremy Hunt, but right now listening to Elena I realise I’d sell the stronger of my two kidneys for a recording of her. It’s not just that she’s gracefully guiding us through the yoga, making even pretzeling myself into an excruciating pigeon position seem elegant, it’s that she’s keeping up such a steady stream of wisdom about gratitude and safety and self-reliance that I catch myself smiling up at the clear blue sky. The music swells euphorically, not in a I’ve-just-dropped-a-pinger-in-Block-9 way, more like a striding-off-into-a-new-dawn way. It feels vast and cinematic. I’m Renton with the bag full of cash at the end of ‘Trainspotting’. I think it’s all going to be OK. I think it’s going to be fine.

Once Elena is done restoring me to the status of functioning human, I sit down with her and Above & Beyond’s Paavo Siljamäki and Tony McGuinness to find out how they ended up creating this instant dose of Serenity Now.

“We’re obviously DJs who spend most of our time playing dark nightclubs,” explains Paavo. “I think where this fits in is that I feel like if I look after my own mental fitness better, and look after my body better, if I’m in better shape mentally and physically, then I can get more out of the parties. It enables a lot more fun in life.”

We’re living in a hyper-accelerated age, where the danger of pushing yourself too hard and too fast is all too real. That fear is the tragic backstory to this project, which was born in the wake of the recent suicides of Avicii and Bill Hamel, a member of Fatum, who released music through Above & Beyond’s label Anjunabeats.

“I’ve been burning out,” says Paavo. “I’ve been struggling with depression. For me, this has been a therapeutic thing. I’ve needed to stop stuff, and I’ve needed space to really work through things. Music is such an awesome thing because I can make music if I’m feeling happy or sad or tired or energetic. That’s very much where a lot of this album has come from, from a very painful and dark place, but doing it has been a release and now that’s it’s out there maybe it’s going to resonate with people who are struggling. All the shocking things that have happened in the last few years have made me realise that we need to get people talking about this. There’s no shame in it.”

To reinforce the message he wanted to convey with this music, Paavo approached Elena to record her voice-over. “Her message is so on point with what we’re trying to do,” he explains.

So what exactly is Elena’s message? “The very first line [of the spoken word recording] is I think the most important,” she says. “‘There is a place within you that is always at rest and always at peace.’ Then we walk through the process of forgetting and remembering several times over the course of the talk, so that by the end there’s no question: You are here listening to this so that you can remember that space inside of you, provide yourself with a sense of safety and presence and hold your own hand. By doing so, you’re going to be able to do that for other people. That is a service that we can all give to the communities in which we live.”

Speaking of communities, I’ve got about 200,000 mates who I think would be into this. “We’ve got to bring this to Glastonbury, for sure,” says Paavo. “I think Glastonbury would be the place,” adds Tony. “Even more than Burning Man.”

Elena, are you in? “I’d love that!” Let’s make it happen. Glastonbury. 2020. Elena Brower and Above & Beyond, I wanna be your downward dog.

Originally published by NME.

Glastonbury has a way of getting under your skin. By the time Sunday rolls around, you start dreaming of ways you could keep living the festival life forever. If you’re anything like me, there comes a point where you start to think: ‘Could I… could I run away and join the circus?’

Luckily, Glastonbury is exactly the sort of place which encourages these sort of insane dreams. With Monday’s threat of a return to reality hurtling towards me at breakneck speed, I decided to pull on my trusty space cat leggings and head down to the the festival’s circus field. There’s a whole tent there dedicated to teaching a range of useful everyday life skills like hula-hooping, poi, juggling, contact balls, devil sticks and plate-spinning. That’s where I meet Ben the Juggler. Not the most inventive name, but you get the idea. “I wanted to be called Willy Drop’em,” Ben tells me sadly, “But somebody had already taken the name.”

He points out the circus tent proper on the other side of the field, which boasts a line-up of some of the planet’s most in-demand acts. You can see everything in there from high-wire acts and acrobats to card tricks and contortionists. “There’s some world class acts in the circus tent,” says Ben. “And we’re the beginning of the next world class acts.” I can only assume he’s talking about me. I’m pretty good at juggling deadlines. How much harder can balls or clubs be?

Pretty hard, as it turns out, although Ben makes it look as straight-forward as necking a pear cider. He’s been a professional juggler for 30 years, teaching in the south-west of England, and has come to Glastonbury in 15 of the last 20 years. “I always do the festival this way,” he tells me. “We get a lot of people coming here who can already juggle a little bit, so instead of just doing 1-2-3 we can open people’s minds to things that they never thought were possible to do themselves. That’s the cool thing about all this stuff, you do it for yourself. It gives you a little spring in your step knowing that you have a superhuman power with a hula-hoop. When people first learn to do something like spin a plate they get a look of joy on their face. It’s a leap of faith. You do it for yourself when you never knew you could. People feel good about themselves, that’s the thing.”

I like the sound of that, but when Ben starts showing me his moves with the juggling clubs I quickly lose confidence. “With clubs, it’s about knowing where the spin is,” he explains as they start flying around his body. “When I throw the clubs from one hand to another it spins around my shoulder height, and that way I know it will come down easily in my other hand.” He makes it sound so simple, but it looks close to magic. Soon he’s throwing them under his leg and balancing one of the clubs on his trilby mid-juggle. Showing off, in other words.

“Juggling, out of all these things, does take a bit longer to learn,” Ben concedes. “Hula-hooping you’re only concentrating on one thing, plate spinning you’re only concentrating on one thing, whereas with juggling you’ve got to get both sides going. People say it’s good for the grey matter, although there’s not much evidence for that for me.”

Ben’s being self-deprecating there. He’s inspired me to further pursue my circus dreams, but sadly I’m a truly terrible juggler. I’m not much better at hula-hooping either, and I can’t seem to spin a plate without sticking my tongue out. There’s no way I’m giving up that easily though. My eyes have been drawn to the grand centre-piece of the circus field: the flying trapeze. It’s time for me to go big or go home, and I don’t want to go home.

Every afternoon of the festival, Above and Beyond runs two-and-a-half hours worth of free aerial trapeze workshops. The company is run by 71 year-old Glastonbury veteran Mike Wright, who’s produced performances for the Brit Awards, Euro 96 and Simply Red. Hard to resist calling that a high-flying career.

Just as my training is about to begin, I get a text from a friend that Nick Cave has just come out with Kylie over on the Pyramid Stage. Annoying. Still, that’s the problem with Glastonbury. You can’t be everywhere at once, and I can’t quit on my new dream already. The instruction is, frankly, minimal. It basically consists of being told not to let go of the fly bar, which I probably could have figured out for myself. Just as I’m thinking that, one of the people ahead of me slips straight off the bar as soon as they leave the platform and crashes clumsily into the safety net. I don’t want to be that guy. If I can hang on long enough, the plan is that I’m going to perform a move called a knee hang, generally considered to be the most basic and accessible of flying trapeze tricks. Still, I’ve got to start my circus career somewhere, and upside down 25ft in the air seems as good a place as any.

As I climb the long, unsteady ladder to the platform, I can hear faint strains of ‘Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’ drifting across the fields. The view from the top is magnificent. On one side, I can just about make out Kylie on the big screens beside the Pyramid Stage. To the other, I can see down towards the madness of Block 9 and Shangri-La in the south-east corner, where in the early hours of this morning I was still rhythmically twitching to some sort of aggressive dance music. The foggy memories come roaring back into horrible clarity. Was that really only a few hours ago? Is it wise to launch myself off this platform in this sort of state? It’s nice up here. Will this be the end of me?

I grasp the fly bar in both hands. I hear the instructor’s voice say: “Ready?” and then: “Hup!” I jump up and the bar carries me forward, out into the clear blue sky. At the height of the first swing I somehow, impossibly, manage to curl myself up and hook my legs over the bar. As it swings back I let go and hang in the air upside down. I’m flying, Jack!

After a couple more swings I pull myself back the right way around and drop into the net. Okay, I know what you’re thinking, I might need to learn how to do more than just one knee hang before I can run away to join the circus. Yet as I dismount from the net I can feel that look of joy Ben the Juggler told me about spreading across my face. I saw a lot of great bands at Glastonbury this year, hugged a lot of friends, and did a lot of dancing, but what’s really special about this festival are the opportunities to do something totally new. Like learning to fly.

Originally published by NME.

Jeff Goldblum won over the crowd at his debut Glastonbury performance with a mix of easy charm and jazz classics. He also took the opportunity to announce the release of his second album with the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra, which will be released before the end of the year. It will feature a version of Irving Berlin’s ‘Let’s Face The Music And Dance’ featuring guest vocals from Sharon Van Etten, who joined him onstage today to perform their slow and sultry take on the classic tune from 1936. “Sharon Van Etten, can you please come and join us on stage,” Goldblum asked before she appeared. “The great Sharon Van Etten. We’re going to do a tune that – can I say? – we recorded for a new record on Decca Records.”

Continue reading at NME.

Liam Gallagher was put on this earth for moments like this. His set on the Pyramid Stage on Saturday night after a glorious day of sunshiiiine was so full of ‘Glastonbury moments’ that it’ll be hard for any act this weekend to better him.

He came out of the blocks like Usain Bolt running for a bus. He started the show with a pre-recorded chant of “Championes, championes”, presumably a reference to his beloved Manchester City as well as to his own rejuvenated fortunes in recent years. His stage set featured a banner reading: ‘MCFC Spezial’ as well as his usual ‘Rock ‘N’ Roll’ sign. As the chant faded out, Oasis’ classic opening music blared out over the field as Liam strutted on stage. And nobody struts quite like Liam.

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While making their own Glastonbury debut, Idles singer Joe Talbot told a packed audience at The Park Stage that the band’s pro-immigration anthem ‘Danny Nedelko’ was written after seeing PJ Harvey read John Donne’s poem ‘No Man Is An Island’ at Glastonbury 2016.

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A day after hundreds of Glastonbury 2019 festival-goers joined the Extinction Parade protest, Sheryl Crow kept up this year’s theme of environmental activism by dedicating ‘Soak Up The Sun’ to 16 year-old activist Greta Thunberg. During her set she also called on fans to help protect the planet.

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Last Saturday marked the 35^th anniversary of the release of Ghostbusters, the most popular and commercially successful movie ever to feature a scene in which one of the lead characters receives a blowjob from a ghost. (Contrary to scurrilous rumour there is absolutely no evidence that Dan Aykroyd getting head from the dead was the origin of the popular theme lyric: “Bustin’ makes me feel good.” The only connection is the one you’re making now, in your own mind, and neither I nor the filmmakers can be held responsible for what goes on in there.)

I’m sure you all celebrated the occasion in your own way, perhaps by eating some Stay Puft marshmallows or a big Twinkie, but I decided to strap on my proton pack and head over to the Sony Pictures lot in Los Angeles to join original Ghostbusters Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson at the Ghostbusters Fan Fest. I have to confess, there was a part of me that felt a little cynical about the whole endeavour. The idea of hosting a sort of ComicCon in miniature based solely on Ghostbusters could have been little more than an exercise in flogging merch and fleecing the very fans who hold the series so dear. I couldn’t help but think of Bill Murray’s line as Peter Venkman in the original 1984 film: “The franchise rights alone will make us rich beyond our wildest dreams!”

Yet as soon as I arrive I realised how wrong I’d been. Most of the costumes – and there were a lot of costumes – on display were homemade, whether it be jumpsuits or the impressively intricate proton packs everyone seemed to have designed for themselves. As if by magic, I felt myself being transported back to my brother’s birthday when we were kids, the one when we used foam-firing proton guns and a ghost trap made out of a shoebox to hunt and eventually capture Casper the Friendly Ghost, in what many critics claim to be “the most ambitious crossover event in history.”

The idea of children wielding proton guns turns out to be central to the plot of the eagerly awaited Ghostbusters 3. Jason Reitman, the director of Juno and Up In The Air, took part in one of the day’s most eagerly awaited panel discussions and revealed all sorts about what we can expect from next year’s film. He told the crowd: “We wanted to make a love letter to the original movie. I did not expect to be making a new Ghostbusters movie. I thought I was going to be this indie dude who made Sundance movies. And then this character came to me. She was a 12 year old girl. I didn’t know who she was or why she popped into my head, but I saw her with a proton pack in her hand. And I wrote this story. This story began to form over many years actually. It started with a girl and all of a sudden it was a family. And eventually I knew this was a movie that I needed to make.”

He confirmed that the 12-year-old girl in question will be played by Mckenna Grace, who recently played the young Carol Danvers in Captain Marvel. Her family will be fleshed out by Stranger Things star (and Calpurnia frontman) Finn Wolfhard, who of course already has some experience in a Ghostbusters uniform, and Gone Girl’s Carrie Coon as their mother. Reitman also promised that the film would blend horror in with the comedy, joking: “I want to scare children.” He’d earlier mentioned that Steven Spielberg had recently told him that he considered the library ghost from the original film as being one of the “Top 10 scares of all time.”

The big question hanging over the film, however, has been the extent to which the cast of the original two films will return. Reitman made a show of attempting to keep his lips sealed, but he did lay a pretty strong hint at their involvement by confirming that Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson and Sigourney Weaver have all read the script for the film.

The sweetest moment of the day though was when Reitman turned to his father Ivan – director of the original two Ghostbusters films – to sincerely express his “gratitude for telling this story that’s brought people together from all over the world.” Just like that, all my cynicism exploded like a 100-foot tall Marshmallow mascot in the streets of New York. Roll on 2020, I’m excited beyond the capacity for rational thought.

Originally published by NME.

God damn, I wish I’d been in New Orleans last night. That must have been a hell of a good party. Missing someone though.

Not me, obviously. Well, not just me. It was missing Dr. John, who died from a heart attack on Thursday just as the sun was coming up. On Friday night, the streets outside Kermit’s in the Treme were thronged with what looked like thousands of people, gathered to play and sing his music loud and raw as part of the great New Orleans tradition of the Second Line parade. Disappointingly for me I’m gleaning this only from YouTube clips. Although, watching those Second Line videos did make me wonder whether Dr. John will be given the full jazz funeral treatment in due course? He must do, right? I need to see coverage of that exactly like Princess Diana’s, ideally with the same presenters. I want to see professional Royal observers forced to try and interpret not just the pomp and ceremony but also Dr John’s intoxicating blend of voodoo ritual and pure rock’n’roll. Live on two different channels so I can pick the best commentators.

Continue reading at NME.

In 1979, Earth, Wind and Fire’s manager Bob Cavallo travelled to Anaheim, California to see a young artist who’d approached him about the possibility of working together. Cavallo had with him his wife and 12 year-old daughter, so he was somewhat taken aback when the performer came onstage wearing a trenchcoat and pantyhose. Every time he span around the coat would lift and open, revealing the G-string he was wearing underneath. After the show, Cavallo made his way backstage. “Well, young man,” he began. “I thought your show was great and your band is great, but I don’t think it’s right for you to go onstage in your underwear.” Prince looked back at him. “Okay,” he said. “Next time, I’ll take it off.”

Cavallo, naturally, signed Prince on the spot and would go on to manage him for the next decade. As well as shepherding the wildly ambitious 1984 film Purple Rain into existence, in 1987 Cavallo also helped Prince build his 65,000 square-foot, $10 million home base Paisley Park in Chanhassen, just outside Minneapolis. Prince had gotten the idea when shooting pick-ups for Purple Rain at Earth, Wind and Fire’s own studio, The Complex. “Whenever he wanted something, he just pretty much told me I was doing it,” remembers Cavallo, sat inside Paisley Park’s own soundstage as part of Celebration 2019, a gathering of thousands of the world’s purplest Prince fans at their own, personal Mecca to mark the third anniversary of their hero’s death.

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The sun is going down on the first Friday of Coachella 2019 and Kacey Musgraves is onstage in front of an outlandishly oversized disco ball attempting to introduce the spirit of country music to California’s hipsters. She is doing this via the medium of call-and-response. “Let’s see if Cali can bring the yee-haw,” she says, approaching the front of the stage. “When I say ‘yee’ you say ‘haw’… ‘Yee!’” The crowd responds with the appropriate: “Haw!” She goes again: “When I say ‘yee’ you say ‘haw’,” except this time she points the mic towards the crowd in silence. “Haw!” shout the crowd, falling right into Musgraves’ trap. She grins as she pulls the mic back to her mouth: “I didn’t say fucking yee!”

It’s a moment that captures Musgraves’ playful sense of humour, as well as her ability to teasingly win over any crowd she finds herself playing to. A few hours earlier, sitting in a hotel in Palm Springs while a stylist takes a blowdryer to her wet hair, she points out that her spot on Coachella’s main stage couldn’t be more serendipitous. “We have a slot during the literal golden hour,” she says, brimming with delight.

Continue reading at NME.

From the outside, the house looks perfectly ordinary. A three-bedroom suburban family home built in the mid-60s, it sits up on a hillside overlooking the city of Ventura. On a clear day, like today, you can glimpse the Californian coastline and the ocean beyond. Look again at the house and you might notice that above the garage a string of fairy lights have been pinned up in the shape of the CND logo, the internationally recognised symbol of peace and political activism. That’s the only clue that this is the house where Chuck D lives.

The Public Enemy leader appears before I even get to the front door. He’s dressed all in black except for a dark green military cap with a pair of wraparound shades balanced above the brim. He lives here in Ventura because his wife, Professor Gaye Theresa Johnson, teaches at the Department of Black Studies at the nearby University of California, Santa Barbara. I also get the impression he enjoys the relative seclusion. A veteran of a staggering 112 tours of duty, he’s currently preparing to embark on his 113^th: the aptly-named ‘Gods of Rap’ tour, where he’ll join Wu-Tang Clan and De La Soul for shows in London, Manchester and Glasgow.

Continue reading at NME.

So there’s this tree in the yard behind Mac DeMarco’s house in Los Angeles. It feels good sitting in the shade beneath it, whiling away an afternoon listening to records, looking up at the light coming through the pale green leaves and smelling the faint scent of citrus. It’s a pomelo tree, Mac says. I’m not exactly sure what a pomelo is, but judging by the lumpy yellow fruit hanging from the branches I’d guess that a pomelo is a sort of shitty grapefruit.

Across from the shitty grapefruit tree is a swimming pool, impossibly blue in the bright sun on this cloudless Californian afternoon. Moving gently across the surface in the breeze is an inflatable killer whale, floating belly up.

Next to the pool is Mac’s studio, a separate building behind his house. Inside is piled high with all manner of instruments and vintage recording gear. Next to the door there’s a pennant with a picture of a moose on it and the words ‘EDMONTON ALTA’, a memento from the Canadian city where Mac grew up and first started making music. A lot has changed since then. A lot hasn’t. Even though he now has this space, the studio still feels like a bedroom.

There’s a dark green flag with a white peace sign on it hung behind the desk, and there are various bits of Simpsons merchandise scattered around as decoration. In a rack near the door sits the copy of Playboy with Marge on the cover. On the desk there are two empty bottles of champagne, two empty beer cans, three empty water cans and three empty packs of Marlboro Reds. There are more empty cans and cigarette packs on a low table in front of a sofa on the other side of the room, detritus from last night’s impromptu recording session with a few friends. When he first cracks the door open, Mac apologises that the place “smells like a body”. He is not wrong.

Back outside underneath the tree is a glass table covered in blossom and an ashtray filled with a miniature Everest of cigarette butts. Mac is sat there now, his back to the tree, drinking coffee and talking about the life he and his girlfriend Kiera have made for themselves since moving here from New York. He says they rarely leave the property. Kiera makes bread and is learning to teach pilates. Mac makes his music. Together they look after the cat, Pickles, who has been here longer than they have.

“I think he was born under the house and has lived in this backyard his entire life,” says Mac. “We started putting food out for him about a year ago. He would come up, eat, see us and fuck off. Then later we could sit with him while he ate. Then maybe we could give him a little touch. Then we moved the food bowl in and he would eat inside. Now, that puss is sleeping in the fucking bed with us every night.” He smiles his gap-toothed smile. “Good kitty.”

Mac seems content to take things slow these days, coaxing a measure of happiness into his life like that feral cat. His new album, ‘Here Comes The Cowboy’, came the same way: slowly at first. Mac himself calls it “kind of a weird one.” There are simple little songs with just one or two repeated lyrics, there are Sly Stone-sounding funk jams and there are straight-up declarations of love for Kiera. There aren’t too many radio-friendly feel good hits of the summer. “It’s like: festival record? No no no,” shrugs Mac. “It’s slower and softer.”

In part this is a reflection of his life, which now seems a far cry from the wild and crazy stories that swirled around McBriare Samuel Lanyon DeMarco when the world first started paying attention to his antics. There was one tale from the early days, about sticking a pair of drumsticks up his ass midway through a drunken show while U2’s ‘Beautiful Day’ hit a crescendo, that followed him around for years, proving the old adage true: write as many songs and play as many shows as you want, but stick just one pair of drumsticks up your ass and they’ll never let you forget it. Still, times change.

“I’m living a pretty domesticated existence,” says Mac, gesturing around. “We have a house, I’ve been with my girlfriend for a long time… it’s not like we have a routine or anything but things are comfortable. It feels like settling down. I have way too much gear now to be able to move to another city at the drop of a pin. I think my head is just in a different space than it’s ever been in, because I’ve travelled all over the world, met all kinds of different people and had different experiences and now I’m navigating that and figuring out: ‘Where do I belong?’ ‘What is this shit?’”

Those are the sort of questions that define the human experience. We’re all trying to figure that shit out every day, making things up as we go along and desperately laying tracks in front of the train even though we’re shovelling coal into the engine at the same time. What’s different about Mac is that he’s had to do a lot of that figuring out in public.

When he first arrived in London to play his first ever UK show at Birthdays in Stoke Newington in December 2012 he was 22-years-old and had just finished touring the USA by car, doing all the driving himself. Hardly anyone had come to see him. “Chicago was fine and LA was fine,” he remembers now, “But for the most part we were playing to no-one in the middle of nowhere.”

Though he didn’t know it then, everything was about to change. The Birthdays show was sold out, and then so was the whole tour. “We were like: ‘What happened?’” he remembers. “I think it was that ‘2’ came out and people gave it good reviews, but I found it really bizarre to see the power of that. It was like: here’s the record, here’s the hype, then here’s the people. I couldn’t believe it was so immediate.”

Foreshadowing the years of hard-partying touring that was to come, when I first met Mac in Montreal just before that first London show he told me that he’d heard good things about playing in Europe: “People have been telling me that a lot of times they’ll give you a whole bunch of beer in the green room and you can take it afterwards,” he said, sounding as if he was describing a vision of paradise he’d seen in a fever dream. “That sounds good to me!”

Mac lets out a long, knowing laugh when I remind him of this. “You know, it’s funny. First tours in the United States, maybe you get one free drink at the bar,” he explains. “The promoter is like: ‘Get the fuck out when you’re done.’ In Europe they really treat you nice. They give you beer and then they’re like: ‘We made you a lasagna.’ Oh my God! You’re kidding me? That first European tour it was like a homemade lasagna every night.”

Mac blew up fast. In just under two years he went from playing that first show at Birthdays to 250 people to Kentish Town Forum to 2,300 people. He quickly built a reputation for having the best live show in town, with a wild edge and an unpredictable comic streak. I remember he closed that Forum show by playing the theme from Top Gun over and over again for something like 20 minutes. It was one of those perfect jokes that starts off funny, then isn’t funny at all, then gets increasingly hilarious the longer it goes on.

By that point, Mac was more than just a cult artist – but he did have a cult following. The Cult of Mac. “That was a trip,” he remembers. “I used to have a lot of kids wearing the exact same kit as me for a little while. Maybe there still are, but I’m not out there so much anymore. That was wild, but people go through phases. I think I’m already in the phase where it’s like: ‘Oh, he’s so played out. He’s not cool anymore’. That’s inherent, but it’s funny to watch. It’s fine with me.”

As the years have gone by and the venues he plays have continued to increase in size, Mac has responded not by becoming more outrageous but by mellowing out. It’s as if, to paraphrase Homer Simpson, he’s learned to enjoy not just the glorious highs and the terrifying lows but also the creamy middles. “It’s not like I’m pushing back on purpose,” says Mac, “but even when the shows get bigger, or maybe it’s as I get older, I feel like: ‘There’s a giant stage? A giant crowd? Then let’s play really slow and really quiet. For me musically right now that’s something different. We never did that, so it’s something new for me.”

Which brings us back to that “slower and softer” new album ‘Here Comes The Cowboy’, which – for the record – is not about cowboys at all. “I just use ‘cowboy’ as slang with friends,” Mac sort-of clarifies. “Like when you say: ‘Hey cowboy!’, but where I grew up cowboys were a thing. There was the [Calgary] Stampede, and people did cowboy activities, and there were themed-bars. For the most part, those zones were geared towards people that I didn’t really want to interface with. Jocks who wanted to call me a profanity and kick my ass. So for a long time it had a very negative connotation for me.”

Mac enjoys toying with and then confounding expectations, so it should be no surprise that the titular cowboy really signifies nothing. “For me, it’s funny and interesting to call something a cowboy record because immediately people jump to connotations,” he says. “There are a lot of things that come with that word, but the record is not a country record. It’s not really a cowboy record at all. I don’t know where that song ‘Here Comes The Cowboy’ comes from but I like it because I don’t know how it makes me feel. Is it funny? Is it strange and jarring? Maybe it’s both, somewhere in the middle. Who is this cowboy? Where the fuck is he coming from? What is he doing? I love that!”

That same instinct to confound lies behind the strange lizard-faced version of Mac who appears in the video for first single ‘Nobody’. If you’re not sure how that unsettling prosthetic mask he wears makes you feel then that’s exactly the point. “You ask yourself: ‘What is this?’, and that’s the kind of thing that interests me,” he says. “I’m just trying to create…” he puts on a mocking voice “…the content that I’d like to engage with.”

One through line in Mac’s musical life has been his insistence on recording everything himself while playing almost all the instruments, like a chain-smoking slacker one-man-band, but without the accordion he plays with his foot. He’s always done things that way. “It was a good trick for a while,” he says. “People are like: ‘You played all the instruments?’ And you’re like: ‘Well, none of them are played that well, but yes.’”

Now it’s more than just a trick or an aesthetic choice. He’s come too far to change. For this record he had touring keyboardist Alec Meen lay down some music, but something was never quite the same. “It only felt right if I played it with no metronome, just the way that it works for my hands to play it,” says Mac. “He played it perfectly and straight a million times, and I’d be like: ‘But that’s not how the song sounds’. I have a problem with needing things to be perfectly shitty.”

One of the best tracks on the new record is called ‘Finally Alone’. As the title suggests, it’s a song about seeking solitude even when you’re not sure that’s what you want. “It’s kind of a cute-sounding song, so when Alec looked at the project title he was like: ‘This song is called ‘Finally Alone’? What the fuck?’ I’ve always loved that juxtaposition of cute-sounding music and then lyrics about isolation. It’s inner turmoil. I think the theme of this record goes through that a lot. It’s about not knowing what you want and vibing on it.”

Mac’s own love of isolating himself here in his house and studio – he says he sends “almost zero” percent of his life online – got him into internet faux-outrage trouble the day the record was announced. A brief Twitter cloudburst spat drizzle at the suggestion his album ‘Here Comes The Cowboy’, with lead single ‘Nobody’, was a slight against Mitski’s similarly-titled album ‘Be The Cowboy’, with lead single ‘Nobody’. This came as a “huge surprise” to Mac, because he’d never heard of it. “Truthfully told, I’m very, very bad at keeping up with contemporary music,” he says. “I listen to music from Final Fantasy video games and The Beatles. That’s about it.”

Mac’s self-imposed period of solitude will soon be coming to an end when he returns to his first passion, playing live shows. “I still love to do it,” he says. “I think the last couple of tours of this year I was pretty burnt. Things inherently get stale after a while, but we find ways to spice it up or do something incredibly stupid onstage for an hour. It’ll be exciting to have new music.”

One of those shows will be headlining his very own mini-festival in June at Dreamland in Margate, which has a capacity of 15,000. A real long way from Birthdays. He’ll be joined by a hand-picked line-up that also includes Aldous Harding, Yellow Days, Tirzah, Thurston Moore, Amyl and The Sniffers, Girl Ray, Kirin J Callinan, and Blueprint Blue. “It should be cool!,” he says. “We have a lot of homies who are going to play.” He puts on a voice that sounds like Springsteen when he’s covering Suicide: “Dreamland, baby. It’ll be chill. It’ll be tight. Let’s rock’n’roll.”

Our time under the shady tree is interrupted because it’s time for Mac to go and have his photo taken. Mac’s first NME cover. He drives us to the location, a dreamy rural cabin that somehow exists within Los Angeles. The owner issues him with a stainless steel bucket to use as an ashtray, and Mac faithfully carries it from location to location. When he’s done we go downtown because there’s this great ramen place he’s just remembered about, and then we buy some beers and head back to the yard.

When we arrive, Andy White, who plays guitar in Mac’s band, is already there. He’s from Florida but is staying with Mac while they rehearse for the next tour. A brief aside about Andy White: He’s one of the most beautiful men I’ve ever met, with long blonde hair in pigtails and the sort of moustache that hasn’t been fashionable since 1979. Every time I’ve met him he’s been incredibly nice, he’s currently preparing to run the LA Marathon, and when I ask him where he’s been all day he tells me he’s been at the library reading about economic history. I don’t understand Andy White even a little bit but I think I’d like to be him when I grow up.

When the sun goes down we go to see Mac’s friend Eyedress play a show at a once-hip Silver Lake club called Tenants of the Trees. Eyedress is amazing – weird and wild and punk – but the crowd is kinda douchey so when the show is over Mac invites us all back to the yard. Somebody builds a fire. Mac orders an ungodly amount of pizza. The studio is opened and the fruit of last night’s recording session is played loud. If this is Mac figuring shit out, it seems like he’s doing pretty well. He’s happy. It’s late now, so that’s where we leave him. The camera pulls back endlessly into the sky and we see the final shot: Mac, fire burning, surrounded by good friends (did I mention Andy White?) and far too much pizza, finding contentment under the branches of his shitty grapefruit tree.

Originally published by NME, 3 May 2019.

There’s a moment in the Robyn show. You know, one of those you giddily recount and discuss and dissect later in the night, looking at each other with smiling eyes; the sort you just have to post to Instagram even though your own voice is obnoxiously loud on the audio. The sort that reminds you why we bother with all this in the first place.

It comes, perhaps predictably, during ‘Dancing On My Own’, a song which could make as good a case as any for being the greatest pop single released in any of our lifetimes. Specifically, it comes a minute in, just after Robyn sings: “But I just gotta see it for myself…” and then the music cuts out and she stops singing, but none of us has realised yet so we’re all still singing the chorus at the top of our lungs, a chorus about being alone, and it’s just us singing now, the crowd, but somehow it sounds skin-tingling because we’re a choir, although we didn’t mean to be, and we’re not sure how long we should keep going for, because part of us thinks the music will cut back in after a line or two, but it doesn’t, so we sing the whole chorus, and Robyn swoons onstage, and we’re not alone, we’re all together, all of us, joined in one voice in that perfect song in this perfect moment.

Continue reading at NME.

An established male rock star stumbles across a talented younger female singer. He recognises that she’s a great songwriter and tells her so, inviting her to collaborate and then tour with him. Their relationship swiftly becomes sexual. When her talent becomes apparent to others, he reacts by becoming jealous and controlling. Under the influence of drugs and alcohol, his behaviour becomes increasingly erratic and disturbing.

Pop quiz: Is this (A) a brief summary of just some of the allegations against Ryan Adams, reported earlier this month by the New York Times? (B) The plot of ‘A Star Is Born’, nominated for Best Picture at this Sunday’s Oscars? (C) Both. It’s both, isn’t it? This is a rhetorical device, not a real quiz.

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