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.

Continue reading at NME.

Jeff Goldblum lost his virginity the same night he made his professional stage debut. It was Tuesday July 27, 1971, and he was a gangly 18-year-old from Pittsburgh who had moved to New York the previous summer to follow his dream of becoming an actor. He was studying at the Neighborhood Playhouse under the great acting coach Sanford Meisner, and had managed to get a part in the chorus of a new musical adaptation of Two Gentlemen of Verona. Opening night at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park was a success, and afterwards some of the cast and crew ended up at dinner together.

“There was this woman who seemed exotically older to me,” recalls Goldblum, his eyes sparkling as we wait for our breakfast outside in the patio section of the Chateau Marmont. “I think she was in her late 20s. Nine or 10 years older than me. She worked in the costume department. She’d been married and was now separated, living in a loft in some place like Tribeca or SoHo. This was all exotic to me. We’d flirted a little bit. After the meal she said: ‘Let’s share a cab home.’ In the cab there was some, uh, um… kissing. She said: ‘Come to my house.’ We went there, and, well, I won’t go into all the details but that’s where I lost my virginity.”

A momentous evening, by anybody’s standards. I ask him if he felt like a different person the next day.

“Another mosaic piece was laid into the final thing, certainly,” he says. “I told her, just before we did it. I said: ‘I’ve gotta tell you, I’ve never done this before.’ She seemed to like that. She said: ‘Really? Really?’”

Continue reading at NME.

Why is NME writing about Mavis Staples in 2018? That’s a reasonable question, and it deserves an honest answer. We’ll get into that in a moment, but first I should say: Don’t worry, she’s not dead. Mavis Staples is alive, and despite being only a year shy of her 80^th birthday she’s in such rude health that when she played the Ford Amphitheatre in Los Angeles this weekend her performance was alternately spellbinding and ass-kicking. Her voice sounded strong and pure and righteous, and she moved exuberantly around the stage and cracked jokes between songs. There is no sound on earth more joyful than Mavis Staples singing, except maybe Mavis Staples laughing.

Continue reading at NME.

In 1988, underground radio DJ Jonathan Poneman and fanzine editor Bruce Pavitt quit their day jobs to dedicate themselves full-time to running their independent record label. 30 years later, I’m stood in a departure terminal at LAX looking across the tarmac at the Alaska Airlines Boeing 737-800 which will take me to Seattle. It’s covered in what looks like huge road case stickers that all read: ‘SUB POP’.

I have questions. How do you go from making a few scribbled notes in Seattle’s Uptown Espresso coffee shop to becoming one of the world’s most famous record labels, with your name painted down a plane’s fuselage? What was it about the remote Pacific North West that allowed it to incubate grunge, the sound that would change the world? And most pressingly: Does this mean they’ll let me play ‘God’s Balls’ by Tad over the tannoy?

The answer to one of those questions is: ‘No’. The rest will take some explaining.Let’s get right to the heart of this thing. Let’s ask somebody who was there. About 24 hours ago I was sitting in the baking LA heat listening to Mark Lanegan tell me – in that voice that sounds like gravel in a gale – about the first time he ever heard Sub Pop’s most famous signing. It was the tail end of the 80s and he was still living in Ellensburg, a small town smack in the middle of Washington state, and singing with Screaming Trees, when he got a phone call from his friend Dylan Carlson.

“He said: ‘Hey, my friend is playing a show at the Ellensburg Library and he’s a big fan of your music.’” remembers Lanegan. “‘Would you go down and watch him? Because there’s probably not going to be anybody there and it would be a thrill for him if you went.’ I went down there. When they started playing, I realised that I was hearing one of the best bands I had ever heard… and in the fuckin’ Ellensburg Library no less. It was Nirvana that were playing, and it was Kurt that he wanted me to meet.”

From that day on, Lanegan and Cobain became close friends. They shared a love of old blues records, not to mention heavy duty narcotics. Soon they were cooking up a half-baked plan to record an EP of Leadbelly covers together. Naturally, Sub Pop – the newborn label who had snapped up Nirvana for an initial outlay of just 600 bucks – were keen to put it out, but when it failed to materialise it was co-founder Poneman who rang Lanegan and asked if he wanted to make a solo record instead.

“I distinctly remember that the offer was for $13,000 for the first record,” says Lanegan. “Up until that point, my contribution to Screaming Trees songwriting basically amounted to changing some of the more egregious lyrics written by the guitar player to make them less embarrassing. I had never picked up a guitar or anything, but I knew that the records we’d made were for a strict $1,000 budget. I thought I could make a record for a thousand dollars and pocket the other twelve.”

So Lanegan taught himself to write, and then wrote ‘The Winding Sheet’. He included the sole song salvaged from the ill-fated Leadbelly sessions: a version of ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night?’, featuring both Cobain and Krist Novoselic. The album was a departure for both Lanegan and Sub Pop, but it turned into a success that would heavily influence the sound of Nirvana’s own famous MTV Unplugged performance. This story illustrates two important facts about Sub Pop: They were willing to gamble, but they knew their shit.

“I thought it was kind of weird because everything else on the label was hard rock, but they were into the idea and it obviously panned out for me. I owe him one!” says Lanegan, acknowledging the confidence Poneman showed in him. While he says his own relationship with them was “tempestuous” (they dropped him midway through the recording of follow-up, ‘Whiskey For The Holy Ghost’, only to later resign him and give him the money to finish it), Lanegan reserves high praise for the label.

“What really changed shit was Nirvana and Sub Pop,” he says. “Sub Pop had a genius for marketing and the way they promoted the label, with Nirvana of course being the shining star in their universe. In terms of Seattle at that time, I don’t think it had ever really happened before where a small city had so many bands going to the top of the Billboard charts. Soundgarden. Alice In Chains. Pearl Jam still play stadiums like they’re the Grateful Dead. It was an unprecedented phenomenon.”

I tell him I’m about to head north to visit the city for myself. ”Shit, man. I haven’t looked at the weather report but you might want to take an umbrella,” he drawls. I tell him I’ll be used to it, coming from Britain. “It’s uber-British,” he says. “People say Manchester is like Seattle. Bullshit. Seattle is like Manchester x100 weather-wise. It’s got the shittiest weather of any city in the world, hands down.”

“A lot is said about the weather,” says Jonathan Poneman, sat in his office at Sub Pop HQ in downtown Seattle. Outside in the corridors are various bits of memorabilia, like a framed copy of a restraining order that K Records’ Calvin Johnson took out against Courtney Love, and a bit of wall ripped from that previous office that Kurt Cobain scrawled his address on. Poneman doesn’t know if it was the climate that made Seattle creative, although he does posit an alternative explanation: “I’ve heard it said that there are more books read per capita in Seattle than in any other major American metropolitan city,” he says. (This is true, at least according to Amazon, who happen to now be one of the city’s main employers.) “Although…” Poneman continues. “That may not be saying all that much at this point.”

While it’s easy to look back with hindsight and see the Seattle scene as fully formed from the get go – Sub Pop would put out debut releases by Mudhoney, Soundgarden and Nirvana all within a couple of years – Poneman says the reality was very different. “The thing that was most remarkable about Seattle was how spontaneous everything was,” he says. “There was no premeditation or calculation. We were just thinking about life-changing shows and mind-blowing bands.”

Suddenly, though, the outside world was starting to take notice. By 1992, the New York Times had decided they needed to find out what this grunge thing that was happening was all about. This lead to one of Sub Pop’s most infamous gags – Poneman passed a phone call from a reporter on to Megan Jasper, a mohawked receptionist who’d recently left the label and was by then working at Caroline Records. She promptly supplied the Times with a list of entirely made-up ‘grunge’ lingo which the newspaper of record faithfully printed. A loser was henceforth to be known as a “cob nobbler”. Hanging out was apparently referred to as “swingin’ on the flippity-flop”. Whatever happened to Jasper? She’s now Sub Pop’s CEO, obviously.

“They were doing a huge piece on Seattle. It was the front page of the Style section,” Jasper recalls. “I had had a shitload of coffee, and was just rattling a bunch of bullshit off. I honestly thought at some point we’d just laugh and say: ‘This is ridiculous’. That never happened.”

It’s a funny story, but it also illustrates just how strange, exotic and remote Seattle seemed to outsiders at that time. “You have to imagine that the writers for the New York Times are pretty intelligent people, we would hope,” says Jasper. “But there was this weird, dark corner of the country that so many people knew so little about.”

The years that followed the grunge boom weren’t always plain sailing for Sub Pop. Bruce Pavitt left the company acrimoniously in 1996, saying that he saw too much waste, and money being squandered. At least they managed to keep a sense of humour about it. Ten years ago, at their 20^th anniversary, they announced they were celebrating ‘15 years of great music.’ “Every record label has its dark times, and we’re no exception,” says Poneman now. “I’ll leave it up to the discerning listener to decide which five years we were talking about. They weren’t always sequential.”

But Sub Pop weren’t finished yet. In 2001, The Shins’ debut record ‘Oh, Inverted World’ helped usher in a new era of indie. The Postal Service’s one-off 2003 album ‘Give Up’ gave the label an unexpectedly massive hit, their first platinum record since Nirvana’s ‘Bleach’. Fleet Foxes followed before the end of the decade, who in turn begat Father John Misty – now one of the label’s biggest success stories, and part of a genuinely eclectic roster that also includes Beach House, Pissed Jeans, Shabazz Palaces and – at least as far as their musical endeavors go – Rick and Morty.

Leaving Sub Pop’s offices on my way to see Afghan Whigs play the label’s showcase beneath Seattle’s iconic Space Needle, I decide to stop off at the nearby Museum of Popular Culture. Inside, there’s a whole exhibition dedicated to Nirvana. Among the collection they have the first demo tape that Nirvana sent to Sub Pop, and the first contract they signed with the label, along with later curios like the original print off of the photo of the baby in the pool from the ‘Nevermind’ cover. It’s inscribed with the memorable line, from Geffen’s art director Robert Fisher: “If anyone has a problem with his dick we can remove it.”

It’s a great exhibition, although for anyone who grew up on Nirvana’s music there’s something odd about seeing that youthful energy literally trapped under perspex. It shouldn’t be strange to see them as an historical band – the 30 years that have gone by since their debut single ‘Love Buzz’ is exactly the same amount of time that separates ‘Love Buzz’ from The Everly Brothers crooning ‘All I Have To Do Is Dream’ – yet somehow it is. Go and put on ‘Bleach’ and tell me it doesn’t still sound vital.

The next morning it’s raining, just as Lanegan prophesied. I catch a ferry from downtown Seattle over to Alki Beach, where Sub Pop’s free birthday festival is taking place, and overhear a couple of young fans onboard.

“I wish Nirvana were still around to play today,” one of them muses.

There’s a widespread general murmur of approval at this thought. Everyone wishes they could have seen Nirvana.

“Then again,” the same fan eventually concludes. “If they were… you know they’d be charging for it.”

Even with the label’s newest signings, the influence of Kurt Cobain still hangs in the ether. LA three-piece Moaning are one of the festival’s early highlights. Frontman Sean Solomon tells the crowd that at the first show he ever played, a Battle of the Bands, his band played ‘Molly’s Lips’ by The Vaselines in the style of Nirvana’s cover. “Our mics didn’t turn on so it was just the same two chords over and over again,” he recalls. “It was really embarrassing.”

Earlier, he’d told me how Sub Pop had always been the label he’d dreamed of signing with. “Everyone in the band has been friends since we were teenagers, and we’d always joke about getting signed to Sub Pop. It was the label we fantasised about. They were always, in my mind, the label I was supposed to be on.”

While the label have long outgrown the ‘grunge’ tag that they always bristled against anyway, Solomon says there’s still a certain vibe that unites the bands that Sub Pop sign. “I think we all have a sense of independence, and you can tell that the music is untouched,” he says. “A lot of labels get more involved than Sub Pop do. They really allow artists to do their thing, and they don’t interfere. In a lot of different productions it’s difficult to be an auteur, but I feel like the artists on Sub Pop have very clear visions, and I think that’s why so many of their records are my favourites. There’s a sense of authenticity, and I think that makes sense that the ‘grunge’ label continues to put out really authentic-sounding records.”

Despite the grey, Manchester x100 drizzle, the rest of the birthday party goes off without a hitch. It’s estimated that 50,000 people show up. Father John Misty, Shabazz Palaces and Beach House all play on the beach. Loma frontwoman Emily Cross not only jumps into the crowd but manages to run out into the sea while the band plays on. Yet somehow the best band of the day end up being Mudhoney, playing some songs that are as old as the label itself. The past isn’t over, as Faulkner said. It isn’t even past.

The next day I take the inevitable pilgrimage to the house where Kurt died. There’s a steady stream of visitors to his memorial bench, seemingly unaware that his old record label had just celebrated an anniversary. Outside the gates of the house, I meet a young guy with long hair and a Nirvana T-shirt on. His name is Justin Huynh, and he’s come from Fort Worth, Texas. He’s 25 – five years younger than Sub Pop. “This was the must-do thing of my life,” he tells me.

There’s a solid wooden gate in front of the house, but he’s determined to get picture so he crouches down and pushes his phone underneath.

“Hi Kurt,” I hear him say. “I love you.”

Originally published by NME.

It’s the day after England’s emotional, last-gasp defeat to Croatia in the World Cup semi-final and noted football fanatics Kasabian are bouncing back the best way they know how: by playing a huge festival headline slot at Madrid’s mammoth Mad Cool festival.

Backstage, frontman Tom Meighan is sipping a cup of pre-show Yogi Tea that may be helping his voice but is doing nothing to calm his hyperactive personality. He shrugs off last night’s result. “It is what it is, we were never going to win it,” he shrugs. Right now he’s more interested in a bright orange graffiti marker somebody’s left lying around. “I haven’t seen one of these in years!” he cries with glee, grabbing it and setting about tagging every sheet of paper he can find.

Bandmate Serge Pizzorno cuts a more laidback figure. He’s laughing to himself at the length of the seemingly endless guitar solo we can hear emanating from Pearl Jam, who are currently onstage. “He’s shredding out there, isn’t he?” he grins. “The rest of the band must be like…” and he mimes impatiently tapping his watch.

Continue reading at NME.

Picture the scene. You’re deep in the sesh with a load of people you don’t really know and somebody asks you to pick the next tune. What do you choose? You need something everybody loves. You need a song any person between the ages of 18 and 39 knows all the words to. You need Warren G. You need Nate Dogg. You need ‘Regulate’.

I’ve been to a lot of parties in my life (yeah, I know. Legend.) and I’d estimate that I’ve heard ‘Regulate’ played loud and late more often than anything else. It’s rivaled only by Biggie’s ‘Juicy’ for its sheer ubiquity, and only by the Fresh Prince theme for the likelihood of someone being able to recite all the lyrics off the top of their head while mashed. Altogether now: ‘It was a clear black night, a clear white moon…’

What I’m saying is, ‘Regulate’ is a seriously big tune. It’s so big that it’s easy to let it overshadow what an integral figure Warren G has been for West Coast hip-hop. A new documentary, ‘G-Funk’, streaming from today on YouTube Premium, goes some way to redress that balance. It follows Warren from his early days in Long Beach growing up with Snoop and Nate Dogg, forming 213, his sometimes tense relationship with his step-brother Dr Dre, his influence on ‘The Chronic’ and how his signing for Def Jam – and not Death Row – changed the course of rap history.

To mark the release of the documentary, I hit the east side of the LBC on a mission trying to find Mr Warren G. We talked family, fame and G-funk. But first, a question that’s been bugging me for years:

What does ‘The rhythm is the bass and the bass is the treble’ mean?

“I don’t know! ‘Rhythm is life, and life is rhythm.’ I learned that from Jimmy Spicer. He always used to say that, so I said it, and then Nate took that part with his singing: ‘The rhythm is the bass and the bass is the treble.’ Chords. Strings. We brings. Melody. [Laughs]”

That’s made my day, just hearing you recite that. How does it feel to have created a song as universally loved as ‘Regulate’? I honestly don’t think there’s any song that gets played as reliably at parties in London to this day.

“It’s all good, man! It feels so good. I got the chance to go over to London and just really get a chance to feel it. I’mma tell you, I was thinking different because there were a lot of Jamaicans there! I was like: ‘This is crazy!’ but it was cool. You guys’ accents and everything, it was incredible to me, and the love I was getting was just incredible. I performed at Wembley when Snoop was doing it. He asked me to come out in his show, and when he pulled me out they lost it. Wembley went crazy! I was like: ‘Oh, shit!’ I was so nervous, but then I was like: ‘Damn, they really love me!’”

We do, it’s true. We really love you. In the documentary it’s clear that when you and Nate were making it that you were just trying to tell a story.

“That record was things that I went through, and friends of ours went through. We’d witnessed that and we’d been a part of it. We just told the story, and then on the hook we just let everybody’s imagination flow. After hearing that you’re going: ‘Wow, he went through this’ and then: [sings] ‘I laid all them busters down, I let my gat explode’ and you roll right back into it. It’s on again!”

You had no idea when you were making it how big it would become?

“No we didn’t know, man. I got to meet Annie Lennox, and so many different people that I didn’t think I would ever get to meet.”

Are you a big Annie Lennox fan?

“Annie Lennox couldn’t even hardly speak English! I’m serious, I was like: ‘Wait a minute! You’ve got ‘Sweet Dreams!’ She could speak English, but not fluent. I was like: ‘This is crazy!’ I told her: ‘You just don’t know how much I love you! You carried me through so much shit with ‘Sweet Dreams’.’ That was one of my theme songs when I was travelling from the United States to Europe. That was my theme song, my song to get myself right and think: I’m really out here. I’m really international.”

The title and the opening sample comes from the 80s cowboy movie Young Guns, doesn’t it?

“Yeah. I was a fan of Young Guns, that was one of my favourite movies at the time. I used to watch it all the time on VHS. I would watch it two or three times a day. We used to always say ‘Regulate’. Like: ‘Man, we’re gonna have to regulate this shit in here!’, ‘Fool, regulate the spot!’ or ‘Get on out of here, we’re gonna have to regulate this situation.’ We used to always say that, so when I heard him say: “We work for Mr. Tunstall as regulators. We regulate any stealing off his property – we’re damn good too!” it made me think of our crew, and who we was. The Death Row crew. I was over there, and I was part of it. I took the RCA jacks right out of the VHS and plugged it into a quarter-inch into my MPC60 – which I’ve still got! I’ve still got the Moog that ‘The Chronic’ was done on, and all the record crates. Don’t tell Dre! [Laughs]”

Dre is your older step-brother, but it comes across in the documentary that even though you worked on ‘The Chronic’ and introduced him to Snoop, he maybe didn’t always appreciate your contribution. There’s a moment where you turn up at the airport to join Dre and Snoop’s first tour, and everybody’s got a ticket but you. Were you upset with Dre for that?

“I wasn’t upset with him. I was upset at the way I was treated when I was ride or die. It wasn’t Dre! Suge [Knight] was the head of the company. I got treated different, and it just wasn’t cool. I wasn’t getting ready to sign or anything. Dre was like: ‘You should go and be your own man. Create you own life so you don’t have to deal with this shit.’”

Do you think if you’d signed with Dre and Suge Knight at Death Row at that point, maybe you’d never have made ‘Regulate’?

“Exactly. He was kind of like a saviour. He purposely did that to push me into doing my own thing. He knew I was dope already, and he would help me with whatever I needed. If I’d signed to Death Row I probably wouldn’t have made my own record. I’d probably be in jail. That’s how a lot of motherfuckers ended up, in jail, and I probably would have been right there with them.”

This documentary is a real reminder of how influential you were on G-Funk, and how influential G-Funk has been on hip-hop. Are you making new music?

“Yeah, I’m planning on dropping seven new songs around this documentary. Me and Snoop have been in the studio together. I’m constantly working. It would drive me crazy if I didn’t do no more music. I have other passions that I love doing too, like barbecuing. This is me. I always say: ‘Music and barbecue and love’ and then I say: ‘G-Funk’. That’s the good shit.”

Originally published by NME.

Originally published by NME.

“She’s a good girl, loves her mama. Loves Jesus and America too. She’s a good girl, crazy ’bout Elvis. Loves horses and her boyfriend too. It’s a long day, livin’ in Reseda…”

I meet Pamela Des Barres for lunch at a Mexican restaurant in Reseda, the San Fernando Valley neighborhood where she grew up and now lives. She can’t say for certain whether Tom Petty was thinking of her when he wrote those lines, but it seems likely. ‘Free Fallin’’ was released two years after Pamela published her explosive memoir ‘I’m With The Band’ in 1987, and those lyrics echo the early chapters. “I always thought he must have written that song after reading it,” she says as we take our seats. “The girl growing up in Reseda, loving Jesus and horses. That’s all in the book, although I don’t know for sure.”

‘I’m With The Band’ became an instant bestseller, making Pamela the most famous groupie on the planet. “Groupie is just another word for love,” she tells me today, “And love of music and musicians.” Her memoir provides a window into something everyone wanted to know about: what it was like to be right there on the Sunset Strip, at the heart of the 60’s musical, cultural and sexual revolution. To be fought over by Jimmy Page and Mick Jagger, huff solvents with Jim Morrison and find yourself living out debauched fantasies with Keith Moon. These days, however, Pamela says people are more interested in hearing horror stories.

“People are always trying to make me say that musicians abused me and used me, and it just didn’t happen,” she says, defiantly. “I’ve said that all along. It was equal. There was an equal exchange of love and energy and fun between us and the musicians.”

She did have her own experiences of harassment, but they came later – particularly when she was trying to establish herself as an actor, in situations where the power dynamics were very different. In the book, she recounts the story of auditioning for a director who then offers her a massage and comes at her with a vibrator. “There was tonnes of that in my whole life,” she tells me. “There were so many assholes! I related so much to the women who came forward finally, having been through so much of that shit myself. I have plenty of ‘Me Too’ moments, plenty, but none with musicians.”

Pamela is rightfully entirely unabashed about her youthful escapades, but she was above the age of consent by the time she entered the swinging world of groupiedom. By contrast, in 2018 it’s shocking to read her stories of Jimmy Page going off with the then 13-year-old Lori Maddox, or her actor boyfriend Don Johnson leaving her for 14-year-old Melanie Griffith. Pamela tells me it’s impossible to judge that era by today’s standards, adding: “I was repulsed by it. I was totally turned off by it in many ways, but it was what was happening. You deal with what’s put in front of you. At that time, no-one thought: ‘Oh, we better call the police.’ It just didn’t happen that way. Lori’s mom knew what she was going on. Lori is a very good friend of mine, and has been for decades now. She’s proud of her history, she’s happy with it, she has no qualms about it, no regrets whatsoever. That’s what happened in those days.”

She doesn’t think there will ever be equivalents to the Operation Yewtree convictions for the rock stars of that era. “People ask me: ‘Do you think so-and-so is going to go down?’ No, they’re not going down,” she says. “The girls aren’t complaining. No women have come forward and said: ‘David Bowie abused me.’ It’s not going to happen. So that’s why. These women [in the #MeToo movement] came forward and felt abused and taken advantage of. In music, it was an equal exchange, and a very different dynamic.”

Pamela’s own introduction into the world of rock’n’roll came when a school friend, Victor Hayden, introduced her to his cousin Don Van Vliet – better known as Captain Beefheart – who in turn introduced her to Frank Zappa. “Zappa and Beefheart were my mentors!” says Pamela, letting out a laugh at her own good fortune. “Just that alone! They fed off each others’ genius, you know? I came across them so young that I was really sparked by their brilliance.”

It was Zappa who encouraged Pamela to form her own group, The GTOs (Girls Together Outrageously… or Orally… or Occasionally… or Often… these were such free times that even acronyms resisted consistent definition). Their sole record, ‘Permanent Damage’, was released in 1969 and remains a trippy, fascinating document of the Sunset Strip scene at that time. “Zappa always wanted to capture moments in time,” remembers Pamela. “He found this nutty group of dancers and he wanted to encapsulate our world. He thought we had something fun and interesting and useful to say. That encouraged us so much, that someone of his calibre would find us intriguing. He was a master at pulling stories out of people. He helped our creativity by believing in us and then encouraging.”

The emergence of The GTOs helps explain how Pamela went from fantasising about Mick Jagger at home in Reseda to making him her lover. “By the time I met him, he wanted to meet me,” she says. “I was in that situation with The GTOs. There was no internet, no Instagram, none of that, but people were talking about The GTOs. We were the first all-girl group in that rock’n’roll, far-out Zappa way. All the bands were very curious about us, especially the British bands.”

Pamela, of course, has plenty more rock’n’roll war stories, both exuberant and somber: watching Led Zeppelin from atop Page’s guitar amp, seducing Waylon Jennings, taking acid at the Joshua Tree Inn after the death of Gram Parsons or the moments after Altamont when a shaken and distraught Mick Jagger seriously considered leaving the music industry for good. For those, you’ll have to get your hands on ‘I’m With The Band’, which has just been republished in a revised edition. She has also written four more books, and continues to teach a writing workshop for women which has produced award-winners like the author Emma Cline.

It’s her writing that is her most important legacy. She might be best known for the people she partied and slept with in the 60s – immortalised by caricatures like Penny Lane in ‘Almost Famous’ – but really the line between Pamela and the current era of Me Too is a direct one. At a time, and on a subject, when women were expected to stay silent she decided to tell her own story loudly and proudly. She defined her own experiences, on her own terms. “I’m perceived as a loose, freaky woman, and I was a wild child I admit that,” she says, with a playful smile, “But I’m really proud that I was able to express myself in the book. It was the first time you could do that as a woman, in our timeframe.”

Originally published by NME.

There’s this moment three minutes and twenty-five seconds into ‘Black Smoke Rising’, the last song on Greta Van Fleet’s double EP ‘From The Fires’, where the music has built with such unstoppable momentum that when singer Josh Kiszka roars: “YEEEAAAHHHHH” it feels as inevitable and powerful as an avalanche, or a tornado. It is rock’n’roll as elemental force. It is the sort of sound which makes this writer leap into the air to attempt an ill-advised scissor kick while his cat eyes him warily. It is very good.

I tell this to Greta Van Fleet when I meet them backstage at Marathon Music Works in Nashville and Josh, a curly-haired, handsome cherub of a man, reassures me by saying he was feeling pretty much the same way when he first let out the aforementioned “YEEEAAAHHHHH”. He was responding instinctively to the music. “The song will, in a fashion, speak to you,” he says. “And you kind of just go with it.”

Continue reading at NME.

What do you mean, you’ve never seen ‘Blade Runner’?

Alex Turner lives for moments like this. The strangled incredulity in the voices of those who simply refuse to believe that in this age of instant on-demand entertainment he’s never sat down to watch Harrison Ford hunt replicants. He loves it so much he wrote the line into ‘Star Treatment’, the opening track of the Arctic Monkeys’ sixth album ‘Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino’.

“When it’s at it’s absolute best, that scenario,” he says, with pure glee in his eyes, “And I’ve only seen this happen a couple of times, but it goes beyond: ‘What do you mean you’ve never seen ‘Blade Runner’?’ and gets to: ‘Oh my God, I envy you!’”

The memory of this makes him throw back his head and laugh, the sound echoing around the Masonic Lodge in Los Angeles’ Hollywood Forever Cemetery where in a few hours the band will play out on the lawn. He’s wearing a tan safari suit, a pair of yellow-tinted shades and a white shirt open so low you wonder why they even bothered putting buttons on it in the first place.

“I fucking love that shit,” he says, composing himself. “When it goes there, that’s like a fuckin’ slam dunk. ‘Oh I envy you!’ People are so involved in that stuff, aren’t they?”

It’s rare to see Turner this unguarded. Usually the 32-year-old talks like he writes: slowly, marshaling his thoughts in long pauses and choosing every syllable precisely. Yet back at the start of 2016, he found himself at a complete loss for words. He had no idea how to follow the multi-platinum international success of 2013’s ‘AM’. He was rattling around his home in Los Angeles, with his model girlfriend Taylor Bagley and their dog Scooter, not watching ‘Blade Runner’. Instead he was watching Fellini’s 1963 meta masterpiece ‘8½’.

If you want to understand how Turner arrived at ‘Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino’, ‘8½’ is the key to unlock it. It’s a film about a director with writer’s block, struggling to make a science-fiction movie – a towering spaceship set is under construction – but all the while being haunted by flashbacks of his youth.

“I’m not sure if ‘haunted’ is exactly the right word,” suggests Turner. There he goes again, always interrogating language. “It seems inherently negative and I don’t think it has to be, but yeah, things from his past are coming in and out, and it’s writing about writing.”

‘8½’ showed Turner a way forward. It combined a lot of the things he was struggling to talk about: his own writer’s block, the memories of his youth, and the science-fiction vocabulary which would allow him to explore it all without leaving himself too exposed.

So he went down to the old spare room, which he would later start referring to as the ‘lunar surface’, and which now contained a Steinway Vertegrand piano that the band’s manager Ian McAndrew had given him for his 30^th birthday. Sitting down at the piano, he experienced his own Fellini-esque flashback. He tumbled back through time to before the house in LA, before headlining Glastonbury twice and the millions in the bank, back before even the electric excitement of that first album, to little 8-year-old Alex learning to play the piano with his dad, David.

“There’s something about the stuff I wrote on piano that definitely reminds me of the types of thing he would play, and still does even now,” he says. “There’s this bit in ‘One Point Perspective’, the sort of jazzy bit of that, that every time it comes around, when I sit there, it feels like something he would play. That’s the thing I’ve been playing whenever I’ve sat on a piano stool since I was a kid, but I never thought it would find its way into my compositions as much as it has on this record.”

As he sat there, playing his dad’s old chords, he experienced another flashback, to a now-teenage Alex in his parents’ garage writing ‘Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not’. There is only one time in our conversation when Turner doesn’t pause or hesitate to answer, and it’s when I ask whether he thinks this record is lyrically the closest thing he’s ever written to their first.

“Absolutely I do, absolutely,” he cuts in, before the words are even out of my mouth. “I can’t put me finger on exactly why I think that, but I have been saying it a lot recently. It’s set in a completely different place, obviously, but there’s something in the lyrics that reminds me of something in that writing. I’m tempted to say that it’s something to do with how blunt it is. I think that was something I was trying to get away from, and perhaps I’ve returned to it now.”

So it makes sense that the album opens with one of the bluntest lines he’s ever written: “I just wanted to be one of the Strokes, now look at the mess you made me make.” He has found himself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful girlfriend, and he asks himself – how did I get here? “The first thing that line does is make me think about then and how much time seems to have suddenly passed,” he says. “I expected to change it, but by the time I got back around to it it seemed like it was exactly where it needed to be, and I was obviously attracted to how blunt it was.”

The album is littered with lyrics just as frank and direct as that one. On ‘Science Fiction’, he sings about his own creative process: “I want to make a simple point about peace and love but in a sexy way where it’s not obvious… So I tried to write a song to make you blush, but I’ve a feeling that the whole thing may well just end up too clever for its own good, the way some science fiction does.” If it wasn’t for the trappings of the fictional lunar hotel that he set about constructing around himself, this could have been a purely confessional, autobiographical record.

“And you could say because of those trappings, it’s allowed to be,” he suggests. Then he laughs to himself at what he’s just given away. “I just walked right into that one didn’t I? I think the way in to that was that I became interested in the idea that these worlds are created in science fiction stories that allow you to explore things that are rooted in this world.”

Things he would have found hard to explore without that device?

“Almost impossible,” he agrees.

One of those subjects is his own personal failings, a topic he keeps prodding like a wound that won’t heal. He sings about: “Things that I just cannot explain to you and those that I hope I don’t ever have to”, and the album closes with the line: “I’ve done some things that I shouldn’t have done. But I haven’t stopped loving you once.” Rather than writing more songs about love and lust, did he find himself drawn to writing songs of regret?

“Oh, you devil!” he laughs at this line of questioning. Understandably, he’s not going to be drawn on the specifics, but he did think it was time to stop singing about love. “I think ‘Sweet Dreams, TN’ from the Puppets album seemed like the place to leave that, for the time being,” he says. “All that is is a love letter, I don’t know how much more detail you could go into. Also, it was suggested to me by a friend: ‘What about not doing that for a moment’. I think I was arriving at that place meself anyway.”

As well as allowing him to be more introspective, the science fiction setting also gave Turner space to write about modern life. One of the album’s best tracks, ‘Four Out Of Five’, concerns a taqueria on the roof of the titular lunar hotel complex with the unlikely name: ‘The Information-Action Ratio’. It’s a phrase Turner lifted from Neil Postman’s 1985 book ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death’, which also heavily influenced Father John Misty’s ‘Total Entertainment Forever’ on last year’s ‘Pure Comedy’. Turner says the phrase ended up as the name of the taqueria by happy accident. It just so happened that the words came in on the backing vocals he recorded with drummer Matt Helders just as the lyrics mentioned the taqueria.

“The implication of course is that that’s the name of the thing,” he explains. “But what a wonderful name for a taqueria on the roof of a lunar hotel complex! But you’re more interested, I think, in why that phrase leapt out at me. I think one of the things I liked about that phrase is that you sort of know exactly what it is right away.”

The Information-Action Ratio is Postman’s prescient analysis of the way that a tidal wave of information and entertainment renders all of us on the receiving end utterly helpless as to how to decipher which of it is useful or useless. In other words, you’re not alone if you feel overwhelmed by 24-hour rolling news coverage, Twitter feeds and the constant, pinging updates on your phone.

“Exactly,” he says. “And phonetically it’s quite alluring, I think.”

Once Turner had corralled all these disparate ideas into ‘Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino’, he assembled the band – Helders, guitarist Jamie Cook, bassist Nick O’Malley and producer James Ford – and they decamped first to Vox Studios in Los Angeles and then to La Frette, the 19^th century mansion-cum-recording studio in northern France where Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds recorded ‘Skeleton Tree’. There, the five were joined by a host of other musicians including their touring keyboard player, Tom Rowley, Tame Impala’s Cameron Avery, Klaxons’ James Righton, Mini Mansions’ Zach Dawes and Tyler Parkford, and drummer Loren Humphrey. They all played together in the same room, inspired by the lush recording sessions for the Beach Boys’ ‘Pet Sounds’ and the idea of Phil Spector’s ‘Wall of Sound’, as heard on Dion’s ‘Born to Be With You’ and Leonard Cohen’s ‘Death of a Ladies’ Man’, some of Turner’s favourite records. “You see those images from those recording sessions and it just looks so exciting,” says Turner. “Primarily I think I love those albums and I wanted my album to be a bit like them.”

Yet when it came to the vocals, they found that it was the lines Turner recorded on his vintage 8-track Tascam 388 in splendid isolation at home that needed to be retained for the record, impossible to better wherever else they tried them.

In a way, that’s fitting. ‘Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino’ is full of songs which sound like they’re being narrated by a reclusive rock star. On ‘One Point Perspective’, he’s dancing at home alone in his underwear, only distracted by the suggestively named “Mr Winter Wonderland” who keeps making him lose his train of thought. Like David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ and Elton John’s ‘Rocket Man’, these are songs that are ostensibly about space travel but use that as a metaphor to talk about the isolating nature of fame.

Where ‘Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino’ joins the dots is by extending that idea to all of us. These days we’re all isolated, living in our own bubbles overwhelmed and rendered apathetic by the alienating stream of information pouring in on our screens. We seek refuge in frivolity. “Everyone’s on a barge floating down the stream of great TV,” as Turner sings on ‘Star Treatment’. We can have everything we want delivered to us on-demand. “You push the button and we’ll do the rest”, the slogan from a very early 1888 Kodak advert, repurposed for ‘The World’s First Ever Monster Truck Front Flip’, that could also describe every app on whatever device you’re reading these words on. Is Turner telling us that in 2018 we’re all becoming more like reclusive rock stars, sat in our pods with every form of entertainment ever devised available to us at the push of a button, slowly realising that having our desires met instantly may not actually make us happy?

“I find it hard to disagree with anything you’re saying,” he says finally, after another of those lingering pensive pauses. “I can’t resist. I’m trying to think of something that I can say that relates that I didn’t say on the record. Of course, I suppose. Of course.”

Originally published by NME, 11 May 2018.

Alex Kapranos is wearing a jacket with Day of the Dead-style skulls embroidered on the chest, and that’s not the only way that Mexico is close to the Franz Ferdinand frontman’s heart.

“I think there’s a certain energy that we have to our music which really clicks with people in Latin America,” he says, leaning forward on a sofa in the band’s dressing room backstage at Monterrey’s Pa’l Norte festival. “There’s a real kind of openness and warmth to people here. It’s our natural environment, I think.”

They might be 5,000 miles from Glasgow, but they’re made to feel right at home by the 105,000 people squeezed into Parque Fundidora for the festival. Rock’n’roll that you can shake your hips to is very much the order of the weekend at Pa’l Norte, with Queens of the Stone Age and Muse also turning in sets that are seductive, rather than headbanging.

After the festival, Franz will be continuing their Mexican love affair with their own headline show in Mexico City – a place they’re returning to for the first time since one of their crowds trashed a venue. “It was a big arena, and the crowds in Mexico are really intense,” says Kapranos. “The first four or five rows of seats in the arena got completely destroyed. Hopefully we’re not playing a seated arena this time!”

The band’s love for this part of the world extends beyond the joy of playing to vast crowds. Drummer Paul Thomson has spent time in Puerto Vallarta, famous for being the town where Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor holed up while Burton was shooting ‘The Night of the Iguana’, while Kapranos recently explored the Yucatán Peninsula. “It’s incredible,” he says. “I hired a car and drove all around there. They have these cenotes, these underwater caves where you can swim completely underwater, and they have these strange albino fish that never see sunlight. The food down there is astonishing, things like Sopa de Lima. For me, in Mexico, but also in any city or country around the world, the best thing to do is get yourself lost. To turn the GPS off on your phone and see where you end up. Watch people, talk to people. Those are some of the best surprises you can get. The London perspective is often not to talk to strangers, but when you find yourself in other parts of the world that’s sometimes the best thing you can do.”

Now back at work, they’ve been introducing fans to tracks from new album ‘Always Ascending’, which was released in February. It’s an experimental, playful record – but Kapranos says it’s still been generating the requisite energy when played live. “It’s experimental in the sense that it’s lots of stuff that you haven’t maybe heard on our previous records, but it still sounds like Franz Ferdinand, and there’s still bangers on it,” he says. “It might sound different to our other records but people still want to get up and dance to it.”

The band will spend much of the rest of the year on the road – with key dates including a Glasgow homecoming at TRNSMT Festival at the end of June, a headline show at the Roundhouse in September and their first ever trip to Ukraine. “Nowadays, in the age of social media, you’re very aware of where your fans are,” says Kapranos. “We’ve had a lot of feedback from people from Ukraine for a long time. ‘When are you going to come?’ So finally this year we’re going to get to see it.”

For Franz fans who want to catch the band in an exotic locale without leaving Britain, they headline Festival No. 6 this September in Portmeirion, the curious Welsh tourist village that was designed by architect Clough Williams-Ellis in the style of an Italian village and featured in cult TV show The Prisoner. “I’m really excited about,” says Kapranos. “I’m a huge fan of The Prisoner, and I’ve never been to Portmeirion before.”

Thomson, though, has been before. “I went when I was 16 with a bunch of guys, because of The Prisoner,” he reminisces. “I’m not sure you’d call it a lads’ weekend. Maybe a virgin’s weekend? I’ll be returning a man this summer.”

Originally published by NME.