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COVER: MICHAELSPENCER JONES THIS PAGE: ANDY COTTERILL
This month’s highlight: a pre-lockdown, tasty Chicken Milanese lunch in Central London with Savages’ Jehnny Beth.
6 CHOICE CUTS ISOLATION SPECIAL
Running out of lockdown inspiration? Fear not, a host of artists and Q writers offer up their picks of music, films, TV shows, books, pods, recipes and more to get you through.
30 TONES AND I
Success has come at a heavy price for Australian pop star Toni Watson, whose second single Dance Monkey was a worldwide smash. The former busker tells us why only the strong survive.
38 MUSIC PODCASTS
By the grace of pod, quarantine doesn’t have to be such a detaching experience. Dorian Lynskey dives into the best music podcasts out there to keep you connected.
45 COVER FEATURE: OASIS
To celebrate (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?’s 25th anniversary, we take a deep dive into the album that turned Oasis from exciting upstarts to world-beating stars. From its iconic cover to its monumental B-sides, Hamish MacBain tells the inside story with help from those who made it.
68 ED O’DRIEN
Radiohead’s genial guitarist always told himself he’d never make a solo album.
On the eve of releasing his debut, we head to a rural rehearsal location in Wales to find out what changed his mind.
76 FLOHIO
The South London rapper is one of the UK’s most exciting new artists. We meet her on home turf to discover how going against the grain is what makes her stand out.
82 MARE LANE6AN
The former Screaming Trees frontman releases his gripping memoir this month. In this exclusive extract, he recounts an epic adventure trying to retrieve a sleeping bag.
14 GH0STP0ET
Before he was a creator of foreboding electronic-rock, Obaro Ejimiwe was a painter and decorator in a brothel.
We give him a call to hear all about his former job and more.
18 OUT TO LUNCH: JEHNNT DETH
Over a chicken salad, the Savages singer tells us why she’s gone solo.
22 IN THE STUDIO: THE AVALANCHES
The Australian pop voyagers reveal all about their forthcoming third album.
24 CASH FOR QUESTIONS: THE KOOKS
The indie trio share the secrets of enduring success as they answer your enquiries.
36 10 COMMANDMENTS: JASON ISDELL
Hard-earned wisdom courtesy of the American singer-songwriter.
114 LAST WORD: PRINCESS NOKIA
The US rapper puts a full-stop to the issue.
92 era JUT IS...
Pop’s master voyeur Jarvis Cocker delivers his five-star masterpiece.
GEDRINA SAWATAMA
The genre-defying London singer takes flight with an effervescent pop masterclass.
GBJAYELECTRONICA
New Orleans rapper Jay Electronica tackles life’s big issues on his winning debut.
101) Cra TBI VEEEND
More existential dread from the R&B star.
JUNE 2020 Q 3
Backstage.
I hope very much that you are healthy, but if you are not, that you soon will be. At the time of writing, we are all doing fine at Q.
Music can seem trivial in these moments of unusual international anxiety. Immediately after September 1 1, 2001, the music stopped. For a period, newspaper columnists agonised about how entertainment culture would ever recover. Then, slowly, as we all rediscovered how melody provides strength and succour and inspiration in times of extreme stress, the music returned. By that Christmas, we were raving again with extra relish. The record shows, too, that 2002 was a vintage year. Life may not return as quickly this time, but it will.
So, now, if you can, buy some music please. Help those musicians, and labels, and record stores whose lives are being indirectly but seriously impacted by Covid- 19.
We’ll need them when the dust settles more than ever.
For our part, we started this issue in an office and then spent the final fortnight in our homes making the magazine remotely. Technology, in the words of Paul Weller, is a must. Sometimes, imposed limits can stimulate and inspire, and we’ve found that to be the case, not just in plotting some elements of this issue but also in the imagining of future issues which, in all probability, will also be made under the current lockdown. We’ve exciting plans up our sleeves.
To that end, I assure you that you’ll still be able to receive or buy new issues of Q whatever the circumstances. Elsewhere in this issue are details of how you can subscribe and have Q delivered to your home for free, or how you can subscribe digitally, too, or even buy single issues online or digitally. We are also stocked by Apple News+ if you decide to subscribe to that service (mention us if you do, please).
In short, we are doing everything possible to deliver you the best, maybe only, contemporary music magazine every month no matter what. I hope you enjoy it.
This is a cracker, I feel.
Take care.
Ted Kessler, Editor, Q Magazine.
Q editor Ted Kessler: “If you can, please buy some music.”
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[. . .And the music that got them through Q's first WFH print week. . .]
EDITORIAL
Editor Ted Kessler [Dynamite Sounds From A Heavenly Jukebox 2020, by chiltonbell, on Spotify] Deputy Editor Niall Doherty [Max Richter's On The Nature Of Daylight]
Art Director Daniel Knight [Alex Cameron's Miami Memory. Not for the kids though.]
Production Editor Simon McEwen [Studio One's back catalogue]
Assistant Editor Chris Catchpole [Madonna: The Immaculate Collection] Picture Editor Monica Chouhan [Quentin Tarantino's film soundtracks] Associate Copy Editor Matt Yates [Iggy Pop's The Idiot]
Subbing Kate Hutchinson [Thundercat's It Is What It Is and Worldwide FM] Design Corrie Heale [Karl Jenkins's Symphonic Adiemus]
Contributing Editors: Eve Barlow, Laura Barton, Mark Blake, Tom Doyle,
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Pat Gilbert, Ian Harrison, Katie Hawthorne, Rupert Howe, Fergal Kinney, Hamish MacBain, Craig McLean, Phil Mongredien, Paul Moody, Rebecca Nicholson, James Oldham, Peter Paphides, Simon Price, David Quantick,
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4 Q JUNE 2020
the debut album * out now
In emergency, break glass. We asked Q’s writers and some of onr musician friends to suggest ways to make the most of your time on Covid-19 lockdown for a Choice Cuts Isolation Special. Dig in! If we re still housebound next month, we’ll deliver part two...
Dorian Lynskey
Victoria Segal
Q Writer
Music: For dark times not done darkly, there’s Cornershop’s excellent latest album, England Is A Garden. Similarly, Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s intimate I Made A Place manages to keep the apocalypse on a very human scale.
Screen: Trigonometry (BBC2)/Feel Good (C4) - two gently idealised shows about modem romance that makes audiences fall as hard in love with the characters as the characters do with each other.
Books: We Have Always Lived In The Castle, Shirley Jackson’s icy American gothic, is all about people who don’t like to go out much. West by Carys Davies is a tiny novel about isolation and wildness: read it in a day and feel a sense of achievement. For pure
escapist joy, there’s always Elton John’s outrageous autobiography, Me.
Podcast: The Last Bohemians - vivid interviews with women who have escaped the constraints of conventional society, from Molly Parkin and Cosey Fanni Tutti to Pauline Black and LSD advocate and aristocrat Amanda Feilding. Free your mind, at least. Online resource/article: @theurbanbirder and The Self-Isolating Bird Club (@SIbirdClub) offer hints on birdwatching from indoors. Pretend you are James Stewart in Rear Window, only with sparrows.
Recipe: Something experimental with
chickpea flour as there was no plain flour in the corner shop. Gatte Ki Sabzi (vegetable curry with dumplings) looks promising. If there are vegetables.
Isolation top tip: Be very careful around daytime TV, it can be minous if you fall into its grip. Dom Does America is almost performance art.
. I Q Writer
Music: With its abundant grace and warmth,
Caribou’s Suddenly is an album that makes you feel like you’re being well looked after. The song Home feels especially apt right now.
Screen: The movie version of Emma Jane Unsworth’s novel Animals seems lightweight at first but deepens into a vivid study of youthful hedonism pushed well past its sell-by date. Savour the vicarious thrill of watching Holliday Grainger and Alia Shawkat careening from club to pub to party. Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon’s rigorous schedule of fine dining, bickering and impersonations is always enviable but their picturesque mid-life odyssey in The Trip To Greece makes for particularly delicious escapism.
Book: Christopher Hitchens was a tirelessly smart and exacting essayist and any of his anthologies are well worth dipping into for a potent hit of his war against bullshit. Except the one about why women aren’t funny. That’s bad.
Podcast: If you’re rewatching classic movies, do it in the company of Ringer’s The Rewatchables. Special guest Quentin Tarantino’s joyful Dunkirk fandom is the place to start.
Online resource/article: New Yorker
Juliette Jackson
Singer, The BUNmni
Music: Something I have found really fun is setting up a collaborative isolation playlist on Spotify with a few friends. Nice way to keep in touch.
See also: the new Porridge Radio album. It’s fabulous.
Screen: I have been chewing my mates’ ears off about Succession for the last six months. It’s sooooo good. Will have you constantly doing the laughing/ crying confusing-melange-of- feelings thing. I also love a good black and white weepy. Anything by German director Douglas Sirk. Books: 1 have just started Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino which was given to me by Celia [Archer, bandmate]. It’s like reading
everything you already thought but couldn’t articulate so perfectly and humorously. I also dug out some poetry by Patrick Kavanagh for a depressing solo St Patrick’s Day. Somehow it hasn’t aged.
Podcast: The Blindboy podcast. He’s a brilliant storyteller and social commentator, with interesting opinions on anything from the Casio keyboard to global warming. He wears a plastic bag on his head to stay anonymous but don’t let that put you off. He’s an expert raconteur. And on top of it all he has this majestic Irish accent and soft voice which makes me feel safe and lovely.
Online resource/article:
Excellent-quarantine-ideas.com created by @Rifke.world is a gorgeous slice of human ingenuity. You can get ideas about things to do and also contribute your own.
Recipe: Something the supermarkets are definitely not running low on: jackfruit. They had a whole pyramid of it in Sainsbury’s this morning. I’m going to cook it up with spices and turn it into fake pulled pork and eat it in wraps.
Isolation top tip: I just bought a Nintendo Wii. It’s the cheapest second-hand console around at the moment and we’re all about to be very broke so... quids in.
8 Q JUNE 2020
profile writers have the unique privilege of practically cohabiting with their subjects so that they can tell you more than you ever realised you wanted to know. Ian Parker on Yuval Noah Harari and Emily Nussbaum on Fiona Apple are two recent masterclasses. Recipe: If you arm yourself with the right spices, Indian food is the most satisfying restaurant experience to recreate at home and it takes a therapeutically long time to prepare. BBC Good Food has an arsenal of easy recipes.
Isolation top tip: That time-consuming but not unpleasant j ob you were always too busy to get around to? Do it now.
I’m painstakingly listing records on Discogs to prepare for my new career as a second-hand vinyl mogul.
John Harris
Q Writer
Music: Since Christmas, I've been immersed in as much music as possible by The Comet Is Coming, the London jazz/ electronica/whatever trio that includes the sax player Shabaka Hutchings. Start with last year’s cosmic Trust In The Lifeforce Of The Deep Mystery, then explore from there. Screen: Along, longtime ago, Channel 4 screened A Grin Without A Cat, the late French director Chris Marker’s epic two- part documentary about 1968, the rise and fall of a new kind of political left, and lots more. You can get it on DVD - if you’re at all interested in post-war history, it may change you for ever. It did me.
Book: Americana is superb graphic novel by Irish writer/artist Luke Healy, about walking the 2600 mile Pacific Crest Trail - life- affirming, funny, sad, and brimming with the joy of friendship, which all means a lot right now.
Podcast: A friend tipped me off about George The Poet’s Have You Heard George’s Podcast? It’s a model for how to do it: freewheeling, intimate, with words so good they almost sound like music.
Online resource/ article: I like TechCrunch,
live our lives both as individuals and as a collective and this book is quite thought-provoking so I thought it’d be a good rime to read it and think a bit more deeply about what the future is going to hold once lockdown is over. Podcast: The Jessie Ware podcast with her mum, Table Manners, is always good for a laugh. I feel like people are getting into cooking so that’s a good one to encourage people to cook.
Redpe: Banana bread.
I made some and it was pretty damn fine. If you put walnuts in, it really goes next level. If you’ve got bananas that are going a bit brown, put them in the freezer and you can use those for banana bread later. The flavour is more intense than an under-ripe banana. Isolation top tip: A nightly cocktail with mates via some type of app can keep the haunting at bay. Also, set a goal for the week. Mine this week is to wash down all my plants and get dust off the leaves. That’s my week.
which is a news and comment outlet about Big Tech and startups, but also great on the small ‘p’ politics of the platforms, apps and what have you that basically define how we live now.
Recipe: Sprouts, halloumi and harissa (if you can find any), from a book called The Green Roasting Tin by Rukmini Iyer.
So easy!
Isolation top tip:
Learn an instrument. The world needs more bassists, I reckon.
Rebecca Nicholson
Q Writer
Music: You might as well plump for someone with a massive back catalogue. I’ve always filed Joni Mitchell under “music you have to concentrate on”, and what better time to concentrate on 19 albums’ worth of stuff? Screen: The Good Wife is proper TV,
22-23 episodes per season, seven seasons, and none of your eight-episode prestige nonsense. It’s a gripping legal drama that morphs into a political masterpiece and »
Yannis
PhHippakis
Singer, foals
Music: I’m really enjoying the new Four Tet album, Sixteen Oceans. Also, Jack [Bevan, Foals drummer] made a really good quarantine playlist called On My Own on Spotify. It’s quite arty.
Screen: Tiger King on Netflix, which is about big cat owners in America who get embroiled in attempted murder. It’s pretty rad. Book: I’m reading a book called The Hidden Pleasures Of Life by Theodore Zeldin. I feel like one positive from this period will be that we get to reflect on the way that we
Charlie Steen
Singer, Shame
Music: I’m usually pretty late to the party when it comes to the features of technology that are already well ingrained around the world - my newest discovery being Spotify Radio. It’s been the deus ex machina that prevents me having to make my own decisions. In the past few days the algorithm trail usually starts to pave off into its own direction after I’ve finished Muso Ko by Habib Koite or The Legendary George Formby- some truly fascinating caves of music have been explored through these two catalysts.
Screen: The screen is something I spend a lot of time in front of.
In times of turmoil, it’s a ritual of mine to plug myself into a screen and avoid human interaction. The Good, The Bad And The Ugly and Once Upon A Time In The West recently made me understand the roots of cinematic genius. Narcos:
Mexico took me through these last weeks with Hispanic power and cheap Spanish lessons; plus I’ve gone back to the beginning of Ozark, a criminally underrated Netflix original.
Book: I’m hallway through Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel, the sequel to the incredible Wolf Hall. Honestly, I can’t recommend these books enough: the writing is poetic, cutting and contains all the dark humour England in the 16th-Century deserves. I find myself only slowing down when wanting to savour the moment.
Podcast: Desert Island Discs is everything I could want and
more from an interview. The hosts are always so engaged and allow each guest to really let go of themselves and delve into the memories that link to the music they have selected. Would recommend starting with either John Cooper Clarke, Stephen Fry, Levi Roots or Judi Dench.
Online resource/article:
It has been incredible to see how much information and help the Facebook groups Covid-19 (enteryour area) have been able to provide for the communities. People are able to offer advice on exercise routines to do at home, what shops still have a decent supply of loo roll (stop fucking bulk-buying it!) and offer advice on what we can all be doing to help those around us who are suffering. Would really recommend joining. Recipe: Yesterday, I pulled out my scales, rolled up my sleeves and crafted a chocolate-chip banana bread loaf. It’s quick, easy, and, if you’vegot some mouldy bananas lying around, is the perfect way not to waste them. Isolation top tip: Don’t set yourself unrealistic goals to do in this period. If you’re not about to finish Ulysses, or haven’t mastered a new language yet, there’s no cause to flay yourself. There’s a lot of other things minds are focused on at the moment which are equally as important. Helping those who need it, as always, is what we should strive for.
incorporates real-world news, and you can only wish it had stuck around for its Covid-19 season.
Book: Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift is a brilliant debut novel that tells a modern history of Zambia, sort of, incorporating a wide range of genres, including science fiction. It is unlike anything I’ve ever read, and will have you hooked from page one. Podcast: Esther Perel’s Where Should We Begin? allows us to eavesdrop on couples’ therapy, which may become a very useful resource, should social isolation stretch on. Online resource/article: Audible. I’m a new convert to audiobooks, which require a different level of concentration to even podcasts, and there’s something very soothing about being so immersed in a story. Recipe: Try fermentation. It’s an edible science project for your kitchen, which you have to tend to daily, and you might get a decent loaf out of a sourdough starter, say. Top tip: kimchi really hums, so don’t try that in confined quarters.
Isolation top tip: Educate yourself. FutureLearn has loads of free online courses teaching everything you never knew you needed. I’ve just signed up to learn Irish Gaelic.
Rupert Howe
U writer
Music: If cloistered family life permits, now might be the ideal time to tackle some major “durational” works by, say, La Monte Young, whose The Well-Timed Piano runs to six meditative hours. Or plunge into the 900-hour online Andrew Weatherall archive dubbed the “Weatherdrive”.
Screen: The new series of Kingdom, Netflix’s
gripping zombie thriller set in medieval Korea, suddenly seems all-too relevant. Books: I’d like to tackle one of the unread doorstops I already own. JR by William Gaddis, perhaps. Alternatively our neighbour has offered a loan of Richard Powers’s recent tree-themed epic The Overstory.
Podcast: A new Jordan Peele series for Spotify has been promised. Though I’ll also be checking Bob Mortimer’s Twitter feed for more “Hilario” Train Guy updates.
Online resource/article: Large galleries are moving exhibits online, though many visual artists are already producing intriguing works in the digital realm: Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s immersive landscapes, Jonas Lund’s quirky interventions or Eileen Simpson and Ben White’s inspiring Open Music Archive. Meanwhile, I’ll be twitchily checking The Intercept and Novara Media for the viral stories behind the headlines.
Recipe: Dan Lepard’s sourdough “mill” loaf from his book The Handmade Loaf.
A nutritious, mixed-grain staple perfect for toast and sturdy sandwiches.
Isolation top tip: An escape route. My trusty Kona Jake The Snake cyclocross bike is always propped up in the hall ready to explore our local holloways.
8 Q JUNE 2020
SPLENDID ISOLATION!
leonie Cooper
Q Writer
Music: There are currently nine Brown Acid compilations, Riding Easy Records’ heavy, heady crate-digging delights of rare proto¬ metal and psych sounds from the 1960s. Nowyou have the time to listen to them all. The 10th in the series is set for release on 20 April, so if you get addicted, a fresh helping isn’t too far off.
Screen: Arena’s icon-packed 1981 doc about the world’s most decadent dive, the Chelsea Hotel, is on iPlayer. Worth it just for the scene in which Andy Warhol and William Burroughs discuss chicken fried steak. Books: I’m rereading Eve’s Hollywood by queen of LA Eve Babitz, mainly because I’d quite like to be drinking margaritas in the Chateau Marmont with 1970s Harrison Ford at the moment rather than being trapped in my kitchen in Tottenham.
Podcast: Excellent person and fellow Q writer Kate Hutchinson’s The Last Bohemians is a joy, especially the Gee Vaucher and Pamela Des Barres episodes. Recipe: Fry up some sliced new potatoes, add a tin of sardines, some chopped parsley, spring onions and some bashed up pine nuts. Compliments to Nigel Slater.
Isolation top tip: Get into Yoga With Adriene on YouTube; as recommended by synth-pop divas MUNA.
1
Chris Catchpole
Assistant Editor
Music: Out now, London duo Sorry’s excellent debut album, 925, has been on repeat in my flat for the past week. Also Dust On The Nettles: A Journey Through The British Underground Folk Scene 1967-72.
Screen: In lieu of being able to venture around the capital, James Mason’s 1967 documentary The London Nobody Knows remains fascinating and surprisingly unsentimental viewing (available in full on Dailymotion).
Book: Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight is one of the best books I’ve read in years. I’d pick it up again in a heartbeat.
Podcast: Comedian Brett Goldstein’s Films To Be Buried With is always entertaining and now doubles up as useful guide on how to
spend your evenings for the foreseeable future. Online resource/ article: Forget about seeing the latest blockbusters, simply watch Half In The Bag’s exasperated takedowns of them on YouTube. Recipe: Slow-cooked
Hinder Singh
(or n ci shop
Music: I’d always dismissed a group called Led Zeppelin because I’ve considered their followers to be the sort of people who piss in their pints and chuck it at the stage. I was ill 10 years ago and then I suddenly got into them. They’ve got a lot of imagination in the lyrics and a great catalogue of albums to get your teeth into. It’s a good couple of months’ worth of music to listen to.
Screen: My wife is from Vosges in France and there was a murder near her home in the ’80s. It consumed the area, the rest of France and the media. It got made into a Netflix documentary in a series called Who Killed Little Gregory?. It’s got a lot of depth and a lot of disbelief. It’s a very sad story. Books: I revisited 1984 and I’ve just started Animal Farm again too.
Next, I’d like to read an early-’90s Soviet novel called We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. It’s about dystopia and was a big influence on Orwell.
Podcast: There’s only one, Remainiacs. In a time of crisis that was the run-up to Brexit, it was the only decent commentary about it. Remainiacs found the perfect balance between the seriousness of what was going on, in-depth knowledge and a light-hearted approach.
Online resource/article: In the Windrush report [by the Home Affairs Select Committee] they talk about institutional ignorance and thoughtlessness towards issues of race and I think it’ll make for great reading. Recipe: A very simple one: an onion tart. Spanish onions, two eggs, milk. Caramelise the onions in a frying pan, mix with the egg and milk, add pepper and nutmeg on top, then put into a pastry tart. Place in the oven for 30-40 minutes at medium heat.
Isolation top tip: Whether there’s isolation or not, don’t ever listen to the UK government.
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lentil and mushroom bolognese. You don’t have to be vegan to appreciate this one and if my local comer shop is anything to go by, lentils remain plentiful.
Isolation top tip: Get some cans and salted snacks in and arrange a session at your preferred video conference call platform for a virtual knees-up.
Rachel Aroesli
Q Writer
Music: It maybe a righteously scathing critique of idiotic young men on the lash, but Happy Hour by The Housemartins is also a jolt of pure joy, its cantering drums and lilting melody guaranteed to mentally transport you somewhere cheerier.
Possibly the pub.
Screen: First shown in 2009 and then promptly forgotten, Cowards is a lost sketch-show classic.
Starring Tim Key, Tom Basden, Lloyd Woolf and Stefan Golaszewski - who between them have since written a host of great British sitcoms - its three episodes are both deeply odd and roaringly funny.
Book: Tina Fey’s autobiography Bossypants isn’t just absolutely hysterical, it’s also wise and insightful about the logic of anxiety and our attempts to control a senseless universe. Podcast: Elis James and John Robins’s charmingly unpolished and in-joke-riddled BBC Radio 5 Live podcast is warm, funny and ridiculously comforting. I want to listen to this mbbish!
Online resource/article: Alistair Green’s Twitter feed is a showcase for his short-form, minimalist and impeccably brilliant character comedy. Currently the happiest place on the internet.
Isolation top tip: Block any addictive or anxiety-inducing websites on your phone: it stops the kind of terrifying unconscious scrolling that leaves you feeling like your thumb has a mind of its own.
Eve Barlow
* * Q Writer
A Music: Put some house music
» on. Nobody needs The Smiths
right now. Singer-songwriters will only make you cry. Fire up your streaming service, make a playlist of classic ’80s Chicago house, Detroit techno and UK rave anthems. Put your trainers on, turn the oven up, close your eyes and have it large. Screen: When Buffy Summers delivered the infamous line, “if the apocalypse comes, beep me”, Covid-19 was the stuff of our worst »
JUNE 2020 Q 9
Gaz Coombes
Singer, Supergrass
Music: I’ve been listening to a lot of Creedence Clearwater Revival. The 1970 album Cosmo’s Factory is a bit of an energy boost in the morning.
It helps to put one in a slightly more energetic frame of mind. Screen: I watched Escape From Pretoria the other day, with Daniel Radcliffe. Me and Jools [Gaz’s wifejhave got a bit of a thing about prison escape films. It’s right up our street.
Books: My daughter bought me Strange Stars by Jason Heller, a cool pick-up-whenever-you- fancy book. It’s about sci-fi’s influence on music and popular culture and the impact the visual side of science fiction had. Podcast:
I always love listening to WTF With Marc Maron. He talks so much sense and has insightful guests. There was a great one
^ -
the other day with Dan Aykroyd, and another with Neil Young from a couple of years ago. It’s definitely worth rooting out. Online resource/article: BBC Sport is still a gentle way to start the day without diving straight
into the news, and The New Yorker always has great articles. Redpe: I do a good ramen, with abit of stock, chuck some veggies in, chicken and noodles and loads of ginger. It’s good to pump that ginger into the body.
Isolation top tip: Do what you can do in the moment you can do it. Don’t get sucked in and go down the rabbit hole of conjecture on social media too much. Make sure you take a break from the news.
imaginations. Yet what better way to while away the hours pondering the end of the world than reliving a seven-series whipsmart fantasy drama in which the protagonist refuses to let nightmares ruin our reality.
A pandemic looks cosy next to some of the ghouls here, plus the soundtrack rocks.
Book: The Rihannabook is a sturdy investment and might sit on your coffee table without anyone to admire it for months.
But Rihanna is the most exquisite pop star we have, and every single page of this eye-watering collection of photographs across her entire career will make you gasp. Podcast: On Being is a podcast about the deeper questions of humanity, politics, art and philosophy. It’s hosted by US journalist and author Krista Tippett, the episodes are almost an hour in length and always feature a guest specialist. Guaranteed to start conversations, offer perspective, and give you inspiration in a time where we seek answers to the big questions.
Recipe: Soups are the best way to make cheap perishables go furtherfor longer. There are countless recipes online. Add potatoes to make them more filling. Freeze them so you can choose from a variety.
Isolation top tip: Set up a home
10 Q JUNE 2020
gym area and check out the fitness studios making YouTube pages and Instagram classes. Keeping your body moving is good for the mind more than anything else. If you don’t have weights at home, you can use heavy books, or washing powder bottles. Get creative.
Sylvia Patterson
Q Writer
Music: Strife, loneliness, poverty, horror, heartbreak... we humans have been here before. The country and western classics know the score: stream Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash, all of them, for solace, solidarity and survival through the knell of gallows humour. Screen: The Godfather Trilogy DVD. Over nine hours of loyalty-testing, back-stabbing vengeance-settling > " Mafioso intensity. Currently confined family life is, by comparison, a doddle. Book: The Complete Unreliable Memoirs: Clive James. Jokes! We can’t live without jokes, especially now.
All five autobiography volumes „ in-one from the quipsome master of comic exaggeration (currently £12.99 on Kindle, a snip!)
Podcast: Ways To Change The World: Krishnan Guru-Murthy. The Channel 4 inquisitor invites “extraordinary people” (professors, politicians, authors, comedians) to ponder The Revolution - and how we can all save ourselves from ourselves.
Online resource/article: Move off the couch, regularly, otherwise we’ll all be dead anyway from diabetes/thrombosis/obesity. Yoga With Adrienne on YouTube will have your legs in the air like you just don’t care. Recipe: Toast’n’proper butter. Sometimes it’s all you need.
Isolation top tip: In nature-restricted times, grow your own indoor plants. Only living like leaf-fondling, altruistic hippies will save us now. Won’t it?
Tom Doyle
Q Writer
Music: No song lyric is more pertinent at the moment than the line, “This is one nation under a roof” from JARV IS...’s House Music All Night Long, a track exploring the joys of raving in isolation. The forthcoming album, Beyond The Pale, is equally ace. Screen: The latest season of Curb Your Enthusiasm isn’t all great - see the
GAB ARCHIVE/GETTY
ALLSTAR PICTURE LIBRARY/ALAMY
SPLENDID ISOLATION!
jazz Nonroe
Q Writer
Music: Lorenzo Senni’s Scacco Matto - the Italian maestro’s third album in a decade is, per his trademark, a burst of dropless, plateau-techno. Hit repeat and let its melodic perfectionism emerge. Screen: For exquisitely soundtracked escapism, bow down to Studio Ghibli’s My Neighbor Totoro. Netflix’s acquisition of the animated classic is perfectly timed: airy enchantment beamed into our dingy bunkers.
Book: Lannyby Max Porter. By turns folksy and beguilingly avant-garde, this modern British masterpiece conjures a village’s disintegration into tabloid-fuelled hysteria when a boy disappears.
Online resource/article: Citizen Insane’s Radiohead press archive. Start with the late David Cavanagh’s Kid A-era Q profile, then work outwards through an invaluable time capsule.
Recipe: Pea shoot stir fry is so hands-off it’s barely a recipe. Roughly chop two garlic cloves and a chilli. Fry in murderously hot sesame oil for 15 seconds. Add 150g of pea shoots, sprinkle salt and toss for one minute. Voila! Fresh, earthy deliciousness - and your
boss won’t notice you’d slipped away.
Isolation top tip:
Unburden yourself! No need to write King Lear - we’re anxious enough without arbitrary trials of self-worth. De-stress, imbibe comfort culture and stare out of the window with a cup of tea, if that’s your lot.
J
toe-curling Benny Hill moments where Larry David attempts some lumpy #MeToo j okes.
Most of it is brilliant though, especially the thread where he gets pissed off with his local coffee shop, Mocha Joe’s, and starts up a rival cafe - Latte Larry’s - next door.
Book: Scottish author Graeme Armstrong’s The Young Team has become a massive word-of-mouth hit, and rightly so, fictionalising his experiences as a noughties gang member in Lanarkshire.
Podcast: Not a podcast, but record producer John Leckie’s The Electric Blues Radio Show on Mixcloud is a reminder of the raw, punky roots of the genre.
Online resource/article: Limiting exposure to the news is probably a good idea. Which makes spoof site The Daily Mash all the more useful. Recent headlines:
“Your Guide To This Week’s Looting”;
“I Am The Bog Roll King”.
Recipe: Stovies. Thinly slice and fry onions and spuds, add veg or beef stock, simmer and mush, stir in corned beef or frozen chopped spinach. Serve with oatcakes. The ultimate comfort food.
Isolation top tip: ITV4. Minder! The Sweeney! Kojak! Columbo! You know it makes sense.
,jf*L George Gamer
% .. ' Q Writer
^ Music: JayElectronica-A
A Written Testimony. Almost as
if Jay Electronica delivering his long-awaited full-length outing wasn’t enough, most of these tracks feature Jay-Z on downright imperious form. Guaranteed to rank among 2020’s finest hip-hop albums. Screen: Hip-Hop Evolution. The great strength, of this Netflix series’ run through hip-hop’s grand narrative arc is its
willingness to shine a light on regional scenes. Beyond familiar explorations of gangsta rap et al come in-depth looks at New Orleans bounce music, Bay Area rap and much more.
Book: Robert Kolker’s Lost Girls, his riveting 2013 investigation into the unsolved Long Island serial killer case, recently spawned a Netflix original film. Focusing as much on the victims’ lives as their tragic fates, this is true crime that prioritises compassion over grisly spectacle.
Podcast: On each episode of Drink Champs, rapper N.O.R.E. sits down with a different hip-hop legend - including Nas and Snoop Dogg - to discuss their lives in music.
All while getting shitfaced together.
Online resource/article: Gremmie.net.
For anyone falling in love with Pearl Jam’s new album Gigaton, this fan-site collates a jaw-dropping array of rarities, including unreleased demos.
Recipe: Hummus can - and will - go with anything.
Isolation top tip: Ifyou can’t resist snacks,
don’t buy therm
Banks
Singer
Music: I’ve been trying to listen to some upbeat stuff, like Chaka Khan. I’ve also been trying to sit down at my piano every day for at least an hour too, even if I’m not feeling particularly inspired, just as an exercise to see what comes out.
It’s been surprising, almost every day I’ve come up with an idea. Screen: I’ve been watching
On My Block on Netflix.
It’s a TV series about a group of friends in high school involved in Hispanic gang life but it’s also really funny. It’s about friendship and love and being young in the Los Angeles gang scene.
Book: I recently read Reincarnation Blues by Michael Poore. It’s amazing. It’s set in this world where you get 10,000 chances in life to reach perfection.
It’s a really good book.
Online resource/article:
Honestly, I’ve really been trying to stay offline lately. It’s so easy to hole up on the internet and be online all the time. So it’s been really nice for me - I’ve been drawing a lot and trying to cook. There’s a little private hike behind my house, so I’ve been doingthattoo.
Recipe: I’m a terrible chef. I*ve been doing FaceTime with my cousin Emma, who’s an amazing cook, and she’s been trying to help me learn how to do the most simple things. It’s not been going amazingly so far. I don’t even want to give you any advice about cooking, just know I’m in the beginning phases.
My family has a group text where everyone has been sending their meals, and they always laugh at mine!
Isolation top tip: The days that I’ve felt the best,
I’ve made an itinerary for myself in the morning and listed things like, “for an hour, do this”. There’s been times when I didn’t want to follow it, but when I did I’ve felt more normal as I’ve had things to do. »
| JUNE 2020 Q 11
SPLENDID ISOLATION!
, DaveEverley
Q writer
Music: Goth never dies,
it just lurks in the shadows.
Something is stirring once again - LA’s The Wraith, the UK’s Naut and a wavelet of other bands are partying like it’s 1985. If we’re going down, we may as well go down pickled in snakebite and black. Screen: Now Bong Joon-ho is the director of the moment, it’s a good time to give some love to his overlooked pre-Parasite sci-fi masterpiece Snowpiercer - a fever-dream comedy set on a train forever circling a ruined world.
Book: Boris Akunin’s Fandorin series is sly political commentary and stylistic shapeshifting masquerading as lavish, turn- of-the-century Russian detective novels. Podcasts: The BBC is on a roll with podcasts. Peter Crouch’s warm and hilarious Crouchcast is the gift that keeps on giving, and historical/comedy mash-up You’re Dead To Me is a history lesson for people who don’t give a shit about history - the Josephine Baker episode is tremendous.
Online resource/article: Dangerous Minds is a trove of art, music and pop-culture weirdness. Looking for footage of The Damned jamming with The Clash or the story of mysterious Beatles-alikes Klaatu? They’ve got you covered.
Recipe: Miles Davis’s legendary recipe for beef chilli, also known as “South Side Chicago Chili Mack”. Haven’t tried it, but now is as good a time as any, even if the exact measures involved are a little bit freeform.
Isolation top tip: Don’t spend more time than you need to on the homepages of newspaper websites. It’ll only depress you.
mu
Andrew
Perry
U writer
Rebecca Lucy Taylor
Sell Esteem
Music: Self Esteem, Compliments Please.
I listened to it recently having not done for ages because I’ve written, the next one and I keep thinking, “God, it’s not as good as the first one” and panicking. But it still totally bangs, though my next one is even better.
In my opinion.
Screen: This TV show called The End. It’s on Sky Atlantic and it’s really well-written. It’s about women and ageing Books: I recently read Marina Abramovic’s autobiography, Walk Through Walls. At the moment I’m reading A Song For You: My Life With Whitney Houston by Robyn Crawford, who was Whitney’s secret girlfriend. It’s about her life with Whitney, where she basically confirms that they were together.
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Podcast: I listen to a podcast called Race Chaser,
which is two drag queens discussing RuPaul’s Drag Race. I only seem to be able to listen and watch things to do with drag queens because I can’t compete in it.
Online resource/article: I’m getting soothed by those ‘before’ and ‘after’ pollution maps. I love that. If people weren’t dying in their thousands, I’d be into the idea of a mass stay-in to
reset the world. But iris a shame people are dying. Recipe: I don’t really have a recipe, but because I’m at my mum and dad’s, they’ve got loads of stuff that I don’t buy so I’ve just been on a Ready Steady Cook vibe, making new things up as I go along with what they’ve got.
Isolation top tip: Don’t get in touch with your exes, but do start a wildly misjudged red flag-ridden online relationship.
V
Music: At
8pm every
night after the kids’ bedtime,
I’m playing one disc from Bob Dylan’s The Complete Album Collection Vol. One - the complete Zimm’, in date order, in 43 days. Will 1985’s Empire Burlesque album test my resolve? Hell no, I won’t want lockdown to end, but if I do,
I’ll revert to Rose City Band’s forthcoming Summerlong LP, with its exquisite, upful sonics, and apposite yearning for warmth and freedom.
Screen: I’ve started on Akira Kurosawa’s Samurai Collection because, spared the usual daily grind, I can actually go the full subtitled distance of the genius Japanese auteur’s
epic-length meditations on honour and swordsmanship without conking out - a silver lining to the sudden loss of income!
Book: I’m hallway through Paul Gorman’s The Life 8c Times Of Malcolm McLaren, an inspirationally detailed new biography of the late Sex Pistols manager.
It’s 840 pages long, so I won’t be * ' / done any time soon.
Online resource/article:
I’ve been dipping into NTS Radio’s archive of Andrew Weatherall’s two-hour Music’s Not For Everyone shows which, dating back to July 2014, offers not only an opportunity to muse on the ‘Guv’nori’s passing, but also a regular portal through which to flee to a better kosmische dimension.
Recipe: As we speak, the sun’s out, so later I’ll do “reggae fish” on the BBQ, modified from Grill It With Levi Roots - basically, cod with oil, pepper, sugar and chilli, boiled over charcoal in foil bags. Irie feelin’s!
Isolation top tip: Play more reggae:
on a mental health tip, it’s incontrovertibly
beneficial.
Paul Stokes
Q Writer
Music: Beirut’s 2019 album Gallipoli fills you with the same wanderlust one gets peering out the window on the first morning of a holiday, so goes some way to compensate for the cancelled flight blues.
Screen: I’ve seen all of Morse and Bergerac, so it’s a relief Sicilian series Inspector Montalbano is streaming all year for free on BBC iPlayer. Clever crime, on an island! Book: At a hefty 800-plus pages,
The Mirror 8c The Light, the final part of Hilary Mantel’s Tudor trilogy, has arrived just in time for isolation.
Podcast: Cocaine 8c Rhinestones is probably the best named podcast ever. You’ll love country music’s stories, even if you hate the ‘twang’.
Online resource/article: Duolingo is a free language learning app, governed by a bossy green owl. My Italian streak is currently 1105 days and counting...
Recipe: A Negroni: one part gin, one part Campari, one part red vermouth. Easy. Isolation top tip: Always charge your phone in a different room if you don’t want to lose the whole day to social media.
12 Q JUNE 2020
IAN J JACKSON
Ten Commandments
THE ROCK STAR S GUIDE TO LIFE
THE
COMMANDMENTS
IN THEIR OWN WORDS
From Iggy Pop and Debbie Harry, to Noel Gallagher and Chuck D - The 10 Commandments: The Rock Star’s Guide To Life... presents the golden rules for living from 50 stars across music’s generational spectrum.
Packed with lots of brand new interviews, plus some of our old favourites. All are deeply illuminating.
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©
Q>
O
O
a
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Where Are You Right Now?
What sort of shades of paint do they go for in a brothel?
It was the standard magnolia. It was me and this older guy employed to spruce up the place, so we were painting hallways and bathrooms. It was very odd, seeing clients come in and we just had to get on with our job. It wasn’t the worst job, but it was probably the oddest job. I was an efficient and disciplined painter and decorator.
“It’s an illusion that ifyou want to write dark music, yon need te do it in the dark.”
The South Londoner with a sharp line in electronic-tinged rock reflects on the time he redecorated a brothel.
Hello, Ghostpoet, where are you right now?
I’m in the glamorous offices of my PR company in East London. The view’s amazing, the plant life is delicious. There’s a wood finish here that’s inspiring. I might put it into my own property.
Your fifth album is coming out soon.
What was the most annoying thing about making it?
Probably the logistical side of it, which involved me having a large spreadsheet that I had to constantly keep checking to make sure I was recording everything. I saw it done by somebody else and I thought, “Yeah, that’s what I need to do to keep everything on track.” But it just became an obsession.
So even dark artistry requires serious admin?
Yeah. You know on phones you can get the night-time skin, I tried to make it like that but I couldn’t work out how to do it on the spreadsheet. That was probably even more annoying.
The record is titled I Grow Tired But Dare Not Fall Asleep. On average, how much sleep are you clocking per night?
Not as much as I would like, if I’m honest. But I’m working on it. With this record, I was working to set hours partly because I was living in Margate and recording in London. I’m not really a fan of working into the night. Any ideas that you have in your mind can be
You are quite militant on Twitter at pulling people up if they tag your music with a label you don’t like. In the past 24 hours, you’ve told someone off for calling you “trip-hop” and another for cal ling you “urban”. What label annoys you the most?
I can’t recall. In the moment, it feels like something I need to talk about so I say something, then I forget about it. I don’t want to stress myself out by constantly thinking about it but I just feel it’s important for all artists to be represented how they feel they’d like to be represented. Ultimately, we are the people who make the music so if anyone should know what they’re making or how they’re making it, it’s us.
What’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever bought?
I don’t buy stupid things! Everything has its place and purpose. I value the small amount of money that I have so I try to avoid buying stupid things.
Very sensible. What will you be doing in 20 minutes?
Getting some food. That’s my next mission.
Enjoy. Thanks for your time, Obaro.
No problem at all. See ya, bye.
NIALL DOHERTY
put down whenever. I think it’s a bit of an illusion that if you want to write dark music, you need to do it in the dark.
Are you typically a speak-on-the-phone or text kind of person?
I am both. I think it depends on the circumstance and depends on how quickly I need to get a particular bit of information across. Sometimes it’s easier to talk, sometimes it’s easier to text.
What’s the worst job you’ve ever had?
I was a painter and decorator in a brothel. That was the worst. I was quite young.
I probably shouldn’t say where it was.
Ghostpoet, aka Obaro Ejimiwe, checks out the plant life at his PR company in East London.
14 Q JUNE 2020
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Breaking
Mongolian metal marauders on
a mission to save the world
ven in the theatre of the outlandish that is Camden Market, the four top-knot- and-tunic-clad men parading through its passageways like stray members of Genghis Khan’s rampaging horde draw stares. They are The Hu, and North London is the latest stop-off on their mission to bring the culture and history of their native Mongolia to the wider world via the unlikely medium of modern metal.
“As nomadic people, we respect and love this earth and nature, and as Mongolians, we believe in the eternal blue sky and that good things come from above,” says singer Galbadrakh “Gala” Tsendbaatar via a translator, as we sit in the dressing room of the nearby Electric Ballroom, where The Hu
Get This Track: Yuve Yuve Yu
For Fans Of: Lordi, Iron Maiden
Tap. But The Hu invert historical infamy to focus on his civilising influence. “Yes, he was a warlord, but he created the first diplomatic passport,” says Jaya, who was raised in a nomadic family in Western Mongolia and as a youngster rode horses in traditional sports festival the Nadaam. “The postal service, international trading, religious freedom - these were progressive back then.”
The Hu are more than just Horrible Histories as soundtracked by Iron Maiden. Yuve Yuve Yu despairs at the current climate emergency, urging Mongolia’s youth to connect with the world around them. “Why are we not taking care of this earth?” says Gala sadly. ‘Why are younger people not respecting the ancestors?
It’s a universal message - global warming, the way we treat this world. It’s not just a Mongolian problem.”
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LU4
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,
will play a sold-out show this evening.
The Hu may cite Western bands such as Slipknot and Foo Fighters as influences, but their debut album, The Gereg, is the sound of the Steppes. Galloping anthems such as Yuve Yuve Yu are built around traditional Mongolian horsehead fiddles and three-string lutes, and Gala and co-vocalist Nyamjantsan “Jaya” Galsanjamts’s otherworldly throat-singing.
“Singing in Mongolian and throat-singing go hand in hand,” says Jaya, who trained with the Mongolian Traditional National Orchestra. “It’s hard to do it in any other language.”
The shadow of their home country’s most famous son looms large over The Hu. Their song The Great Chinggis Khaan salutes the bloodthirsty 1 3th-century warlord who conquered much of Eurasia. So far so Spinal
The Hu’s merging of East and West has attracted some unexpected fans. Elton John recently FaceTimed Gala to say how much he loved them. European festival organisers have been queueing up to book them, while back home the band have been awarded the prestigious Order Of Genghis Khan - an honour only ever bestowed on 1 1 people previously.
“We want to share our culture, our music,” says Gala, ever the pitchman for his homeland. “Forget about five-star hotels. When you go to Mongolia, you will see five billion stars.” From the Steppes to Europe, via Camden Market, The Hu are out to spread the word. DAVEEVERLEY
It-
Taking a bow: (left) The Hu onstage at Electric Ballroom, London; (right, from left) Temka, Gala, Jaya and Enkush hit Camden Market, February 2020.
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16 Q JUNE 2020
“As Mongolians we believe in the eternal bine shy and that good things come from above.” Gala
JUNE 2020 Q 17
MARCO VITTUR
/
Out to lun^h with...
The Savages singer discusses her solo career and drops a few insults over a chicken salad.
ehnny Beth takes a seat at a table inside Tempio, a bustling Italian restaurant situated below Temple Chambers in central London, and looks around her. It’s a sunny, Friday lunchtime in early March and tables are filling up with giddy diners from the surrounding solicitors’ offices. “I wouldn’t have chosen here,” she says, her accent a mix of native French with a hint of cockney thrown in, overspill from a decade spent living in London. “I would have taken you to Banner’s in Crouch End, my old local. But I’m working near here,” she explains.
As singer with Savages, Beth is a thrillingly fierce and antagonistic performer but today she chirpily scans the menu and is immediately warm company. “OK, I’m not going to take hours,” she says aloud to herself, “I’m just going to go quickly into... chicken salad.” She places the menu back on the table. “You know there was this big businessman,” she confides, “I don’t know
who he was, but he’d always take prospective employees for lunch, deciding if he would hire them depending on how long they would take to decide on their meal.”
We’d both be successful applicants today, Beth opting for her salad and me for Chicken Milanese. Time is of the essence. The singer is on her lunchbreak after spending the morning in a studio at her book publisher’s office. She’s been recording the audio version of C.A.L.M.: Crimes Against Love Memories, a collection of erotic stories she’s written that will be released later this year. This
“My initial thought is, ‘No,
I can’t!’ But that’s just fear and I try not to be led by that.”
summer will also see the arrival of her debut solo album, To Love Is To Live, a record that moves away from Savages’ fiery rock sound and into gothic pop, electronic ambience and haunting balladry.
Beth had mulled over the idea of a solo record while she was touring with Savages and was coerced into action by PJ Harvey, when Harvey insisted Beth open for her at an Eden Projects gig in 2016. “I was like,
‘No way, I can’t, I’m not ready,”’ she recalls. “She was like, ‘You’ve got 10 days, you can do it.’ I thought it was a great challenge and I didn’t want to say no to her, she’s so great and inspiring.”
As our food arrives, Beth explains that saying yes to things before you know you can do them is a useful way to test yourself. “My initial thought is usually,
‘No, I can’t!’ But that’s just fear and I try not to be led by that.”
Although To Love Is To Live is for all intents and purposes a solo record,
Beth says it was never just her making it. There’s a number of collaborators across its 11 tracks, including her boyfriend and long-term artistic associate Johnny Hostile, Nine Inch Nails’ Atticus Ross,
The xx’s Romy Madley Croft and a spoken- word piece from actor Cillian Murphy.
“He was a fan of Savages so I reached out to him,” explains Beth of the Peaky Blinders star’s involvement. “He has this intimacy about the way he says things. He made it more personal.”
Beth currently lives in Paris, relocating there three years ago with Johnny Hostile, but London still feels more like home to her than the French capital. She moved here from her hometown of Poitiers, western France, when she was 20 and spent the next 12 years here. “I knowthis city much more than I know Paris, and I have all my friends here.”
Oe finish up our food and it’s almost time for Beth to head back and continue recording the audio book. “It’s very tiring,” she says. “They thought I could do it in one day but I don’t think so, there’s 12 stories and I’ve only done two so far. Fucking hell, it’s hard!”
Asked if she feels like she’s in a scene from Toast Of London, she embarks on a full impression of Matt Berry’s comedy character
18 Q JUNE 2020
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||
Here’s Jehnny!: Beth takes a break from recording her audiobook to dine with Q.
TEMPO
BAR &
www. tempio. co. uk
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interacting with his nemesis. “‘Hello, this is Clem Fandango, can you hear me?’ ‘Yes, fucking hell, I canhearyou!”’ she says. “Yeah, it’s a bit like that. It’s more my accent because some words I don’t pronounce the English way.”
We head out into the sunshine and say our goodbyes, before she departs with a bombshell. “You know, you sound a bit like Steven Toast,” she says suddenly.
And then she’s off, leaving your writer to deal with the shock of this announcement, laughing to herself and waving goodbye as she strolls down the road. Jehnny Beth might be on a new artistic path but there’s still a bit of devil in her. That old antagonism dies hard. NIALL DOHERTY
CAN I TAKE YOUR ORDER PLEASE. MS RETH?
Favourite restaurant?
“Banner’s in Crouch End, London. It’s a Jamaican jerk chicken place. There’s a plate on the wall from Bob Dylan cos he used to sit there. It was my local when I first moved to London, I used to go there a lot and sit in the Bob Dylan chair.” Culinary speciality?
“I’m really good at baking. Well,
I shouldn’t say that I’m really good but I love baking. I was speakingto my TV PR and asking, ‘Is there any way I could go on Bake Off?’ I’d love to do it! I’d be competitive and I think I’d be upset if I didn’t present somethinggood enough.”
Most detested foodstuff?
“I don’t think I hate anything, but I
was a teacher in a British school in Enfield and the food was disgusting. It was pizza and fries and that was it, every lunch! That’s insane! It was a massive shock.” Death Row dinner?
“Canyou really eat whenyou’re goingto die? I know my dessert.
I want a Mirabelle plum tart. For the main, probably a ratatouille. They’re both quite homely.”
What food did you miss when you left France?
“When I first moved to London,
I didn’t have a lot of money so I think I was missing my grandma’s chicken. My family are farmers and here it was more like Morrisons’ chicken... which is not as good.”
JUNE 2020 Q 19
Breaking
Meet the Canadian singer who alchemises raw, emotional dirt into chart-topping pop gold.
azing out of the window of her London hotel suite, Jessie Reyez has the faraway stare of someone who’s seen a lot. “I’ve done shit,” she says, her thick Canadian accent underscored by the lilt of her Colombian roots. Only she’s not referring to relationship implosions, the kind detailed on 201 7’s breakthrough single Figures (100m Spotify streams and counting), or the myriad emotional mazes traversed on her debut album, Before Love Came To Kill U s, but her previous London-based tourist exploits. “We’ve done London Bridge, and the first time we came we saw the Crown Jewels...”
Bom in Toronto,
For Fans Of: Amy
Winehouse, Kehlani, Eminem
Get This Track: Figures
the 28-year-old’s childhood was tough financially, but her parents instilled in her an ambitious streak early on, one that led to her taking piano lessons at a local music school aged three. “I was bossy as hell,” she smiles. “The teacher would be like, 'This is howyou do it’ and I’d be like, ‘No, this is howyou do it.’” School was a battleground too. “The teachers were always calling the house and telling my mum about my bad behaviour,” she huffs. One day, however, the phone rang with positive feedback about a poetry assignment Reyez had poured her heart into. This new creative outlet soon morphed into songwriting, offering Reyez the chance to “say everything you have to say without getting interrupted”.
In her early 20s she
landed a place at the Remix Project, an art incubator for at-risk youth in Toronto. It was there that she honed her songwriting skills, ending up in writing camps making songs for other artists. It’s a creative muscle she still flexes, with co-writes on Calvin Harris’s recent UK chart-toppers Promises and One Kiss. Even with the escapist freedom of pop, however, she can’t help but prod others. “In sessions I’ll be like, ‘When’s the last time you cried?’ Then I have the seeds to make
Jessie Reyez: has a healthy disregard for both musical convention and sitting normally.
“I make music selfishly.
The fact that people connect with my songs is a positive by-product...”
something.” It’s this love for emotional excavation that’s caught the attention of both Eminem (Reyez appeared twice on
2018’s Kamikaze), and Billie Eilish, who she’ll support on her forthcoming world tour.
“People who are able to use happiness as Play-Doh, I respect that - but from far away because I don’t get it,” she says. Reyez is also unafraid to make the personal political, from jazz-tinged LP highlight Far Away’s mention of border walls to 2017 single Gatekeeper’s depiction of sexual exploitation in the music industry (“Oh I’m the gatekeeper/Spread your legs...”). While the timing with the #MeToo
movement added extra attention to the song, it was actually recorded 18 months before.
“I make music selfishly,” she says. “The fact that people connect with my songs after the fact is a positive by-product of something that’s like emotional diarrhoea for me.”
She goes on to state that no matter the subject matter, self-censorship is not an option. There’s a pause and a huge grin appears across her face. It turns out she censored herself just once. She sings a snippet of a bitter, anti-Christmas song that never saw the light of day. “People said, ‘You’re going to ruin Christmas for so many kids!”’ she laughs. Reyez is a lot of things - singer, songwriter, fighter - but she’s no Grinch. MICHAEL CRAGG
20 Q JUNE 2020
GAVIN LI
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In The Studio
TRIP
Sampling masterminds head into the afterworld for third album
othing focuses the mind like a deadline. Just ask The Avalanches. After 2000’s acclaimed debut album,
Since I Left You, the Australian duo took a whopping 16 years to release a follow-up. “Difficult second album syndrome” puts it mildly.
“I remember hitting the 10-year mark and thinking, ‘Woah, where does the time go?’” laughs Tony Di Blasi. “Year after year after that it just compounded to the point where it was almost comical.”
“Well, we can laugh about it now at least,” adds bandmate Robbie Chater. “We wanted a deadline for this record. We learned the hard way what happens if you don’t.”
Thankfully, the pair are currently holed up in their Melbourne studio sticking to a self-imposed schedule to keep album number three on track. Heavenly lead track We Will Always Love You was released in February and features airy vocals from Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes mixed in and around a Smokey Robinson sample. It’s a good indicator of where The Avalanches’ heads are currently
at. Namely, the heavens themselves.
“It started with us talking about things like death, the afterlife, the stars, celestial beings and everything that’s out there,” says Di Blasi, “and the music has picked up a lot of that.” It may sound like New-Age hippy claptrap, but the band’s way of thinking was rooted in the realisation that the samples they base their music on are largely taken from artists who have passed away.
“Sampling is our craft.
What we’re doing is recording people’s voices and making representations of the human soul,” explains Chater.
“Everything crystallised around the idea that the human voice lives on in these recordings.”
As well as communicating with those no longer with us, they also started digging out recordings where people have
Due: Summer Title: TBC
Song Titles: We Will Always Love You, Running Red Lights, The Divine Chord, Reflecting Light.
Producers: The
Avalanches
Recorded At: Sing Sing Recording Studios, Melbourne
Fascinating Fact: The
pair’s collaborations with Tricky happened after Chater DM-ed the Bristolian rapper on Instagram. “Eventually our manager emailed us and said: ‘Have you been working with Tricky?! I just got a message from his manager!’ They freaked out because neither of them knew about it,” he
says
“Sampling is our craft”:
The Avalanches at work on their third album.
claimed to be in touch with the dead.
“There’s these special transmitters that people use to try and get the voices of spirits,” says Di Blasi. “It’s fascinating, you can find them on YouTube.”
Some flesh and blood collaborators will appear, too. Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo and LA rapper Pink Siifu appear on the dreamy Running Red Lights. Tricky worked with
22 Q JUNE 2020
“It started with ns talking about things like death, the afterlife, the stars, celestial beings.
a recording of a human heartbeat as part of it and that’s Ann the day before Carl asked her to marry him. This recording of a young woman in love is floating out there in the cosmos forever. I just love that.”
Sending out love, good vibes, great music and voices from beyond the grave - not even the sky is the limit for The Avalanches.
CHRIS CATCH POLE
them on several tracks including The Divine Chord, a sweet dollop of spacey pop that also features Johnny Marr and MGMT. Meanwhile, Neneh Cherry and Jamie xx crop up on the expansive cosmic dub of Wherever You Go, which samples the Voyager Golden
Records, the recordings NASA sent into space in 1977 for alien lifeforms to find.
“We spent a lot of time talking to Ann Druyan, who compiled it with her husband, Carl Sagan. They fell in love while they were making it,” says Di Blasi. “They included
Celestial buddies: The Avalanches’ Robbie Chater (left) and Tony Di Blasi boldly go their own way. Sing Sing Recording Studios, Melbourne, March 2020.
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JUNE 2020 Q 23
p
Cash
Qnestiens
THE EOOES
W YtHtoi
WORDS NIALL DOHERTY PHOTOGRAPHS GAVIN LI
The indie-rock trio on getting booed in Germany, going to school with Adele and their trouble with keeping hold of bassists.
f all the bands who emerged in the mid-’OOs, The Kooks were the ones who looked most likely to be derailed by mainstream success. Even by the time their debut album peaked at Number 2 in the UK charts, they were already without original bassist Max Rafferty due allegedly to an excess of extra-extra-curricular behaviour. But onwards the band marched and, over a further four albums, they have established themselves as one of the country’s most resilient and successful indie-rock bands.
“People say we’ve had a resurgence but I just think the songs have lasted,” says frontman Luke Pritchard, stepping out of a wet Monday morning in central London and into the cosy confines of Bradley’s Spanish Bar. “We’ve had to persevere through some tough times. A lot of people had us out for the count and you have to take that on the chin. But the people who loved our music have stayed with it and it’s stayed fresh for them.” It’s not just those old devotees who’ve kept Pritchard, guitarist Hugh Harris and drummer Alexis Nunez in a job, though. A new generation of fans have discovered the band, streaming their songs in their millions and elevating their live shows to some of the country’s largest venues. This summer, they will appear at London’s All Points East festival, playing to bigger crowds than ever. “There’s a lot of support now,” says Harris. “We’ve taken a few knocks and stood our ground.” It’s the sort of attitude that will hold them in good stead to field queries from curious Q readers...
If The Kooks were a football team, who would they be?
Spencer Rose, Lincoln
Luke Pritchard: Crystal Palace, because they
are always the underdog and they’re the team for the people. It’s not got the big investment or the big hoo-ha but people love them and they occasionally surprise you. They’re my local team.
Hugh Harris: I don’t think we’re cool enough to be a football team. We’d be a badminton team. Something a bit more alt, like Lewes Badminton Club. More shuttlecocks.
What’s the closest you’ve ever come to splitting up?
Stu Bond, Gloucester
H H : I slapped Luke in the face once. It was a dysfunctional period in our history.
LP: You cracked my rib, too. Me and Hugh have had a few fights.
H H : That was more catharsis, where we gave each other the green light to hurt each other.
I think in hindsight there’s much nicer ways of releasing your tension than smacking each other on a bumpy tourbus after a bottle of rum. I don’t think it did us harm, aside from the physical breaking of bones and bleeding of noses.
LP: For me, personally, the closest was probably when there was a time when our original drummer Paul [Garred] had left and we had this other guy learning the songs on. an airplane coming to meet us in Dallas.
We did the first three songs and I just walked offstage. I got on a flight to Miami. With Max [ Rafferty , original bassist] and Paul, it was very personal and at that point we felt quite let down. Personally it was boiling point, in terms of,
‘What’s going to happen?
How can this continue?”
Simon Amstell: alleged Luke Pritchard impersonator?
When you were putting together 201 7’s The Best Of... So Far, were there any hits you wanted to leave off because you thought they were rubbish? Christina Selley, Taunton LP: Yes, one hundred per cent. I was surprised when Naive became a hit. I didn’t want to record it at all, I think Hugh convinced me. I didn’t see the potential in that song at all even though I thought the lyric was interesting. If you’d asked me, that was the last thing I thought would be the big song and it was the big song. If that song hadn’t happened, things would’ve been quite different. It’s a song that bridged the gap between pop and rock’n’roll and has a special place in the world now but at the time I just thought, ‘We’ve got way better songs.”
Luke, have you spoken to Simon Amstell since that very awkward interview on Popworld?
Lorcan McLaughlin, Strabane
LP: It was a weird time, because that was our first ever interview. He definitely blind-sided us, but funnily enough people really liked it and people still watch it on YouTube. Even initially, we didn’t feel any bitterness about it. I’ve seen him since. He came up to me once and launched into this thing where he said he’d once had sex with someone who thought he was me and he never told them it wasn’t, so they’ve always walked around thinking they had sexwith me. I was like, “Cool, man. Great story!”
H H : He basically impersonated you to have sexwith someone?
LP: Yeah. Quite strange. Isn’t that weird?
H H : And he did a comedy show about us needing psychiatric help?
Who would you invite to a BRIT School reunion?
Cameron Baker-Nate, London
HH: Adele. She was in the year below me.
She’s fucking hilarious, she hasn’t changed at all. She came up to me at BBC Radio l’s Big Weekend with a burger in her hand, going, ‘Awight, mate!” She’s so cool.
LP: There was a lot of competition at the BRIT School.
HH: There was a real competitive spirit and people who were sucked into that nature didn’t do well.
LP: It was a very small music class as well, 20 people in each class, E so it was very competitive and ft intense. Leona Lewis was ft there. I used to play guitar in ft her band. She’d be invited.
■ Producer Blue May too, he’s ft agreat producer and a great ■ guy. There’s been a shift about artists who’ve gone to the BRIT School now »
24 Q JUNE 2020
DAVID FISHER/SHUTTERSTOCK
'We’ve taken a few knocks and stood our ground.” The Kooks (from left, Alexis Nunez, Luke Pritchard and Hugh Harris) come out fighting, Bradley’s Spanish Bar, Fitzrovia, London, February 2020.
“Some people just can’t hack it. The lifestyle isn’t for everyone. It affects people in different ways, bass players maybe.”
■ L 1 Pritchard
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“Who mentioned John Borrell?!” The Kooks “had a few pops” from the Razorlight frontma (below) anyone for cri
[KingKrule and Black Midi are among the artists who also attended the performing arts college in Croydon , South London] and maybe we were a reason why it changed. Bands like us weren’t meant to come from places like that but we did, and we’re great.
HH: There were a lot of blurred lines. There were a lot of bands that were manufactured at the time and once you introduced the idea of schooling behind that, people are right to second-guess and question whether your intentions are true surrounding music and writing, so it’s fair enough. But we proved them wrong.
You’ve gone through a lot of bassists. What have you got against them? lain Bailey, Liverpool Alexis Nunez: It just hasn’t worked out!
LP: [Counting on fingers] I think we’ve had five? Six? The thing is, some people just can’t hack it. The lifestyle isn’t for everyone.
It affects people in different ways, bass players maybe.
H H : Every bass player who’s played with The Kooks has been a genius at playing the bass,
but if you can’t step up to the lifestyle and everything that surrounds touring an album then it becomes very difficult.
It’s not for everyone.
AN: They’re frustrated guitarists.
What’s the most disgusting thing you’ve ever eaten?
India Boyce, Shrewsbury
HH: I once had semen of cod in Japan. Itwas milky and salty. I didn’t select it, it was ordered during the meal that I had. I used to play this game where I’d think it was quite cool to eat crazy things.
In actual fact, it just made me ill quite a lot of the time.
LP: I’ve had ants and crickets in Mexico. They say it’ll save the planet if we can all eat insects, because they’re high in protein.
AN: I’m not that Ah
adventurous.
HH:
Wasn’t there one
tour where you ate fried chicken every day? AN: The first American tour after I joined, yeah. Any fried chicken I could get my hands on. It was the first time I’d toured the States. LP:Weall came back two stone heavier.
AN: My daughter didn’t recognise me when I walked in the door.
Do you feel like survivors of the mid-noughties indie scene?
Bernadette Cleary, via Q Mail
LP: It sounds negative, survivor, doesn’t it?
I think that we’ve evolved. We didn’t keep doing the same music. We were part of that time but we’ve taken a lot of risks since.
AN: There are so many bands of that time who’ve faded away.
LP: The big moment was when we did / fourth album] Listen. We were still in that zone and we went and did a completely different album. It kept us alive. You don’t want to be the guy sat in the pub going, “Remember the good old days?”
26 Q JUNE 2020
SHUTTERSTOCK, GETTY, DAVE ALLOCCA/SHUTTERSTOCK, TIM MOSENFELDER/GETTY
Got any pot?” The original
Kooks line-up (from left
Paul Garred, Max Rafferty,
Pritchard and Harris) in 2007
(right) Hugh’s doppelganger
Paul Dano; (below left) "Kooks” or "Boobs”?
“We overheard Mumford & Sons bitch- talking us. They didn’t realise our bass player was in the back.” Hugh Harris
Cash Far
QnestioMs
What’s the worst gig you’ve ever done? Sophie Ellis, York
LP: Coachella was pretty bad.
H H : I threw up in my mouth. I had to swallow it.
LP: Hugh, man.
HH: Sorry. It was quite an emotional and stressful gig.
LP: Another time, there was this punk rock festival and we were in-between a lot of heavy punk bands. Hugh had fucked his hand the night before so I went out and did an acoustic show on my own. I got Euros chucked at me, Zippo lighters. It got heavy, the crowd got really aggressive. Even when I was walking off there were people trying to chuck things at me. That was probably the worst.
H H : Our tour manager at the time thought that the aggression was because we weren’t playing a full band and they were Kooks fans, so he said, “You should go on and show them that you’ve broken your finger.” So I went on with this big bandage on, going [he waves his middlefinger in the air], “See, it’s true, I’ve broken my finger.” Then came the Zippos.
LP: So you sparked it off?
HH: One hundred per cent. My fault.
LP: You should’ve just left me to it, man!
What would people say if you released Jackie Big Tits today?
Michael Cartwright, via Q Mail
LP: I think now it would be cool, right? It’s a character from a film. I was talking about it recently with my wife and my sister-in-law. I’ve never experienced anyone getting uppity about it, we still play it all the time. But I think if we released it now, it might be seen as potentially sexist. But if you look at John Lennon or Serge Gainsbourg, they challenged the listener. Sometimes you have to put things out to raise the questions, that’s something people have to remember now, you can’t rush to judge. Things are going in the right direction in a lot of ways, but sometimes it doesn’t mean things going the way you initially think, especially when it comes to writing songs.
Who would play you in a film about The Kooks?
Gail Hughes, Beeston
HH: I’ve been told I look like Paul Dano.
He’s my doppelganger. I’ve been told I look like a cross between him and Will Ferrell. AN: Kit Harington for me, that dude.
LP: I’ll have Peter Sellers for me please. I like the idea of it being a comedy performance.
Who’s the strangest Kooks fan you’ve ever met?
Jo Court, Canterbury
AN: When I first joined the band, we were doing a show in Japan and there was a girl
who was a really big fan of [original drummer] Paul. She was not happy with me, giving me the evil eye.
LP: Didn’t she book the seat next to you on the plane somehow?
AN: Yes. She freaked me out a little bit.
HH: I wouldn’t necessarily say strange... she’s passionate.
LP: No, that’s pretty weird. She was sat next to him on the plane going, “Where’s Paul?!”
What’s the most Spinal Tap thing to ever happen to you?
Scarlet Beck, Norwich
HH: Day to day, it’s Spinal Tap. I can’t even watch that film, it’s too close to the bone.
LP: The venue thing [of getting lost on the way to the stage] always happens, of course.
If you’re playing a bigger show, to get to the stage, it’s exactly the same.
HH:On our second album tour, for Konk, we had this lightbox which said “Kooks”, but in the font they use at Konk Studios.
I was looking at it at Brixton Academy with our then-drummer Paul and he was like,
“It just looks like Boobs. It doesn’t look like Kooks at all. It looks like Boobs.” Dave, our manager, had to chill him out, ‘Well, Paul, don’t let it affect your performance.”
“No, Dave, I’m not going on under a big sign that says fucking Boobs.” And it kind of did look like it said Boobs. »
JUNE 2020 Q 27
Cask Far Qnestiais
Who out of you would survive the longest on a desert island?
Benjamin James, Nottingham
LP: Hugh. He’s quite resourceful and I feel like he reads and watches enough about survival.
AN: Bear Grylls.
HH:No, it’s Ray Mears. If you were stuck with a Bear Grylls-type character, it’d be really fucking stressful, cos he’d be like, “Come on, we’re gonna scale this mountain, then we’re gonna kill this boar ! ” Ray Mears, who I relate to a little more, would just make some wine while spit-roasting a badger.
What’s the worst thing anyone’s ever said about The Kooks?
Ross Barlow, Worcester
HH: Johnny Borrell had a few pops.
LP: It was the time for the pop back then, wasn’t it?
HH: He said that our record sounded like we were bending over and waiting for Radio 1 to “eff ” us from behind. Which is interesting considering who he’s courting currently and what he’s trying to resuscitate himself.
AN: It’s a lot of bravado.
LP: He said to me afterwards, “Oh, sorry,
I never listened to that album.”
HH: We overheard Mumford & Sons bitch-talking us in the car. They didn’t realise our bass player was in the back of their festival transport.
LP: One of our bass players.
HH: Bass player number two. He overheard it and they were so apologetic.
LP: I mean, everyone slags off everyone else. We ended up doing a song together [at a Swiss festival in 2012] so it was all fine. HH: Except I wasn’t plugged in... God, this is so Spinal Tap.
“The Spinal Tap venue thing always happens... If you’re playing a bigger show, it’s exactly the same.” Luke Pritchard
What are the must-haves on your rider? Emily G, Derby
LP: A life-size cut-out of Kylie Minogue
has been on our rider for ever.
H H : We’ve never gotten it.
LP: We should just buy one. When we’re in America, we always put that we want a vinyl album each.
HH: And stamped postcards.
What’s the weirdest place you’ve ever heard a Kooks song being played?
Megan Brady, Aberdeen
LP; A strip bar. It was the song Bad Habit.
HH: Bad Habit is in the Peter Rabbit 2 trailer too. Isn’t that cool?
LP: If a song can work in a strip bar and Peter Rabbit-
Bob Dylan famously warmed up to your song Ooh La. What other celebrity fans do you have?
Matty Davies, Saffron Walden
HH: Mr X Factor likes us, doesn’t he?
LP: Louis Tomlinson apparently, which is nice. HH: Elton John likes us.
LP: Bob Dylan was an amazing one. The thing with him was unfortunately we never crossed paths and maybe it’s just a song thing, but what has been cool is some younger artists, whether it’s Catfish And The Bottlemen or The 1975, who’ve said, maybe just to us, that they liked our record. It’s what’s kept us alive a little bit.
AN: Bam Margera from Jackass.
LP: He’s a big fan, yeah. He proposed to his wife to Seaside.
H H : He came to our show and we were freaking out because we were like, “He’s up to something, what’s he gonna do, he’s gonna fuck with our show! ” But he was the nicest guy ever. 0
To take part in Cash For Questions, go to Qthemusic.com, follow @Qmagazine on Twitter or visit Facebook (facebook.com/ qmagazine). £25 for each question printed! If yours is printed, email Qmail(a) Qthemusic.com to claim your money.
28 Q JUNE 2020
SHUTTERSTOCK
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Toni Watson shot to mega-global tame in
e
Dance Nonkey, a Number 1 in 30 countries. But the exposure tor this iormer busker has been unbearably harsh,
talks to her about bullying, photo-phobia, P Diddy and why only the tough survive.
GIULIA McGAURAN
Going ape: Tones And I and friends in the promo for the record-breaking Dance Monkey.
ackstage in
the dressing room of Glasgow’s SWG3, just before she plays her first ever show in Scotland, Toni Watson is trying to stifle a yawn, but the yawns just keep coming.
“I’m so sorry for yawning,” she says, in case I take it personally. “I’m just... I’m awake now. It just comes out of me.” The singer, known as Tones And I to the billions of people who have streamed her track Dance Monkey, or watched the video for it, or seen her perform on Ellen or on Jimmy Fallon or on breakfast TV, is fresh from a nap. “And I don’t nap. It’s weird. Usually I’ve been up all day, will go to the gym, will go for a walk and get some lunch, and then we’ll start getting ready for the show, but to fall asleep like that is crazy. Even today, I’ve fallen asleep twice. Am I really this tired?”
She really is, but anybody who had experienced the year that she has had might be feeling the need for a nap, too. It is nine months to the day since Watson released her first ever single in her native Australia, a bombastic pop banger called Johnny Run Away. Now 26, she had spent a portion of her
early 20s living in a van in Byron Bay, taking her keyboards out on the street to busk to passing crowds that had started to grow, and then grow some more, giving her an inkling that she might have an audience for her music. For a debut single, Johnny Run Away was a hit, reaching Number 12 on the Australian charts. Her management told her not to be too disappointed if its follow-up didn’t do as well.
The follow-up was Dance Monkey, a song she had written about busking, and how drunk passers-by would demand that she perform for them. It quickly became the biggest song in the world, not so much breaking records as demolishing them: it topped the charts in 30 countries, has had over two billion streams and made Watson the longest-running female artist to have a Number 1 in the UK, toppling a previous record held jointly by Rihanna’s Umbrella and Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You. The numbers grew so big, so quickly, that they began to blur into a hard-to-grasp mass of success. I mention that one video has 250 million YouTube views. “It’s 750 million,” says Watson, casually, then laughs. “But I mean, maybe it was 250 million last weekend.”
To say it has happened quickly is the mother of all understatements. Watson is lying on a sofa, wearing a huge orange puffa jacket over a white tracksuit, and a beanie hat over a baseball cap, over the blonde hair that falls on her face. Her eyes are practically covered by the shadow of her cap. “This time last year, I’d just released my first song,” she says. “I hadn’t released Dance Monkey yet. I was still trying to work it out, trying to get it right.”
It must feel like a kind of madness, then, to have one’s life change so dramatically, in such a short period of time. Watson has only officially released six songs when we meet, including Dance Monkey and Johnny Run Away, and she has just one EP out, The Kids Are Coming. Tonight’s Glasgow gig is the final stop on a brief sold-out UK tour. “I don’t even have enough songs released for a whole setlist,” she says, though she will plump it up with new songs and a cover of Alphaville’s Forever Young. Outside, there’s a tourbus waiting, the kind that most artists get after a few years on the job, and it will take her, overnight, to an awards show in London. ‘Well, I mean, it is very different,” she says. “The things which I’ve done in the last year are some of the craziest things that I never thought I’d ever do.” Like what? “I mean,
I played the AFL Grand Final, which is like the Australian version of the Super Bowl, and I got to go on the Ellen [DeGeneres]
Show and meet Ellen. I met [US rapper] Macklemore, who’s my favourite artist.
I won Best Female Artist at the Aria Awards and opened the show and won three other Arias as well that night.” »
“I’m a good person and I’m a good role model, but I’m tough as nails. You don’t have to be a pop princess and sing Disney and be super fluffy to be a good role model any more.”
32 Q JUNE 2020
JACK NEALE
“G’day, Scotland!”: Tones And I gets the party started at Glasgow’s SWG3 4 March, 2020.
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,T % |
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55* |
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GIULIA McGAURAN
She talks about the numbers, the awards, the size of it, in such a deadpan tone, that it seems like it hasn’t quite sunk in. “It does blur, but I do realise it,” she says. “I realise it later, when I have time to myself to think. When I’m home and I’m relaxed and I’ve had a few days off and I can really think about it. Then I take it all in.” There is another reason for her drollness, though. “I’m just a really monotone person,” she says, smiling, underneath her cap. “It’s amazing, and I can’t believe my music’s getting recognised, but it’s like all of a sudden, people want you to be really high-pitched and it’s just literally not me. So I always get caught out between either people thinking I’m rude - I’m never being rude - or if I am really high and perky, then me feeling fake, like everything I just said was not genuine at all.”
In the video for Dance Monkey, Watson goofs around with her friends, dressed up as an old man. “That is 100 per cent me,” she says. The video cost $800 to make, and was an excuse for her to run amok on a golf course with her mates, having a laugh. “I have the kind of personality that is silly, but also it protected me, the old Tones. That old man protected me from, you know, being really camera shy, and stuff.”
Watson isn’t keen on having her photo taken, or doing filmed interviews; during the ones that do exist online, you can see her holding her arms across herself, as if an act of protection. She prefers talking on the radio, because she feels she can be herself. “I’m a good person and I’m a good role model, but I’m tough as nails.” Not, she clarifies, the sort of tough where she’d “hit you over three dollars.” But she is tough. “You don’t have to be a pop princess and sing Disney and be super fluffy to be a good role model any more, and that’s just who I am.”
Last November, after Dance Monkey had truly exploded, Watson posted a message on Facebook, in which she thanked her fans for supporting her, but then revealed that she had been “hiding in a big black hole for a while now”. She wrote about how “the relentless bullying that follows every proud moment tears my mind in two... I am going through the best and worst time of my life.”
She says now that she doesn’t really like to talk about it any more. “But it related to how savage online bullies are. I’ve already left high school, and I was like, ‘Cool, I’m done with that, yay, normal world.’ And then you’re like, ‘Oh my God, I actually am achieving my dreams, everything I ever wanted, I’m working so hard and I’m getting results, and I can say that I’m an artist and I can live off it.’ But then the online bullying started, and I was like, ‘Whoa, this is way worse than anything I ever experienced in school.’” On a practical level, she made the decision to simply stop looking at social media. “If you don’t go on social media, it just disappears,” she reasons.
Street hustle: (left) Tones And I busks in Byron Bay, New South Wales, prior to hitting the big time.
he fairytale version of the Tones And I story is that, inspired by a friend, Watson packed in her job in a clothes shop, bought a van to live in, and moved from Melbourne to Byron Bay, to make a go of it as a busker. There, she had a chance encounter with a certain Jackson Walkden- Brown, who saw her perform in Byron Bay, the first time she went out busking. “He walked past me, and said, ‘Here’s my card.’ It said ‘entertainment lawyer’, and I was like, ‘I don’t have any legal issues.’ He said, ‘Just call me.’” She waited three weeks. “I was like, ‘What’s up?’ He said, ‘I’m going to help you make a demo CD and you’re going to busk full-time.’” He became her co-manager, and she moved in with his family while she worked on her act.
She had always wanted to be a singer. “I’ve been singing since I was little. Never had a lesson, though, I refused to.” Considering Dance Monkey’s success, there is little out there about her early life. “I know. That’s on purpose, yeah,” she says. Some tabloid reports suggested that she had tried out for The X Factor, a few years ago, and she yawns when I bring it up. “I was pretty young when I tried out. I don’t know. Just not for me,” she shrugs. Why is she so keen on keeping that sense of mystery? “If I needed to talk to anyone about myself as a child or my upbringing, I have friends I can speak to.
I don’t need to speak to the world and get their opinion,” she says matter-of-factly.
She has already heard their opinion, she continues, on social media. “I mean, if I was welcomed with opened arms into the industry, and I wasn’t absolutely ripped to shreds to the point where other artists were saying, ‘You’ve really copped it’, maybe I’d be
“I am achieving my dreams. I can say that I’m an artist and I can live off it. But then the online bullying started, and I was like, Whoa, this is way worse than anything I ever experienced in school.’”
34 Q JUNE 2020
TONES AND I
more inclined to opening up, but right now this is about as far as I’m allowing myself to go. Because I haven’t been that well- supported in the past. People thought I was just this pop EDM chick that wrote a track in her room, and they didn’t bother looking at me or my story, or what I’ve done and the effort I’ve put in. They just wanted to hate a song because I have a weirdly high-pitched voice in it. Fine, but I’m not going to tell you one more thing about me then, because you obviously don’t care to know.”
f this all makes the business of becoming a huge pop star practically overnight sound joyless, then it isn’t the full picture. Maybe we should end this chat on a joyful note.
“I know!” laughs Watson. “It’s the way I speak, it’s so monotonous! I’ve got a very dry sense of humour as well. I’m like [90s animated sitcom character] Daria.” Besides, there is plenty of joy in her life right now.
She says she met P Diddy recently. “And I can’t even believe I met Ellen, that’s just crazy. Like, to have a photo in my house of me hugging Ellen, and to wake up every morning like, ‘What’s up, Ellen?”’
The last year has been insane, she will admit. Even in an industry that’s increasingly unpredictable, this kind of success story never, ever happens. “I know! I don’t even know what made it go like this. I don’t know what made it this big,” she says, smiling. “But I’m not mad about it. Well, I mean, give me a day off. I would like a day off.”
Then there’s the show tonight. “I’m so excited for it, honestly, I need it,” she says, lighting up at the mere thought, waking up, at last. “I cannot believe I’m in Scotland.”
The Glaswegian crowd that greets her is up for it, lively, happy to be in her presence, giving it the full “here we fuckin’ go” chant. Watson comes alive onstage, twirling and jumping and leaping, and it’s clear that this is what she loves doing. She may only have six songs out, but she’s got plenty up her sleeve, and plenty of stories to tell about them.
She introduces a new song, as yet unrecorded, with a tale about a recent trip to LA. A hot-shot producer asked her to feature on a track, but she turned him down.
“I’m really happy to write my own music and be my own musician,” she tells the audience. Nevertheless, she took him up on an invitation to go to a fancy party in Hollywood and took a friend along. It transpired quickly that it wasn’t their scene.
“We decided to go back to the hotel and order Uber Eats and watch Netflix,” she concludes, but hey, she got a song out of it. The crowd loses its marbles. At the end of her short, sweet set, Watson waves them a cheerful goodbye. “Thanks for wanting more than one song,” she says, dancing off the stage. 09
JUNE 2020 Q 35
Have guitar, will travel: Jason Isbell and his trusty 1959 Les Paul “Red Eye”
“The reason I stayed sober was becanse I wanted to improve myself.
WORDS: CHRIS CATCHPOLE PHOTO: ALYSSE GAFKJEN
The Grammy-winning singer-songwriter and former Drive-By Trucker shares his life lessons.
1
Lay Off The Sauce
I’ve been sober for eight years now and that’s my first priority in order to keep everything else working. I know that’s not the case for everyone, but for me the bigger lesson is, “knowyourself and know your limits.” I get up every day and think, “Whatever happens today I’m not going to drink...” Everything else falls into place after that.
If I woke up now feeling like I used to every morning, I would immediately need to go to the emergency room.
Don’t Lie To Yourself, Or Other People (Within Reason)
Being honest with yourself is sometimes the most difficult thing to do but it’s also the most rewarding because then you can really take an inventory of your life and own up to the things that you’re responsible for. It makes you able to be honest with other people, too. Now, I have a four-year-old daughter so I can’t exactly expound on everything in the world to her. I don’t want to wind up in a conversation about an episode of Forensic Files with a four-year-old, but I tell the truth whenever possible.
2
6
self Happy, Then You Can ’arent, Partner Or Friend
Make Yoursc Be A Good Parent,
Find your happiness within yourself. It’s not my wife’s j ob to make me feel better, it’s my job to make me feel better and once I’ve done that I can be of service to the people around me. I initially went into rehab because of my wife. I thought, “If I keep on living like this she’s not going to put up with it...” That made for a good catalyst but the reason I stayed sober was because I wanted to improve myself and I wanted to be happier. You can’t make a huge change just for somebody else because then it won’t last.
7
3
Count Your Blessings
If I’m down, I can turn it around by listing the things that I’m grateful for. It puts things in perspective. Just the fact that I was given the opportunity to live for 41 years and do the things that I’ve been able to do makes all my problems seem small. The more I remind myself of that, the happier I am.
4 Do Yonr 13-Year-Old Self A Favour
I never wanted to be an astronaut or a firefighter or anything else other than this. Once I realised that there were people out there who played instruments for their job, I was sold. If I were to go back to 13-year-old me and show him the guitars that I have now he would follow any piece of advice that I gave him based purely on my guitars. I have a 1959 Les Paul and a ’70s Marshall head that used to belong to Neil Young so whenever I have the chance, I plug it in and turn the knobs all the way to the right just as a service to that kid with his cheap copy guitar and tiny amplifier.
5
Don’t Be An Asshole
My behaviour could become the waterline for what my daughter thinks is OK. If she sees me being an asshole to the waiter in a restaurant, fast forward 20 years and she’s having dinner with some guy who is being an asshole and she might think, “Ah, that’s not so bad, Dad did that.” It doesn’t just apply to your children, because also in the entertainment world shitty people can write great songs. But I don’t want to love that music and overlook those people’s bad behaviour.
THOU SHALT COVET THESE FIVE ALBUMS
Carol King Tapestry
“It's an album that makes me appreciate what it's like to be someone that I’m not.”
John Prine John Prine
“How could he write a song like Sam Stone when he was that young? He was just a kid. It's incredible.”
OutKast
Aquemini
“Growing up in the South in the '90s you had to have this album.”
Bob Dylan Blonde On Blonde
“This was Dylan needing to stay in touch with what he called the Thin wild mercury sound'. It was a successful attempt to stay in touch with that wild part of himself.”
Prince
Sign O’ The Times
“There are people who are great songwriters and great entertainers and great musicians but I don't think all three of those things have ever existed in the same amount in anybody else as much as Prince.”
Everyone Needs An Editor
When I write a song my wife sees it first. She doesn’t use a red pen, but she will go through it and say, “I think this is a cliche” or “I think this is a bit vague...” A lot of songwriters don’t have that. If you’re writing a novel you have editors that do probably as much as you do to try and whip it into shape, but most of the time songwriters are just left to their own devices.
It’s really important to have people around you who say: “I think you can do better.”
There’s Always Somebody Who Has It Worse Than You
When I grew up in Alabama we lived in a trailer in my grandmother’s yard. My parents were teenagers and we didn’t have a whole lot. I got a little older and I went past a Native American reservation and all of a sudden I thought, “Oh no, I didn’t grow up poor,
I was fine...” Most of us had some sort of advantage and once you recognise that it makes it easier to sympathise with other people.
8
9
Vote Like Yon’re Broke
If you’re lucky enough to have some success in the world, try to make as many decisions as you can from the perspective of someone who has less than you have. I tell people: “Vote like you’re broke.” Whether you have money or not, vote like you have no money at all and everybody will wind up better for that.
10
Keep Up With The Kids
I try to stay current but also don’t fight the fact that I’m getting older. I’m not going to make an attempt to sound like Billie Eilish or Doja Cat, but I like the fact that I can appreciate music that people half my age are listening to. It keeps me from getting out of touch. A big problem is older people feel isolated from the younger community and feel like they don’t understand them. But if you listen to the music that they’re making you realise: “OK, they’re not that different from me, they just move a little bit faster.” El
JUNE 2020 Q 37
You may currently be in lockdown at home, but the sustenance. DORIAN LYNSKEY investigates the most
world of PODCASTING provides escape and mental rewarding music podcasts to while away the hours with.
PODCASTS
ONE OF MARCH
Hey
CH
RFUL
was an episode of Reply All, a podcast about internet culture, called The Case Of The Missing Hit. A man called Tyler Gillett approached co-host PJ Vogt to solve a mystery. He vividly remembered a song from the late ’90s, down to the tiniest detail, but couldn’t find anyone else who did, nor the slightest trace of it online. Had he imagined it? How could a radio hit just disappear? Vogt’s search for answers, involving memory, obsession and the madness of the pre-Napster music business, was hailed as “the best podcast episode ever” and “instantly legendary”. Vogt suggested that it became “something for anyone who felt stuck and needed something to focus on”: a joyful distraction in scary times.
It could only have been a podcast. You couldn’t hear Gillett’s enigmatic earworm (or at least his recreation of it) in print. The story isn’t visual enough for a TV documentary and it’s too idiosyncratic for most radio stations. Hugely versatile in tone and form, free to access whenever you want, with bingeable archives for latecomers, podcasts offer a new way to think and talk about music.
Bringing together two audio media feels like a no-brainer but music podcasts were slow to take off. The first online music show, NPR’s All Songs Considered, debuted on RealPlayer in 2000, four years before the word “podcast” even existed. “I called it ‘ a music show, for your computer!”’ says co-host Bob Boilen. “That phrase makes me laugh now, but I didn’t know of anyone else back then doing an online music show.
I j ust knew that the world was ripe for listening to things at their convenience.”
Even when the iTunes store popularised the new format in 2005, music was underrepresented. “A lot of people were thinking about it but I feel like it took another 10 years before anyone else really built on it,” says Boilen’s colleague Robin Hilton.
Well-funded legacy broadcasters such as NPR and the BBC were the first to exploit the format. Hits like Desert Island Discs and Soul Music are primarily radio shows, although podcasting has given them global reach and infinite shelf life. Next up were podcast specialists such as Radiotopia, home of Song Exploder, and Spotify,
“Music - and the companionship of music conversation - is one of the few things bringing
comfort right now.”
Robin Hilton, All Songs Considered podcast
which has invested in original series such as Stay Free: The Story Of The Clash. Then there are celebrity hosts such as Rick Rubin and Malcolm Gladwell, who ransack their enviable address books for A-listers to interview on Broken Record.
But one of the form’s advantages is that you can make something great in a bedroom or basement with just a laptop and a decent microphone. “They’re the Do-It-Yourself format,” says Lucas Hare of the Bob Dylan podcast Is It Rolling, Bob? “The best - and worst - thing about podcasts is that anyone can do one.”
Many of the best are solitary labours of love, funded by Patreon donations. The intimacy of podcasting, says Hare, means that hosts can feel like good friends. “There are family members whose voices I hear less frequently than podcast hosts. They become comforting presences in your life.”
Podcasts lend themselves most easily to conversation. James Acaster, whose forthcoming BBC Sounds series Perfect Sound Whatever tests his theory that 2016 was the best music year ever by discussing key albums with fellow comedians, cites old-school chat kingpin Michael Parkinson as an influence. “Now on chat shows they’re trying to make a clip that goes viral but I like getting lost in a long conversation,” he says. “Podcasts are where that exists now. They don’t have to be in-your-face. It can just be a nice chat.”
More analytical podcasts such as Strong Songs and Dissect,
meanwhile, constitute a dynamic new form of music j ournalism which allows you to hear the songs under discussion. “When I was a blogger, I found writing about music to be surprisingly difficult,” says Strong Songs host Kirk Hamilton. “It’s so much easier if I can have an instrument on hand and play excerpts.”
A third category, which includes long-form narratives, deeply reported investigations and documentary anthologies, taps the podcast’s enormous potential for storytelling. “When listeners press play, it’s their mind working within the audio world you’ve created that breathes life into the story,” says Tyler Mahan Coe of the popular country music history series Cocaine & Rhinestones. “They bring their own imagination to the table.”
What unites all the best podcasts is a passionate impulse to explore what music means to us, whether emotionally or culturally. Now that the music industry has abruptly entered an ice age, they can help to plug a vast hole in the landscape. “Music - and the companionship of music conversation - is one of the few things bringing people some real comfort right now,” says Robin Hilton. Music podcasts have always been enjoyable, but right now they feel like a lifeline.
40
JUNE 2020
GETTY
RACHAEL WRIGHT, MICHAEL CAULFIELD/GETTY
(Radiotopia, 2014-)
Cocaine & Rhinestones
(Independent, 2017-)
The pitch: Musicians take apart their songs and, piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made.
The story: “The creative process isn’t only about big ideas,” says host Hrishikesh Hirway, a musician himself. “It’s also an accumulation of small ideas, tiny bits of inspiration, failed attempts, and problem solving.” Hearing the likes of Lorde, Wolf Alice and U2 share a sketchy demo or isolated vocal track is as close as you’ll get to being inside the studio. Each addictively bite-sized episode tells a different story about creativity. “It’s taught me that there is no ‘correct’ way to make a song,” says Hirway. “You just have to do the best you can with what you’ve got, all the time.” Start here: The epic journey of Vampire Weekend’s Harmony Hall from mumbled 2011 Voice Memo to final mix.
Try this: Broken Record.
Rick Rubin and Malcolm Gladwell get big names to open up.
The pitch: The true history of country music.
The story: “I’ve heard these stories my whole life,” says Tyler Mahan Coe before each episode. “As far as I can tell, here’s the truth about this one.” The son of Nashville maverick David Allen Coe, he tells stories that have been “misrepresented, misreported or misunderstood” and his charismatic, up-close yarn-spinning (he records alone in his basement at night) makes them irresistible. Researching, writing, recording and editing each episode takes up to 100 hours, which explains both why Season Two is overdue and Season One is such a treasure trove. “I’m bringing this music, and the people who made it, back to life for a world that thought it could no longer relate to these things,” says Coe.
Start here: The story of Loretta Lynn’s The Pill is a masterclass in social history, fly this: Disgraceland. Where rock’n’roll muckraking meets true crime.
Song Exploder tells the epic story of how Vampire Weekend’s Harmony Hall came to be.
There must be an angel: Kanye West gets unpacked on Dissect.
(Spotify, 201 6-)
The pitch: Dissect selects a single iconic album per season, and unpacks the lyrics, music and meaning of one song per episode.
The story: Music college graduate Cole Cuchna was working for a coffee company when he started Dissect in his Sacramento garage to share his obsession with Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly. Subsequent series have unpacked albums by Kanye West, Frank Ocean, Lauryn Hill and Tyler, the Creator. ‘We’re speaking about recent history in a way that’s typically reserved for history books,” says Cuchna.
He hooked up with Spotify in 2018, but his distinctive tone - smart, passionate, idealistic - hasn’t changed. “Hopefully you come out of a season knowing a little more about the world we live in, and a little more about yourself as well.”
Start here: Kanye’s Power explained via Beethoven and Greek mythology.
Try this: AlbumtoAlbum. Journalist Arsalan Mohammad’s fantastic voyage through David Bowie’s back catalogue.
Soul Music
(BBC Sounds, 2000-)
The pitch: Tributes to the life-changing power of enduring classics.
The story: Radio 4’s beloved institution launched 20 years ago with an episode on Elgar’s Cello Concerto and its 28th series recently concluded with (Sittin’
On) The Dock Of The Bay. The capacious remit is music that moves people, whether it’s The Cure’s Boys Don’t Cry or Auld Lang Syne, and each episode’s thoughtful collage of voices (artists, critics, fans) invites a deeper appreciation of even the most overplayed songs: you’ll never hear Carole King’s You’ve Got A Friend the same way again. Crafted with love and patience (one episode on Wagner took five years to complete), it’s perhaps the only music podcast that regularly reduces listeners to tears.
Start here: Hallelujah (Season 20).
TVy this: Desert Island Discs.
The show launched in 1942 and has become a podcast sensation. »
JUNE 2020 Q 41
PODCASTS
Sodajerker
On
Songwriting
(Independent, 2011-)
Strong
rw**
Sodajerker
On Songwrfng
(Independent, 2018-) The pitch: Classic songs broken down to a subatomic level.
The story: “Everyone likes music, but a lot of people don’t have the tools to really articulate why they like what they like,” says trained jazz musician Kirk Hamilton. “I want to lend my ears to listeners, and help them hear what I hear.” When he piloted the concept with his pet theory about the popularity of Toto’s Africa, Hamilton found an audience for his cheerfully accessible brand of musicology, which leaves you feeling much cleverer without bamboozling you with jargon. Tunnelling deep inside songs ranging from Bohemian Rhapsody to Single Ladies, Hamilton is the music teacher you wish you’d had.
“It takes me back to music school, when my friends and I would just sit around and listen to music together,” he says. Start here: The Paranoid Android episode is genuinely mind-expanding.
Try this: Switched On Pop.
Top 40 hits get the highbrow treatment.
The pitch: Conversations with the world’s most successful songwriters about their craft. The story: Songwriters love to talk shop, especially with two amiable Liverpudlians who are in the business themselves.
“To our surprise, nobody else was doing anything like it in 201 1,” says Brian O’Connor, who co-hosts with songwriting partner Simon Barber. “We don’t ask impertinent questions about their private lives. We just want to know what makes them tick creatively. Often that’s extremely refreshing for them.” The duo’s relaxed, respectful style elicits insights into a range of approaches, from Paul Simon’s perfectionism (“OK isn’t OK”), to Noel Gallagher’s merry pillaging (“Most people with a good record collection could do what I do”).
Start here: The one at home with Sting and his guitar epitomises Sodajerker’s easygoing charm. “He called us nerds,” says O’Connor. “That’s praise indeed.” fly this: And The Writer Is... Songwriter Ross Golan talks to fellow hit-makers.
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Slow Burn: Season 3
Is It Rolling, Bob?
Talking Dylan
Is It Rolling, Bob?
(Slate, 2019)
The pitch: A deep dive into the deaths of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls.
The story: The first two seasons of Slate’s breakout hit covered notorious White House scandals. The third, presented by Joel Anderson, applies the same method - fresh and counter-intuitive angles on a familiar saga - to the murders that traumatised hip-hop. Emphatically not a whodunnit, Slow Burn frames the killings as an American tragedy which takes in police brutality, media hysteria, criminality, misogyny and conspiracy theories, without losing sight of the two gigantic personalities at its centre. Whatever you thought you knew about hip-hop’s bloodiest chapter, Anderson tells you something new. The gold standard in long-form audio music j oumalism.
Start here: Cops On My Tail, about hip-hop’s vexed relationship with the police, typifies the show’s panoramic scope.
Try this: Dolly Parton’s America. Extraordinary eight- part ode to a divided land’s “great unifier”.
Talking
Dylan
(Independent, 2018-)
The pitch: Two actors talk to interesting people about Bob Dylan.
The story: When Bob-mad actors Lucas Hare and Kerry Shale noticed that shared fandom always broke the ice with new people, they launched a podcast in which actors (David Morrissey), writers (Neil Gaiman) and musicians (Kathryn Williams) could talk about the role Dylan has played in their lives. More popular than he ever expected, the podcast has been an education for Hare. “The more I do it, the more my opinion doesn’t matter a damn. I’m so far beyond what’s right or wrong, or what’s the best song.
It becomes less about Bob Dylan and more about the people.
If the person is interesting, then the discussion is.”
Start here: Hare recommends Billy Bragg. “It’s our longest episode. He was such good value.”
Try this: Hip Hop Saved My Life. Romesh Ranganathan gets celebrity rap buffs to wax lyrical. I
■t
American tragedy: Biggie Smalls’ and Tupac Shakur’s murders are examined in Slow Burn.
42
JUNE 2020
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46 Q JUNE 2020
25 Years Of
(What's The Story) Morning Glory?
Michael Spencer Jones: “Berwick Street has become like Abbey Road.*
Behind Michael Spencer Jones’s famous (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? cover shot.
Location: Berwick Street, Sunday, 23 July, 1995
Michael Spencer Jones: “it was very much a trust thing with the artwork for Oasis.
Sometimes Noel would have an idea about something and then that idea would change and get tweaked. Morning Glory was quite tricky. The initial idea was that Noel had said the album sounded like ‘riot music’, so I was thinking, ‘Right, how can you have a visual representation of riot music?’
Then you’d hear tracks like Cast No Shadow and Wonderwall and it was like, ‘Hmm, I think we’re going down the wrong road here guys!’
“We got to a point where we wanted a morning scenario and it developed into two people coming home from a nightclub. Originally Noel and Liam were going to be on the cover but in the end that didn’t happen for various reasons. When I was doing a recce in London, one of the shots was on Berwick Street. We looked up and there was the sign for Noel Street. It was a sign from upstairs - this is the location guys!
“It was taken on Sunday morning at about four o’clock with Brian [Cannon, Oasis sleeve designer] and [DJ and band associate] Sean Rowley. The night before the shoot we’d been up at the Kensington Hilton and we all decided that because it was an early start there was no point going to bed. So we stayed up all
night and you can imagine the state we were all in. The myth was that it’s Owen / Morris , producer] in the background holding up the master tape of Morning Glory. He’s in fact holding up the master tape for Champagne Supernova, not the whole album. He’d taken it out of the studio, which is breaking all protocol. We were like, ‘Fucking hell, if you leave that in the back of a cab or on the fucking Central Line then that’s Champagne Supernova lost!’
“There were some subliminal influences that crept into the sleeve. Bob Dylan’s The Freewheelin’... and also [Pink Floyd’s] Wish You Were Here where they’re shaking hands and one of the guys is on fire. There’s that kind of two- guys duality thing going off on Morning Glory. There’s a surrealist element with the back of the head where you never get to know what that person looks like which was Magritte’s thing. The cool thing about the cover is its ambiguity; it’s like, ‘What’s happening?’ There’s no moral perspective. It was just a completely ambiguous moment. It might not have had that if Liam and Noel were in it.
“Of all the covers I did for Oasis that was the most difficult one. The knowledge of following up the Definitely Maybe cover and knowing how great the music was. But in the end that ambiguity and the hint of surrealism works for that record. To this day, the amount of stuff I see of people on social media walking down Berwick Street, it’s become like Abbey Road.” SI »
“The cool thing about the cover is its ambiguity; it’s like, ‘What’s happening?’ There’s no moral perspective.”
“I’m City!” “No, I’m City!”: Liam and Noel Gallagher go head to head at Subbuteo, Rockfield Studios, May 1995.
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MICHAELSPENCERJONES
It’s the fifth biggest-selling UK album of all time, containing national anthems that will long outlive its authors. But as
it arrived just 14 months after its predecessor had kicked the door open
asis (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?
Hamish MacBain
appeared to little fanfare That soon changed tells its inside story, track- by-track..
Glory days: Noel at the
MICHAEL SPENCER JONES
(What's The Story) Morning Glory?
course,
the Oasis album with statistics to make your eyes water. Still the fifth biggest-selling UK album of all time - outstripped only by a pair of Greatest Hits albums (Queen, ABBA),
Sgt Pepper’s and, most recently, Adele’s 21 - it has sold more than 22 million copies worldwide: almost three times as many as either Definitely Maybe or Be Here Now. But more importantly, it is the album which contains the songs that you and everyone you know - Oasis fan or not - knows every last syllable of. The songs that will continue to be bellowed by arm-in-arm people of all ages at closing time; murdered by buskers in town squares the world over; and clutched to the hearts of those who have not yet even been born. The songs that, even more so than Live Forever, really will live long, long after everyone involved in making them has passed away.
So it is therefore strange to consider that, on its arrival a quarter of a century ago, (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? was perhaps the least “highly anticipated” of all Oasis albums. Such was the velocity of the Oasis train in late 1995 and so frequent were the newsworthy events
involving the band that it just kind of... appeared. “Highly anticipated”, Noel Gallagher knew from watching The Stone Roses squander their moment in time over five long years between classic debut and somewhat-out-of-step follow-up, can kill you dead. Better to follow the template set by his other Mancunian idols The Smiths and get a second album out (almost) within a year. And despite pre-release reviews that were almost universally lukewarm, despite a lead-off single that came second in the most infamous chart battle that music has ever seen, the tactic worked magnificently.
Largely recorded in just over two weeks at Rockfield Studios - where an in-residence Roses had struggled through the making of Second Coming - the songs, specifically the ballads, soon took on the kind of unforeseeable life of their own that only the masses can instil. By the end of that year, Wonderwall, Don’t Look Back In Anger and Champagne Supernova had pretty much become the inescapable part of British life that they remain to this day. Definitely
Maybe had been an album for the cool kids, an album that would inspire a large percentage of the people who bought it to grow their hair and pick up a guitar. But (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? was the point at which, to borrow Noel Gallagher’s phrase, “the squares came on board”.
In the ’80s, someone once opined that, at some point, Michael Jackson’s Thriller went from album to household appliance: as essential to any home as a kettle. In 1995 and 1996, in the United Kingdom, the second Oasis album ascended to this rarefied status (to this day, in fact, it has shifted more copies at home than Thriller) . And in doing so, it allowed its creators to begin living the life about which they had fantasised on the dole only 18 months previously. (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? was to be the album that turned Oasis into bona fide, big coat and shades-wearing, blacked-out Rolls-Royce- riding, half hourly white line-inhaling, red top-shifting, bigger stadiums-than-anyone- else-shaking rock’n’roll icons. Or as the man who wrote it so perfectly put it: “Definitely Maybe was written about being young, and about looking at the world like a huge great big fucking playground ...Morning Glory was about being in that playground.” »
JUNE 2020
M
(What’s The Story) Morning Glory?
Track 1
Hello
Os evidenced by debut single
Supersonic’s straight-off-of-My Sweet Lord guitar solo and, even more overtly, the T.Rex lift that powered Cigarettes & Alcohol, brazen pilfering of rock’n’roll’s past was nothing new for Oasis. But even by these standards, ...Morning Glory took things up a level. There was the Imagine piano intro to Don’t Look Back In Anger; the With A Little Help From My Friends outro of She’s Electric. An entire song - the Noel-sung Step Out, which would have sat between Some Might Say and Cast No Shadow - was cut at the last second (despite appearing on advance promo CDs) because it was, as far as Stevie Wonder’s lawyers were concerned, far too close to their client’s Uptight. But the opening song, with its outro’s excerpt of Gary Glitter’s Hello, Hello, I’m Back Again, made it through. Written towards the very end of the Definitely Maybe sessions - you can tell - Noel Gallagher started singing the Glitter bit when showing it to the band “and everyone just fell about laughing. As the track progressed, we found we couldn’t get rid of it, so we stuck it in.” Three years later, of course, the idea of referencing Gary Glitter would suddenly feel a great deal less fun, but at the time, as a pick-me-up coda to a slightly darker, more paranoid tone - “It’s never gonna be the same”, sings Liam over squalling wah wah guitar - the refrain felt perfect. And anyway, these days, as the producers of the film Joker were last year at pains to point out, Glitter no longer receives royalties on his songs. So anyone beyond those 22 million people thinking of shelling out for the second Oasis album can do so with a clear conscience.
encouraged hardcore fans to buy the same single twice. The leaders of both bands, meanwhile, would over the years both bemoan the fact that neither single was their finest hour. But whatever: exposure-wise it did neither party or the scene fast coming up around them any harm. It was fun. It was a lead item on the six o’clock news. Featuring newly installed drummer Alan White’s very first take on any song and a gloriously drunk and direct solo from Noel, Roll With It typifies more than any other recording the get-up-and-go, un-thought-out immediacy of Oasis at this point in time. And as anyone who ever got to see them play it in a stadium will attest, it was as effective a moshpit- instigator as Noel Gallagher ever wrote.
Track 3
Wonderwall
Ohe very week before Definitely Maybe came out in August 1994, another British album that would prove, over time, to be equally if not more influential was released. Portishead’s Dummy was characterised by shuffling beats and moody strings, was admired by Noel, and its influence bled into the off-kilter drums and cello (or technically Mellotron tape-playback keyboard) arrangement of what would quickly become, and remain, the most well-known Oasis song. Famously, when Noel Gallagher presented it to the band, complete with dubbier-than-usual bassline, his younger brother was not enthused, proclaiming that Oasis “are not a funk band”. And while in reality it was perhaps not that much of a departure, in contrast to the song that followed it both in the tracklist and as a single, Wonderwall on arrival did feel much more low-key and off-
kilter rather than instantly anthemic. But not for long. Shortly it was to ascend to its status as every acoustic guitar-learning pre-teen’s first chord sequence, a song that would never, ever be performed without every person in attendance singing every last word. Oasis as a band dropped it from live performances on occasion, while at various points in time, both Liam and Noel Gallagher have both professed their distaste for it, but in 2020 it remains a staple of both their setlists, and the song for which both of them will be forever most associated.
Track 4
Don’t Look Back In Anger
Ohe choice that Noel Gallagher gave Liam Gallagher -“You can have either Wonderwall or Don’t Look Back In Anger, and I’m singing the other” - was a tough one.
Given the latter’s aforementioned initial objections to Wonderwall, and the extremely overt Lennon-isms on display here, you might have thought his choice would be obvious. Only the two of them really know how the ensuing negotiations went down, but there can be little question, retrospectively, that the final decision was the right one. Wonderwall needed Liam’s sneer, with Don’t Look Back In Anger far more suited to his brother’s higher register. Written in Paris in April of 1995 and debuted, solo acoustic, just a few days later at Oasis’s first ever arena show in Sheffield - “I got to the soundcheck, wrote the words »
Track 2
Roll With It
t’s impossible to talk about the lead single from ...Morning Glory without mentioning Blur, Country House and the so-called battle of Britpop that, prior to their comprehensive winning of the war, Oasis lost. It was Blur who moved their single back a week to instigate the clash, and the single CD release of Roll With It was always going to struggle against Blur’s 2CD release: a then-common, none-more- ’90s marketing that essentially
Rockfield Studios, Monmouth, Wales, where the majority of Morning Glory was recorded.
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“In 2020,
Wonderwall remains a staple in both Noel and Liam’s setlists - and the song that both will be forever most associated with.”
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Trunk rocker:
Liam takes a break from recording, Usk Valley, Wales, near Loco Studios, February 1995.
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out in the dressing room and we actually fucking played it that night” - the final version represented the first time he was backed by a full, electric band. It was performed this way at Glastonbury that year, but that would be the last time that Noel Gallagher would get to sing the chorus of his most famous song unaccompanied. Soon after, the chorus - and, often verses - of Don’t Look Back In Anger belonged to the audience in front of him. And so it continues. In interviews at the time, Noel would often declare that the lyrics meant nothing. But a couple of decades or so later, with the entirety of his home city bellowing the line, “You ain’t ever gonna burn my heart out” in the aftermath of a terrorist attack, they very much did, and do, mean something.
Track 5
Hey Now!
©side from perhaps a few times at soundchecks, the fifth song on the album was never played live.
It is (What’s The Story) Morning Glory) ?’s black sheep: perhaps the only song here that a fan would struggle to recall every last word of. Sub-editors might note that its title represents the point at which Noel Gallagher’s love of a superfluous exclamation mark began - see afterwards: It’s Getting Better (Man! !), Gas Panic! and, much later, AKA. . . What A Life ! - but other than that it is not often celebrated. A shame, because it features some of Noel’s most beautifully entwining guitar lines, a great arrangement, an incendiary Liam performance and, in the shape of, “It said you might never know that I want you to know what’s written inside of your head”, perhaps the most gloriously nonsensical Oasis lyric ever.
Track 6
The Swamp Song
®ith their barrage of barre chords and straightforward rhythm tracks, Oasis never seemed like a band predisposed to instrumentals. So it was a surprise to all those at their Glastonbury headline set in June 1995 when, with a new drummer in tow, they started with a new song without any singing. But if it baffled people at the time, Alan White’s drumming from that performance was good enough to form the basis of the recorded version and The Swamp Song became Oasis’s opener at all of their biggest shows: usurped eventually by the far superior Fuckin’ In The Bushes.
Cheers!” Liam and guitarist Paul Bonehead” Arthurs
get into the swing of
it, Rockfield Studios
May 1995
5
Track 8
Cast No Shadow
Ohe band on whose equipment the Some Might Say demo was recorded were early-days touring partners of Oasis - the infamous Amsterdam non-show, prior to which the whole band minus Noel were arrested and then deported, was to have been in support of The Verve. But as ...Morning Glory arrived, The Verve were in tatters: splitting as History, the third, string-laden single from that second album was released (“All farewells should be sudden” declared its sleeve). For the time being, they would have to make do with this song being “dedicated to the genius of Richard Ashcroft”. It was to be a cap-doff that helped them no end when they eventually re-formed, proffering the more accessible songs - mostly written solely by Ashcroft - that populated the multi-million selling Urban Hymns in 1997. By that time, there was a huge mainstream audience hungry for the more melancholic, confessional, acoustic guitars- and-strings side of Oasis that Cast No Shadow exhibited. And if it would be extremely unfair to accuse The Verve of copying this sound - if anything, History was an influence on the writing and arrangement of Cast No Shadow. By the end of 1997, others certainly were. There’s a clear lineage stretching from Coldplay and Keane through Damien Rice and all the way up to Ed Sheeran and Lewis Capaldi. It’s likely that neither band are especially proud of such an association but, given that it has now stretched over a quarter of a century, it’s an impressive legacy nonetheless.
Track 9
She’s Electric
®ith the rock’n’roll fantasising of
Step Out - “I met her down a disco in a beat-up car, she was purring down the road” - jettisoned for copyright reasons, it fell to ...Morning Glory’s very own Digsy’s Dinner to provide the levity on an otherwise very intense second half. Based on a jaunty, sped-up version of the chord sequence from Definitely Maybe’s Married With Children, and with the silliest, most kitchen-sink lyrics that Noel Gallagher ever has written or probably ever will write, She’s Electric is something of an anomaly in the Oasis back catalogue: at odds with the themes and the swagger that define them.
Yet though it was never played live during »
Track 7
Some Might Say
(What's The Story) Morning Glory?
©asis’s first Number 1 single is the song that links the first and second incarnation of the band in more ways than one. It’s the only song on (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? to feature original drummer Tony McCarroll. It’s the first song that Noel wrote having moved down to London from Manchester. But is also the only song with the same sentiment, the same towering, kiss-the-sky optimism that ran through Definitely Maybe, the “we will find a brighter day” refrain the last sign of the kids trying to reach for the stars, now on the way to becoming those stars. The only demo that Noel made for the album, his version being recorded at Loco Studios in Wales on The Verve’s equipment (who at the time were having a weekend off from recording their second LP, A Northern Soul, with ...Morning Glory producer Owen Morris). This version, with Noel on vocals, was slightly slower, and was deemed complete enough to be played, once, on Steve Lamacq’s Radio One show. But the final version is something else: one of Liam Gallagher’s finest vocals, swamped in echo and sounding more confident than ever. When the younger Gallagher began reviving Oasis songs in his solo sets, Some Might Say - passed over by Oasis from 2002 onwards - was one of the best, most triumphantly received moments. And rightly so.
“Some Might Say is the only song with the same sentiment, the same towering, kiss-the- sky optimism that ran through Definitely Maybe.”
JUNE 2020
55
25 Years Of
(What’s The Story) Morning Glory?
the ’90s, the fact that it was revived in the next millennium - and sung by Noel rather that Liam - shows that its writer saw and still sees the funny side of his band’s funniest ever song.
Track 10
Morning Glory
®n Some Might Say B-side Talk Tonight, Noel had posited that “your dreams are made of strawberry lemonade”. Barely six months on, they “are made when you’re chained to the mirror and the razor blade”: an even more explicit reference to cocaine than Cigarettes & Alcohol’s “you might as well do the white line” (“I’m amazed we got away with either,” said Noel, much later).
If Be Here Now was the sound of gone-way- too-far-now, the title track of its predecessor is teetering, perfectly, on the edge: titanic drums, Apocalypse Now helicopters, screeching multi-layered guitars... the musical equivalent of the moment when you should go home but don’t. Diehard R.E.M. fans will no doubt theorise that the two-chord riff driving here is a straight steal from The One I Love. Certainly the latter song would have been all over the radio at the time Noel Gallagher was writing it, and there is more than a passing resemblance - if not quite enough to jolt the lawyers into action. But however Oasis arrived at one of their most titanic songs, it was soon being re-appropriated left, right and centre by the bands following in their wake: to name but three, the likes of Supergrass’ Richard III, Cast’s Free Me and Shed Seven’s Getting Better were all built on extremely similar, loud guitar foundations. All of these songs made the Top 20, too, evidence of just how much, at this point in time, Oasis had reshaped British pop music in their own image.
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Track 11
Champagne
Supernova
©erhaps the most spine-tingling bit of 2016’s Supersonic documentary is the moment when, through the lens of a camcorder behind the mixing desk
of Rockfield, through the glass of the vocal booth, we see Liam Gallagher. In his left hand is a lyric sheet, guiding him as he sings the first and only take of the greatest Oasis epic. It’s indicative of just how casually effortless he - and they - were at this point. How, in contrast to the arduous Definitely Maybe recording process, these multiple- generation-touching anthems just materialised so swiftly. And of the almost telepathic nature of his and Noel’s
56
JUNE 2020
DES WILLIE/GETTY
“Hot, innit?”: Liam and Noel take a breather on the set of UK TV show The White Room, January 1996.
relationship at this point. As producer Owen Morris noted, “Noel would sing it through for Liam, once, then Liam would sing it, once.” Oasis’s first foray over the seven-
minute mark, laden with all kinds of guitar lines (some of them Paul Weller’s), Champagne Supernova turned out as excessive as its title suggested. But this was
the perfect level of excess, and the song that best defines their imperial phase, more so even than Wonderwall or Don’t Look Back In Anger. No other band would sing a line such as, “Where were you while we were getting high?”, words that resonate now with the aforementioned people who were not even born when they were written, as much as they did to the hundreds of thousands who got the chance to bellow them, eyes closed and arms aloft, at Oasis. IS
“Champagne Supernova turned out to be as excessive as its title suggested. But this was the perfect level of excess, the song that best defines their imperial phase.”
JUNE 2020
57
in her home city. The song - complete with reference to Lim’s favourite flavour of Snapple lemonade, strawberry- was recorded the next month in Austin, Texas, and immediately became a bone of contention between the Gallaghers:
Liam, unenthused by the idea of Noel’s melancholic, off-the-grid adventure being immortalised on an Oasis release. Talk Tonight was mooted as a B-side to Whatever in December 1994 but didn’t ultimately appear; the sole chance for the public to hear it was when Noel performed it at a BBC session that Christmas. Such a great song could clearly not sit in the vaults forever, however, and when it did arrive with Some Might Say it quickly became a firm fan favourite and, in 2006, one of only three B-sides to make Oasis’s first, and to date only, Best Of compilation, Stop The Clocks.
Acquiesce
The B-side to a single was once a noble art in itself, a place where artists could stretch out, experiment and sometimes stash gold. Few acts could match the run that Oasis delivered around (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?, though. Hamish MacBain tells the tale of each.
Ohe ’90s were not short on bands going above and beyond when it came to their B-sides. Suede, The Verve,
Pulp... all excelled in this area. The young Noel Gallagher’s heroes, too - The Beatles, The Jam, The Smiths, The Stone Roses - did some of their best work on the flipsides of their singles (see, respectively: Rain, The Butterfly Collector, Girl Afraid, Mersey Paradise). But even against such stiff contemporary and historical competition, when it comes to B-sides, no band comes close to the over-achiever status of Oasis in 1995. The theory has often been posited that had Noel Gallagher banked some of these
songs rather than frittering them away, he could have extended Oasis’s imperial period significantly. But where, really, would the fun have been in that?
Talk Tonight
Few Oasis songs are inspired by specific events but, famously, Noel Gallagher’s greatest solo acoustic recording definitely was. Following on from his band’s notoriously disastrous 1994 show at the Whiskey A Go-Go in Los Angeles, he took his passport and the tour float and disappeared: holing up in San Francisco at the house of a woman - years later revealed to be one Melissa Lim - whom he had met three days previously after a (slightly) less chaotic show
Buried treasure: some might say that the B-sides were often as good as the A-sides.
The title - it can be interpreted as “come together”, a title that might have been a step too far - came from an interviewer, who
was describing to Noel Gallagher, as part of an analogy for the stratospheric rise of his band, how all the kids that followed the Pied Piper were “experiencing acquiesce”. Few songs in the Oasis catalogue fulfilled this purpose as well. Perhaps the peak of relegating absurdly strong, should-be-a-single tracks to B-sides, Acquiesce had to settle for being the opener at many of Oasis’s mid-’90s enormo-shows, a staple of every live set until they split up and the song that, however much its writer might periodically say otherwise, most overtly encapsulates the yin-yang, cat-dog chemistry of the Gallagher brothers. Written when Noel’s train to Loco Studios in Wales stopped for the best part of an hour because of something on the tracks - “sat in the smoking section. About five other people on the train” - it’s still being played live by Liam to this day, his audiences now officially tasked with stepping in for the chorus.
Headshrinker
Aside from Bring It On Down from Definitely Maybe, this Some Might Say B-side - the intro a straight rip from the Faces’ Stay With Me - is as punky as Oasis ever got, a tornado of descending power chords and abrasive guitar solos or, as Noel put it, “like the Stones meets the Pistols on speed”. For a lot of Oasis diehards, this is
58
JUNE 2020
oasis
also Liam Gallagher’s greatest ever vocal: the perfect balance of Lydon sneer and Lennon melodicism, on which you can hear him pushing himself to a point, on the second verse, where he almost cracks but doesn’t. The lyrics, too, are brilliant: nasty, menacing and full of venomous contempt for whoever it is about.
It’s Better People
Of all the largely acoustic, Noel-sung songs that populated early Oasis B-sides, It’s Better People is by far the least well-remembered: never performed live, not included on any compilations, hugely overshadowed by Rockin’ Chair on the Roll With It single release and not really spoken of much soon after it came into existence. As a song, it is far better than just alright - a propulsive, folky arrangement, a nice two-part psychedelic vocal on the chorus - but the ludicrously high standard that its writer had set at this particular point in time was such that suffering by comparison was an inevitability. In short, it is the only early Oasis B-side that sounds like a B-side.
Rockin’
Chair
Often, the Noel Gallagher songs that pre¬ date his joining Oasis are characterised by lyrics that, rather than being I-want-it-all celebratory, are yearning for a better life that will never come. An opening line such as, “I’m older than I wish to be” would have felt out of place on Definitely Maybe, but B-sides were the perfect safe space in which to reveal this side of his writing. Right back as far as debut single Supersonic, there had been Take Me Away (“Take me away... cos I’m sat here on my own”) and Rockin’ Chair - elevated by an intricate, largely acoustic, Johnny Marr-esque arrangement and some truly sublime Liam singing - continued this tradition. Before Wonderwall materialised, it was set to be included on (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?. There’s no way it would have connected on the scale that the most famous Oasis song did, but it’s about the best example of melancholy Oasis there is: and certainly a better song than Roll With It.
In the frame: Wonderwall was backed by, among others, the classic The Masterplan.
Round Are Way
The brass-laden stomp that came on the flipside of Wonderwall was held in high enough regard to be a centrepiece of all the biggest Oasis shows - Earl’s Court, Maine Road, Knebworth - and to be performed twice on TV instead of better-known album tracks or singles. Strange, then, that Round Are Way was ultimately omitted from B-sides compilation The Masterplan: meaning that it kind of fell through the cracks for future generations, a strange little gem for only the most obsessive of new fans to discover. This is a great shame, as it’s a pretty unique Oasis song: like the Blues Brothers’ Everybody Needs Somebody To Love slowed down to their patented just- too-slow pace, with a lyric that features a game of 25-a-side football and rhymes “singing” with “minging”.
The
Masterplan
The formatting of singles in the ’90s was such that with a cassette or 7-inch release you would get one extra track, on a 12-inch two. Only on a CD would you get the full three.
In 1995, most people were probably buying their singles on CD, but even so: if throwing away The Masterplan as a B-side at all seems like self-sabotage, billing it below Round Are Way and The Swamp Song is a straight-up act of total lunacy. But no song is more indicative of the gloriously spontaneous way in which Oasis were operating in 1995 - songs were just put out as they arrived - and the sheer purpleness of the patch that Noel Gallagher was in at this point.
Noel Gallagher shares with Marc Bolan an inability to drive and a resulting fascination with fast cars: Jaguars being a particular favourite. Jaguars feature heavily in this song full of all kinds of ’70s high school film-style imagery - “She was dressed up in leopardskin”; “Down a disco in a beat up car” - that should have slotted in to the second side of (What’s The Story)
Morning Glory? but was pulled because of its proximity to Stevie Wonder’s Uptight (see p55) . But it remains a great, fast song: great (and fast) enough for Noel to revive for Oasis’s first stadium tour of the ’00s.
Underneath The Sky
Another great example of how easy Oasis were making it seem in 1995 and 1996, this not-often mentioned song has the kind of effortlessly classy-yet-catchy melody their contemporaries would have killed for, lyrics pulled largely from a book Noel picked up in the airport and a one-finger piano solo that took both Noel and Boneheadto play. They were both pissed, obviously.
Cum On Feel The Noize
No Oasis cover version could ever eclipse I Am The Walrus: their steamroller take on one of the Beatles’ most intricately layered psychedelic arrangements a perennial set closer and a perfect encapsulation of their musical mission statement (“the Sex Pistols playing Beatles songs” as one early reviewer so accurately put it). Even in 1995, Slade were a far less fashionable influence to exhibit, but they were a clear influence on Oasis nonetheless and this cover - guitars seemingly louder than they had ever been before, Gallaghers singing in unison - is a fitting doff of the cap. It was played as part of an all-covers encore at Maine Road, performed on Jools Holland with Noel singing (Liam was off sick) and, when it was played on TOTP after Don’t Look Back In Anger, it made Oasis one of only two bands ever invited to do two songs on the show as part of the same performance. The other?
They start with an “S” and end with an “e’L El »
“Not only could The Masterplan have been an Oasis single. It I could’ve been the Oasis single.”
25 Years Of
Written in a hotel room while on tour in Japan, The Masterplan has the lushest orchestral arrangement of any Oasis song, some of the best nonsense/not-nonsense lyrics Noel Gallagher ever wrote and sounds effortlessly anthemic in the way that All Around The World from Be Here Now does not. Not only could it have been an Oasis single. It could’ve been the Oasis single.
Step Out
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rbend of their sprint. By the time it had been out for a year, Oasis were in a different race altogether, up against the international stadium-fillers. ihTiiTffilXhW^Ti charts that year.
60 JUNE 2020
Being part of Oasis was like being part of a circus: you just turn up and everyone goes nuts.” Liam Gallagher
Noel Gallagher (lead guitar/vocals):
“Earl’s Court was when the proper famous people started showing up.
You’d look across and be like,
‘George Michael!”’
Liam Gallagher (vocals): “I didn’t feel scared one bit, man: all those people were there to see you and give you massive amounts of fucking love. Being part of Oasis was like being part of a circus: you just turn up and everyone goes nuts.”
or so previously quit the band due to “nervous exhaustion”. The second is that his replacement, Scott McLeod of The Ya Yas, has also left the band after just a few shows. And then the phone rings. Bonehead (rhythm guitar): “Guigsy phoned up and was like, ‘I’ll be there’. It was great to see your mate back onstage and we gave it all that night, you can hear it in the performance. You just have to look at the crowd to see how good it was.”
With (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? released, Oasis gear up for their biggest gigs to date: two nights in front of 20,000 people at Earl’s Court, with the Bootleg Beatles in support, which both sold-out in seconds. But there is a problem. Or rather, two problems. The first is that bass player Paul “Guigsy” McGuigan had just a month
Gonna-bes get busy
There are three wins - Best Group, Best Album and Best Video - but that is not what everyone remembers about Oasis’s second visit to the Brit Awards (also at Earl’s Court). There is Noel telling Michael Hutchence that “has-beens shouldn’t be presenting awards to gonna-bes”; there is the band refusing to leave the podium and proclaiming that “anyone who thinks they’re hard enough to take us off the stage can come up here now!”, then pointing out Blur and singing “Shitelife...” to the tune of Parklife; and most memorably there is Noel eulogising the then-Labour leader Tony Blair, to whose new address he will next year pay a visit. Noel: “When Tony Blair spoke, his words seemed to speak to people, young people. Call me naive but I felt something - I’m not sure what it was, but I felt it all the same.” Alan McGee (Creation Records boss): “Everyone was out of control...”
Noel: “We were off our heads that night.
We were talking some right bullshit.”
Liam: “Fucking hell, that jacket. Jesus Christ... I didn’t take that off either. Yeah, that was hot. We were running the show back then and it was top. It was perfect. Blur had won loads and I kept going on at them and / guitarist , Graham] Coxon was getting a bit uptight. It was one of them - 1 was like,
‘I am fucking winding you up.’ That kind of thing. Fuck knows what’s gone down since then, man. Ever since Oasis split up - and I’m not being big-headed here - everyone’s just run amok. It just seems to me that all the posh idiots, or whoever they are or whatever, have just got in and fucking sealed it off.”
Citizen caning
Demand for Oasis tickets is now simply too big to be limited to venues with roofs: their first outdoor shows take place at the home of their beloved Manchester City FC. Both nights sold out instantly in February, having been announced only through local radio and press. Manic Street Preachers support, Noel plays a Union Jack guitar, Liam wears an Umbro tracksuit, they open with two B-sides that go down like most band’s singles, close with their covers of I Am The Walrus and Cum On Feel The Noize, and ascend into superstardom.
Liam: “I went backstage, there was some player’s fucking Umbro gear just sitting there and I thought, T’m having a bit of that’, tried it on, fucking freebie innit and I fucking pinched it and fucking wore it.” Noel: “It looked like a big front room except there were 42,000 people in it. Maine Road was where we all used to go as kids. So I was standing there trying to make sure I would never forget this moment.”
Liam: “I moved to London the day after that, or the second night. The first night I stayed at my mam’s, the second night I might have stayed in a hotel. And then, the next day I fucking went down to London and then that was it, I stayed down.” »
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“Maine Road was where we used to go as kids. I was standing there making sure I’d never forget this moment.” Noel Gallagher
JUNE 2020
63
“ I remember after the first night [at Knebworth] getting absolutely wankered, then forgetting the next day, like, ‘What, I’ve gotta do it again?”’
Liam Gallagher
History trip
The statistics now are simply mind boggling: 2.7 million people apply for tickets (about one in 20 of the British population) for Knebworth. Oasis could easily play a week of shows if they wanted, but two will do (on 10 and 1 1 August) with 125,000 turning up each day, making them the biggest concerts ever staged in the UK. Noel’s guitar rig will be “officially louder than a rocket”. The backstage area alone, complete with giant Scalextric track and filled with a rumoured 7000 people, will be bigger than some of the smaller British festivals. The Prodigy, Manic Street Preachers, Ocean Colour Scene, The Charlatans and the Bootleg Beatles all support, before Oasis arrive by helicopter and make history.
Noel: “Genuinely, now, I can’t remember walking onstage at Knebworth.”
Liam: “I don’t think I even looked at any of the support bands, I just stayed backstage fucking about. We were all in these caravans.
I remember The Prodigy being on and it was just shaking, and I remember sticking my head out the door going, ‘Who the fuck has put these lot on?’ And I’d heard / guest guitarist , The Stone Roses’ ] John Squire had this really cool Winnebago, so I was trying to find that. Someone had said it was covered in velvet, like a Jimi Hendrix vibe. I was like, ‘So why I am in this fucking white thing, then?”’ Bonehead: “John Squire came onstage and joined us [for Champagne Supernova and I Am The Walrus ]. The whole lot of us were so - even though we knew him and it was John Squire our friend - it was still a special moment. I looked to my left and it was, ‘OH MY GOD. I’m onstage with John Squire,’ you know? Friendships aside, there’s still that secret fan inside.”
Liam: “I swear to God, I cannot remember much about it. What was I doing the night before? Being fucking brilliant, probably.
I was with Patsy [Kensit] at the time, so I was probably in London. I remember after the first night getting absolutely fucking wankered, and then forgetting the next day: like, ‘What, I’ve gotta do it again?’ I’d only brought enough clothes for the one night.
I wore the white j acket on the first night, but the big jumper on the second night is fucking Patsy’s. I was going, ‘I can’t wear the white jacket again!’ and she had this bigjumper on. I went, ‘Give us that here’, blow-dried me fucking hair, got on with it.” Noel: “I remember sitting there, in the backstage area, and someone saying,
‘Well, what now?’ And I was like, ‘I couldn’t fucking tell you.’ And that was how I felt for a good couple of years afterwards. It’s like, ‘What do you do when you’ve done everything.’ I suppose it’s like getting a massive pay rise and buying everything you want. What do you do after that?” »
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(What's The Story) Morning Glory?
Losing it in America
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“We needed a break. We needed to sit in the garden with those polystyrene gnomes.”
Liam Gallagher
First up, it is Liam who bails on Oasis’s first major US arena tour (with Screaming Trees and Manic Street Preachers) , refusing to get on the plane and declaring that he has to buy a house. Noel takes over on vocals. Liam returns after four gigs and in time for the MTV Awards on 4 September, 1996, at which the American media are shocked by his spitting Red Stripe over the stage. The tour continues. A fight between band members over not very much at all ensues. Then Noel decides that he’s had enough, quits the band and flies home. It looks like Oasis is all over. Noel: “When I’d landed [ back in the UK],
I phoned Marcus [Russell, Oasis manager] on his mobile. He was outside waiting. I asked him, Ts there any press?’ He went, ‘Is there
any fucking press here? Wait till those doors open.’ The doors opened and it was bedlam. I wanted to go back to America.”
Liam: ‘We needed a break. We needed to sit in the garden with those polystyrene gnomes.”
Noel: “The reason U2 and R.E.M. and Coldplay are the biggest white rock bands in America is because of their frontmen.
Not being negative towards Liam; he’s just not Chris Martin, he’s not Bono, he’s not Michael Stipe. He’s Liam. For all intents and purposes, Americans don’t get Liams.
I think we’re musically as strong as those three bands put together, but as characters we’re different.”
Here we _ J go ...Now
Since debuting new songs My Big Mouth and It’s Gettin’ Better (Man!!) at Knebworth, anticipation for new Oasis material has been sky-high. But a year on from (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?, they are only just beginning the follow-up, with initial sessions booked at London’s Abbey Road. Under the intense glare of the media and fans sat outside daily, it immediately feels like an album that is going to be a lot more difficult to make than its predecessor was.
Noel: “It was exciting but exhausting as well. You’re the biggest band in the world, making
66
JUNE 2020
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so for me to go to my corner shop I had to go across the fucking zebra crossing every fucking time to get milk. So obviously, me, I was just fucking milking it, every time.
I was like, ‘Fucking yeah!’ Coming across the road was just fucking top.”
Owen Morris: “The only reason anyone was there was the money. Noel had decided Liam was a shit singer. Liam had decided he hated Noel’s songs. Massive amounts of drugs. Big fights. Bad vibes. Shit recordings.” Alan McGee: “I used to go down to the studio, and there was so much cocaine getting done at that point... Owen was out of control, and he was the one in charge of it. And the music was just fucking loud.” 5)
this much-anticipated new record, it was the birth of celebrity culture and what became known as Britpop had crossed over into the tabloids. I was constantly having a microphone shoved into my face. No way to make a record.”
Bonehead: “The paparazzi were breaking into the studio, looking for drugs, looking for a story. I was staying in an apartment with Owen [Monis, producer], which was next door. We were living and sleeping there. But we had to put a disguise on before going to the shops in the morning.”
Liam: “I was living in St John’s Wood, on a road called Hill Road, which is right next to Abbey Road. The studio was right there, and
For many years, resisted making music apart
from his colleagues in Radiohead. He’d sooner have left the band altogether. But then he turned 50. “I wanted to make a record that had hope and love and light,” he tells
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afternoon in January, Plas Dinam Country House looks like the setting of a murder mystery, or a ghost story. It’s in the same patch of mid-Wales as Led Zeppelin’s fabled Bron-Yr-Aur - Misty Mountain Hop country - and the surrounding hills and valleys are blanked out by a wintry fog.
Ed O’Brien - 5 1-year-old father of two, one-fifth of Radiohead, currently trading as EOB - bought a house nearby during the seven-year gestation of his debut solo album, Earth, because he craved wide open spaces. He dreamt up lyrics while wandering in the hills. So when it was time to start recording in 2017, this remote Victorian mansion was perfect. “It was really important to find a place in this land that would set the tone for the recordings,” he says reverentially. “Often you imbue the music with the spirit of the first place that you go to. The first time we did that was OK Computer.
That house is all over it.”
For those album sessions, O’Brien assembled a crack squad of musicians, including bassist Nathan East, drummer Omar Hakim (the rhythm section on Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories), guitarist Dave Okumu and producer Flood. More than two years later, he has returned to Plas Dinam with a four-strong live band to prepare for EOB’s forthcoming tour dates. One of the reception rooms has been turned into an unlikely rehearsal space, where O’Brien’s effects pedals are arrayed on a floral carpet in front of an oil painting and New Orleans drummer Alvin Ford Jr summons disco thunder beside a dresser loaded with ornamental plates. A whiteboard setlist propped up in the fireplace jokingly bills the band as EOB &
The King Prawns. O’Brien chose EOB because it
“It was really important to find a place that would set the tone for the recordings.” O’Brien rehearses in Plas Dinam; (far left) with Radiohead in New York, 1993.
sounds like a larger entity. “I don’t like the sound of solo projects. I’d like it to morph into other things.”
As they start playing, they feel more like a new band than an arena-rock veteran and his hired hands. The music runs from Arcadian folk to full-tilt, arms-aloft rave. The track Brasil encompasses both, starting in the Cambrian Mountains and ending up on Ipanema beach. Only the righteously pissed off Banksters sounds much like Radiohead. During an ecstatic cover of Ulrich Schnauss’s stadium-shoegaze colossus On My Own, O’Brien plays with his head back and eyes closed, a serene expression on his face. As the final notes fade away, he opens his eyes and smiles with satisfaction. “Nice!” They try to start another song but one of his pedals has gone rogue, grumbling like a struggling car engine. “That’s the dinner bell,” he jokes. “Time for supper.”
A film director might have cast O’Brien - lanky, handsome, agreeably posh as the most well-liked officer in the trenches. He has always been Radiohead’s most accessible member: the one keeping a candi d online diary during the making of Kid A in order to demystify the process; the one you’re likely to bump into in one of Glastonbury’s afterhours fields. When, in passing. I state the simple fact that Radio head are one of the most revered bands in the world, he looks embarrassed. “It’s weird but it’s only in the last year that I’ve realised, ‘Oh, Radiohead! ’ I’ve never thought we’re a great band. I’ve thought it’s just what we do.”
It is 35 years since O’Brien formed a band with four friends at Abingdon School, Oxford, and he feels like he’s starting again.
70 Q JUNE 2020
BOB BERG/GETTY IMAGES
“It’s only in the last year that I’ve realised, ‘Oh, Radiohead!’ I’ve never thought we’re a great band. I’ve thought it’s just what we do.”
For a very long time he had no interest in making his own music.
“The last thing anybody needs is a shit album from somebody from Radiohead,” he reasons. “I didn’t feel pressured just because Thom, Philip and Jonny were doing it. In fact I’d go the other way: ‘I’m not fucking doing that.’” But a lot has changed for O’Brien over the last few years and he is giddily enthusiastic about explaining how he got here.
“I think when you turn 50 something happens,” he says. “You pass through a gate. I don’t feel 50-1 feel better than I did when I was 25 - but I’m this number and crikey, there’s so much stuff I want to do.”
d O’Brien didn’t want to quit Radiohead but he thought he should. It was 2007, just after they’d finished making In Rainbows,
! • ■ ; : and the prospect of leaving his two small
[ : ■, ’ ; children to go on tour filled him with guilt.
f j , , , , A Manchester United fan, he admired the
I j j j j j M way Eric Cantona had walked away from
football at the height of his powers to
become an actor. He thought maybe