El Hunt

London-based journalist and copywriter. Features Editor at DIY Magazine.

[elhunt]

The Genius of Grimes: Claire Boucher exists on another planet

Originally published in DIY Magazine, March 2016. Words El Hunt.

“Sorry, I have so many beverages here!” exclaims Claire Boucher suddenly, attempting to juggle a mug full of coffee, and an elegant wine flute. Distracted every so often by a mountain she can glimpse out of her Adelaide window, and in the process of taking ‘Art Angels’ on tour for the first time, Grimes is, as she puts it herself, in a “mildly insane” mood today, having just awoken from a nap. “This is water, not wine,” she qualifies, quickly. “I just like the look of the glass,” she explains, studying it. “I feel like I’m in Sex and the City or something.”

A couple of years ago, the idea that Grimes was a potential subscriber to Carrie Bradshaw and co.’s hapless romantic adventures seemed unlikely. Squirrelled away in darkened basements, making bizarrely twisted - and yes, overwhelmingly zeitgeisty - sounds, Claire Boucher struck as an incredibly serious musician. Though she remains a true perfectionist, obsessed with every microparticle of her craft Grimes is also becoming a rocket-fuelled cultural hoover with no limits. Less pop, and more endlessly fascinated by popular culture itself, anything is game for absorption into her retina-bashing slash movie meets sci-fl flick universe; everything that emerges out the other side is life in the vivid dream, enhanced and larger-than-reality for reasons beyond everyday comprehension. It’s an ability very few artists possess. In each generation, you can count people like Grimes on one hand.

‘Art Angels’ - Grimes’ fourth record, and her first since her breakthrough third, ‘Visions’ - sees her taking on more ferociously varied facets than ever before. From the gender-bending vampire mobster that runs riot spitting football chants over ‘Kill V. Maim,’ to the record’s bizarre, garish, no-fucks-given clashing of all genres going, ‘Art Angels’ is a little like Grimes’ beloved Game of Thrones in scope and ambition; if it were set in a gaudy, futuristic neon wonderland instead of Westeros. Though she still readily admits to battling against stage fright, Grimes’ live show is a saturated glimpse into the world she’s designed, letting rip with fast-unfurling, cathartic screams. Designers these days are tripping over one another to photograph her fearless Adidas sandal and sock combinations, and in the studio, Boucher’s dark days of Adderall-fuelled writing binges have been disowned and left behind. Now, she operates from a studio in her home. Everything is entirely on her own terms.

Originally, Grimes was conceived as a sort of alter-ego; a space-dust flecked girl band controlled by Claire Boucher The Producer, safe and hidden behind the curtains. Grimes itself has grown enormously in scope in the last couple of years, taking on ever more technicoloured variations. Claire Boucher, meanwhile has emerged gradually from her mysterious control box. Though one especially infamous character from the programme that inspired her multiple beverages today, Sex and the City, might not feature as one of Grimes’ voices, per se, she’s a definite influence on how Claire Boucher conducts herself these days, all the same.

“Samantha,” Grimes announces, naming the Sex and the City character she identifies most heavily with, without a moment’s hesitation. “It’s her crass nature,” she qualifies. “I appreciate her lack of giving a fuck. I relate to it. A lot of times I get in trouble are a result of not giving a fuck…” she adds, changing tact, “and then people taking it out of context.”

Several times today, Grimes alludes to this frequent knack for “getting in trouble.” Really, though, she’s talking about her words being sensationalised, and her caution is fair enough. With ‘Visions,’ she set an entire agenda and influenced a whole trail of lesser imitators; her knarled, blooping nightmare-scapes being hawked by every aspiring weirdo out there with some free time and a copy of GarageBand. Part and parcel with that came a great deal of critical recognition, and also constant scrutiny. An artist who started out making weird, crunking noise-pop about obese cats in the warehouses of Mile End, Montreal, suddenly found her flippant, off-hand remarks turning into bold-letter headlines on pop’s biggest gossip websites, and alternative music publications alike.

Most prominently, there was the dramatic non-saga of the ‘scrapped album,’ and Grimes’ ‘panning’ of her one-off song ‘Go’. Originally penned at a songwriting bootcamp, she was toying with behind the scenes writing; worn down by her constant visibility in the public eye. Though the song was ultimately turned down by Rihanna - who is signed to Grimes’ management, Roc Nation - Grimes liked it enough to put it out there anyway. The media machine painted an entirely different picture; the sort of scene that depicted Grimes chickening out of a whole new direction, simply because a portion of her fans weren’t entirely keen. It’s a ludicrously untrue twist on events.

“I’m going to discuss a thing I’m not supposed to discuss because it always gets me in trouble…” Grimes starts, that notorious word rearing its head once again. She shrugs, and continues anyway. “Me and my friend Blood Diamonds were writing ‘Go’ for another artist [Rihanna] and the process of pretending I was someone else at that time, I had so much fun making that song. I realised I had this terrible feeling of constraint, that everyone’s always judging me, you know….” she trails off. “Because they do. They still do.”

Fast-forward from the media ruckus surrounding ‘Art Angels’’ creation, and Grimes silences the lot in a swift fell. Hurling herself into a swimming pool, Grimes returned as macabre, pastel-drenched Marie Antoinette, her bloodied gowns staining the crystal-clear waters.“Got a doll that looks just like you,” chides ‘Flesh Without Blood,’ nodding - but only nonchalantly, in a half-arsed, unbothered way - towards people’s expectations and the inaccurate figure ‘Visions,’ and the churning media cogs, created. Forget everything you thought you knew about Grimes.

“People were like, ‘oh it’s so cute and naive,’” Grimes says of ‘Visions’ today. “I don’t wanna succeed on the basis of cute naivety, or endearing failure or charming lack of knowledge,” she says, firmly, “I want to succeed because I’m good.”

It’s a mission that Grimes takes incredibly seriously; from the making of ‘Art Angels’ itself to the relentless months she spends working on her complex music videos. Blowing almost all of her advance on the most high-tech home studio set up she could muster, she set about poring over complex production techniques, physical string arrangements, and crisp, in-your-face high fidelity. She had a drive to reach new heights. “I kind of went insane during it,” she admits. “It’s mentally difficult when people are like, ‘oh she’s so cute, she screws up, she always hits the wrong button, it’s so lo-fi and you can tell that she doesn’t have good equipment’” she says, before putting on a high-pitched, whinging voice in imitation, “neh neh neh.”

She keeps coming back to the idea of transforming herself into something menacing and downright scary, a monstrously ambitious artist to whom patronising adjectives like “cute” will never stick. It’s no more pronounced than in the monstrously brilliant Janelle Monáe-featuring ‘Venus Fly,‘ from ‘Art Angels’. “What if I cut my teeth? Cut my hair underneath my chin,” she asks, or rather proudly threatens, before demanding “why you looking at me?!” Tinny, timid, super-trebled melodies rev into life, the whole thing growing into clawed, fearsome rebuff of objectification.

“In retrospect I see more pathos in [‘Art Angels’] than when I was actually making it, about that kind of stuff,” reasons Grimes. “I’m in a weird situation..” she starts, “where if I always say and do stupid things, I get a lot of attention, but I actually fucking hate it. It’s really distressing to me. I’m in a constant state of distress because I’m always… there’s always a new thing, you know?”

“People think… she must want attention so much, and it’s like, no,” she continues, start-stopping sentences. “I feel really disassociated when my hair’s a normal colour, shit like that. Shows are still a nightmare for me,” she admits. “You wanna make art, and you wanna make music. The art and music I admire is really character-centric. Beyoncé, Rihanna, Bowie, Prince, whatever… there’s this core character. I kind of need that, but at the same time it’s really uncomfortable to have this much attention. There’s always this inherent tension where you’re like, no, leave me alone,” she says, “but also, I am completely embedded so deep, with my personality, in this work,” she trails off. “It’s weird.”

“Most people ask me,” she observes, putting on a comedy British accent. “’Do you want to be like Katy Perry?’ Sorry,” she laughs. “Anyway.”

There’s no denying that Grimes is one of these rare magical characters that Claire Boucher - still sipping from a seemingly bottomless mug of coffee - personally admires. The aesthetic she paints mashes together pastichey combinations; androgynous Al Pacino-type mobster vampires, Daniel Clowes’ Ghost World comic books, the Russian poet Pushkin, ‘Lord of the Rings’, Enya, the music for ‘The Legend of Zelda’, and Frank Herbert’s sci-fi epic ‘Dune’. Out of breath yet? Grimes is dizzyingly vast, and yet it’s unmistakable.

The idea that all of this bold, boundless expression marks Grimes turning into a Pop Star, she says, confuses her no end. Judging by the liberal smattering of swear words she drops into conversation around the subject, it’s also an assertion Claire Boucher clearly finds annoying. Vehemently dedicated to keeping full control over every single aspect of the Grimes project - from hand-drawn album covers, to self-directed videos - and signed to independent label 4AD, she actively distances herself from the smoke and mirrors of cookie-cutter singers performing songs written by a ten-strong team.

“It depends,” concedes Grimes. “If you classify David Bowie and the Ramones as pop, yeah Grimes is pop. But if you’re talking Top 40, I do think it’s pretty different from that. The means to the end are extremely different in particular.”

“When I made ‘Visions’,” she laughs, “I thought it was my sell-out Britney pop moment! I didn’t think it would succeed, either. I remember A/B-ing [comparing sound quality] with a Britney song, and being like, ‘this is just totally as good as this Britney song, I’m so great!’” she remembers, visibly amused.

“This is really embarrassing…” Grimes starts, before, typically, shrugging and continuing her thread anyway, “but I didn’t know who Mariah Carey was until I was like, 24. I went on this cross-country road trip with my dad, and he was like, you have to get into R&B, so he got me into her. There are a lot of hipster Mariah Carey remixes, like Burial and stuff, and I remember listening to it. It was really hip at the time that I first started making music. I was like, ‘why aren’t there any actual bands like this? Why don’t they get actual singers, and make original songs instead of doing these hip remixes?’ That was kind of my thought.”

Grimes is not pop music, in that she does not imitate anything that has come before her. Instead, studying the world - complete with all its ugliness, brashness, and macabre unpleasantries - she’s something unclassifiable on the fringes while setting the entire agenda. “It’s weird to me that people think ‘Art Angels’ is a poppier thing, because in terms of the actual process, I was trying so much harder to make pop music when I made ‘Visions,’” she says. “I was actively trying to make pop music when I made ‘Visions’. With ‘Art Angels,’ I wasn’t.” At approximately this point, Grimes decided to give an almighty “fuck you” to all convention, for good.

“To me, [‘Art Angels’ is] an emo rock record,” Grimes says, changing tact entirely seriously. “I was listening to Queen and Bowie, My Chemical Romance, Le Tigre,“ she lists “and I thought people might think it was my rock record. I was so confused by the response.”

Garish, neon-hued, and screaming with a breathless cramming-in of every feasible influence, ‘Art Angels’ takes everything that Grimes loves - from the hellish paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, to J-Pop, and Russian ballet set designs - and throws it at the wax. From the twanging hoedown vibe of ‘California’ - think Dolly Parton on a mad one at Comic Con - to the merrily chirruping intro of ‘Butterfly’ ‘Art Angels’ is, in the best possible way, a little bit uncool.

“That was a goal!” exclaims a delighted Grimes.

“I wanted to stop being seen as a hipster thing, I guess,” she explains, referring to the whole pastel-grunge, synth-pop aesthetic that ‘Visions’ became an integral part of. “I actually don’t mind hipsters,” she clarifies, “hipsters are rad. But I didn’t want [Grimes] to be seen as a thing that existed because it was cool. It’s the same thing as the cute thing - ‘oh, Grimes, because it’s cool’. No, no, it’s not cool, and it’s not cute.”

“I really wanted to make a Baby Bash song,” says Grimes, talking specifically about ‘Art Angels’ closer, ‘Butterfly’. For the uninitiated, Baby Bash is a smooth-crooning 90s rapper - again, not especially renowned for being cool. This goal - naturally - led Grimes into a mess of old Japanese jazz compilations, and it was there that she discovered ‘Penguin Dancer’ by Masayoshi Takanaka. She ended up sampling it for ‘Butterfly’‘s introduction. “It sounds like a kids TV show theme song,” she says excitedly. “I want ‘Butterfly’ to be a really all-ages song, like a kids TV vibe song.”

‘Butterfly’ - vaguely about a curious little minibeast who discovers air travel for the first time - feels like a symbolic launching off from the record where Grimes finds her wings. Having seized back the narrative, trampling all over it with trebled-up riffs, Grimes concludes ‘Art Angels’ by saying one thing - “I’ll never be your dream girl.” It’s the one headline in the entire world she wants written in bold.

So, where on earth does Grimes go from here? Nowhere on earth, to hazard a guess; more likely, she’ll wind up in some other distant musical galaxy, creating daring, experimental, and boundary-pushing art out of the meteor dust whizzing around her super-charged neurons. As Boucher’s beloved Frank Herbert - who wrote Dune - pointed out; “beware of heroes”. Rely on your own judgement instead, make your own mistakes, and question everything. It’s a mantra that Grimes follows to the letter. Blazing her own trail, and flinging open the door to a whole new realm of possibilities, Grimes is a genius alright. What’s more, she’s only just getting started.

[elhunt]

MØ: “Don’t pretend to be radical. It’s more radical to just be yourself.”

“Seriously!?” shouts MØ suddenly, reeling around in a swivel chair in a state of total disbelief. “That’s pretty fucking crazy.” She’s just been informed that when you tot up the total minutes people have spent listening to ‘Lean On’ worldwide, it leaves you enough time to get to Pluto and back. 138 times. The track – her storming team-up with Major Lazer and DJ Snake, and the most streamed song on Spotify, ever, (no biggy) – has a reach beyond all rational comprehension. Pretty fucking crazy stuff indeed.

“It’s super weird to think about…” she ponders, pausing to take stock. “Shit! Thank god for ‘Lean On’,” she concludes, with a comedy shrug.

Things have sped on at asteroid-quick speed for MØ since releasing debut album ‘No Mythologies to Follow’ two years ago, and it’s only now that it’s all started to properly sink in. Originally, she planned to start work on the follow-up back in her homemade recording booth - a makeshift den of blankets at her parents’ house back in Denmark - immediately after putting out her first work. A certain song flipped everything upside down, took previous plans by the scruff of their necks, and drop-kicked every expectation into another galaxy.

“I started working on it actually straight after finishing [‘No Mythologies To Follow’],” explains MØ, referring to her in-progress second record, “and that’s a while ago now. Due to the whole success of ‘Lean On’ things happened and so it took longer,” she adds. “It took me in different directions, and also opened up doors and all these things, so it’s been a long run.”

New avenues have opened, and then some, with all the speed of the Starship Enterprise’s corridors unfolding during a vessel-wide automatic door malfunction. From the thrilling, left-field pop banger ‘Kamikaze’ – a clear statement of LP2’s gigantic ambitions - to Diplo’s recent cat-out-the-bag revelation that she’s been working with Justin Bieber, everything’s coming up MØ-house.

“Maybe three years ago, or even more, DIY interviewed me and asked me about my dream collaboration, and I said Major Lazer,” she remembers, revisiting just how recent stratospheric events first began to unwind. “Someone on Twitter tweeted Diplo, and said ‘please make this happen, you should work with her’. He replied ‘we love her’,” she beams. “So then me and my manager were like, we need to fucking hunt him down and get a session set up.” Hunt him down, she did: cornering the producer in Amsterdam for a day of studio time. The outcome was ‘XXX 88’. “That was the beginning of our collaborations. So thanks, man!” she laughs.

Her recent record-smashing madness with Diplo is all the more surreal considering she didn’t exactly start out with chart domination on her mind. Instead, she first cut her teeth playing rough-and-ready shows in squat venues, her first creative ventures seeing her pen songs with grinningly brash, provocative – and overtly political - titles like ‘Fisse I Dit Fjæs’ (‘Pussy In Your Face’) in punk band MOR. That song remains “one of my favourite songs I ever wrote!”, she grins.

Firmly dedicated to the Spice Girls (Sporty Spice in particular) and subversive pop figures like Peaches in equal measure – while adamant that the two can go hand in hand - she spent much of her teens hanging out in Odense’s punk cafes, playing trashy, glittery-soaked electro-punk on Copenhagen’s activist music scene. It’s a far cry from your usual clean-cut pop star beginnings, but then again, there’s very little that’s predictable about MØ.

Every other sentence is flecked liberally with cuss-words like a sweary Jackson Pollock painting, for one. Upon rocking up today, she proudly points out her Sonic Youth t-shirt, bearing the cartoonish cover of their 1990 record ‘Goo’. She’s currently reading a bashed-up copy of Kim Gordon’s memoir, ‘Girl in a Band’, too. “Kim Gordon is a badass for sure!” she announces, loudly. “She was a tomboy, she was a badass! She was rough, unpolished, and so sexy, and such a role model,” she continues, entirely failing to keep her head static as final preparations are underway for her photoshoot. “So fashionable, such a front mover, a girl in the punk rock scene!” she gushes. “I was very not like the classic beautiful little girl, you know?” she asks.”I was a tomboy myself, and I could really relate to her. A great role model, when you’re a girl that is not one of the pretty dancing girls.”

MØ isn’t just inspired by the rebellious spirit and powerhouse force of Kim Gordon either. In fact, it turns out she’s a bit of a badass herself. Over the years she’s designed feminist t-shirts bearing the slogan “Kvinde Kend Din Kusse” (Danish for “Woman Know Your Vagina”), vocally aligned herself with left-wing politics, and interned with Le Tigre member and outspoken LGBT activist JD Samson in New York. She originally called herself MØ – ‘maiden’ or ‘virgin’ in Danish – to deliberately provoke a polarised reaction. Singing middle-finger flipping songs about fucking, fighting, going wild, and smearing herself with gravy (yep, really) in her early days under the moniker, things suddenly clicked for her when she started to write frankly about her own feelings, too. She soon realised that it’s punk to feel powerless sometimes.

All roads led to ‘No Mythologies to Follow’. As a debut, it’s a euphoric, immediately infectious collection of gaudy, sky-soaring pop, sure, but is also charged with a subtly political pulse. “Oh, what a world I was born into,” bemoans ‘Pilgrim,’ later declaring “all the time I just want to fuck it up,” over parping, sharp-edged horn-stabs. Elsewhere on the record, she’s a “bug in your eardrum,” raging and tired with endless photo-fit billboards, and a tenacious searcher intent on finding something that feels uncynical and real. Much of ‘No Mythologies…’ centres around the confusion of discovering yourself, and then taking on life’s dangerous business square on, win or lose. It’s a personal battle she’s raging, here.

“For many years I was into being an activist,” she says today. “When I look back on the whole thing, and my life before, and everything, it’s so hard to pinpoint. It was ten years of my life, and such a big part of my character-building as a person. It took me to so many places and situations, with different people, thinking about different things and politics. I was in MOR for five years,” she points out, referring to the band she formed aged 17. “All our songs would be extremely political. I also think, coming out after that, it was time for me to talk more about my feelings,” she admits. “My first album was very much to do with being a teenager, and finding yourself, and being lost in this weird life and society. I just think it’s important to talk about something that’s important to you.” she adds as a qualifier. “Don’t pretend to be radical” she says firmly. “It’s more radical to just be yourself.”

The way her second album seems to be shaping up – on the evidence of one-off tracks like ‘Kamikaze’ and ‘Final Song’, anyway – it’s a quest MØ is following with all the determination of Frodo heading for Mount Doom. Except in her case, she’s headed for somewhere altogether more sunny; a heady, branch-twisted rainforest packed to the tree-tops with pure pop.

“Now with the second [album], again, it’s a mix of me analysing myself, and the world, and life….” MØ drifts on, before laughing suddenly and stopping herself in her tracks. “We’ll see what it ends up like!”

If there’s one thing that’s starkly apparent about MØ, it’s that she owns everything she does - even her missteps and fuck-ups. Her and Major Lazer’s ‘Lean On’ video attracted controversy and rightful scrutiny for its flippant hawking of Indian cultural symbols; a criticism that could be levelled at many pop music videos filmed in token exotic locations. But while the likes of Coldplay still remain schtum about their own visual gap years through diluted takes on other cultures, MØ responded with a flat-out admission that she’d messed up. “I should have been more aware,” she told the Fader earlier this year.

Looking back on her performance with Iggy Azalea on Saturday Night Live today prompts a knowing look, followed by an amused snort. MØ’s telly debut was a disaster, she freely agrees – a combination of malfunctioning ear monitors, and gyrating male dancers that made her look plain uncomfortable. She had never seemed more lost, and it could have been crushing. For her, it’s another stepping stone. “I learned something from it!” she says. “It’s a fucking TV show, you gotta do fucking in-ears, because otherwise…” she smiles, indicating towards herself. “Be prepared,” she hoots.

Having a crack at something and falling over in the process is, in her opinion, the only way to tread new ground. She’d much rather things be imperfect, and prone to mayhem. “The worst thing I can imagine is to be trapped in the same kind of thing and never move,” she states firmly. “I’d rather go and do something drastic, fail, and then get on top of the horse again, than to just stay safe for the rest of my life. Fuck it if you fail!” she announces. “Failure makes you better. Pull yourself up! Suck it in. Whatever you call it,” she adds. “It always sucks to make mistakes, but I’ve always seen it as a good kind of way to reflect and make a new fresh beginning or something.”

That said, failure isn’t likely to figure when it comes to MØ’s next steps. Despite a few difficulties settling back into an intense writing headspace after years of unrelenting touring, her sole goal now is to “just let go! You can’t think too much about it, you just have to do the music and have the love for making music, rather than thinking about it like ‘What is this?! This is my second album?!’ Blah blah blah…” she says, putting on a theatrical whingeing tone for a second. “I never thought that second album would be hard to do because the songs have always naturally just flowed from me. But the second album is hard! But I feel like I’m getting back into what it is, to the core of why.”

A no-fucks-given figure in the bonkers land of pop – who chucks a big old dose of holographic, iridescent roughness into everything she does - she’s been pondering music’s shift towards an exciting new realm with few boundaries herself. “It’s super exciting!” she says, on the subject of Grimes, Christine and The Queens, Charli XCX and countless other rulebreakers blowing the lid off convention’s usually-limited melting pot. “I feel when I was a teenager, it was like, either you’re into pop, or you’re into the underground,” she ponders. “Maybe this is a wrong observation, but it seems like now because everything is available and on the internet,” she enthuses, “it feels like underground is infiltrating pop music,” she says with a glint, “and getting mixed up. You can do anything, basically. Fuck!”

Insistent that Cher can be rock n’ roll and Moomins are punk, she’s undoubtedly onto something. Zooming to Pluto and back 138 times aboard the good ship ‘Lean On’ is only the start. The way her next steps are shaping up, MØ’s just about ready to crash through the borders of the entire solar system.

[elhunt]

Tilted: get to know Christine and The Queens

“What would Christine do?” asks a sharp-suited Héloïse Letissier suddenly, almost upturning a cup of green tea in the process. “It’s a question I find myself asking a lot. What would she do?”

“What would Christine do,” exactly? Considering her track record thus far, just about anything. Last month saw Christine and her accompanying Queens standing in the middle of Dutch festival Best Kept Secret’s main stage, Christine holding biceps tensed, and yelling “I’m a dude!” at the top of her lungs. At a landmark sold-out show at London’s The Roundhouse earlier this year, – with a certain Elton John in attendance, no less – Christine danced so much that she split her trousers. “Things happen in London!” she grinned at the time, hurling flowers across the room, and welcoming every single attendee to an all-enveloping barrage of leaping dance routines, and plunking, subversive pop songs about finding freakish freedom in boundless expression. Christine and The Queens is about smashing free of every mould, and slipping away from definition.

‘When I’m on stage nothing can happen to me, truly,” smiles Héloïse; who surprisingly claims to be very shy when it comes to her everyday, non-Christine existence. “It’s just a rectangle,” she quips, “a different floor. But I think it creates something really weird. The stage is like a ring, it’s like a fight. In a cool way.” Born at London’s Madame Jojo’s, thanks to the occasionally forceful encouragement of the venue’s resident drag queens, Héloïse ‘s debut album, ‘Chaleur Humaine’, was written to get over a break-up, and back to herself. “They said, sing louder! Do something with your fucking sadness! “ she remembers “With Christine, I stopped trying to choose and make sense, and decided to feel,” Héloïse adds. “When I was creating Christine in the very beginning as a character, I was writing ‘Christine is my anger,’” she adds. That anger, she says, stems particularly from a society obsessed with neat boxes. “It’s something I’ve experienced, and felt, and lived with. Changing your mind, and feeling like a boy, and sometimes wanting to be desired as a woman, or lurk after someone like a macho man – it’s something I’ve lived,” she nods. “Christine was a statement about being an unusual little thing, moving and loving people,” Héloïse smiles, adding, “I’m attracted to characters that are queer. Michael Jackson, Björk, David Bowie, Laurie Anderson, Boy George. They were creatures. And I guess I want to be a creature as well.”

Though her debut album ‘Chaleur Humaine’ is relatively new to our own shores, it’s been out for two years now in Héloïse’s native France. Coincidentally, the record arrived just as debate was raging in the country around the topic of gay marriage…”and I arrived with my flowers and gender-fluid songs, like ‘hi!’” laughs Héloïse, clearly delighted by the whole scenario. As stuffy conservatives squabbled away, there was Christine, flippantly declaring “I’m a man now,” on her song ‘iT’ and leaping around on stage in a tuxedo.

“I like to shift language within the space of one song,” Héloïse explains. “When you think about queerness, you think about language. Language itself can be a tool, or something to oppress you. If you change the gender of a word, suddenly it’s weird. Or if you say, constantly on stage, ‘I’m a man’ - being a young girl, and a tiny one -” she laughs referencing her own modest height, “it creates something interesting.”

Shifting rapidly between French and English with little regard for grammar or convention, and letting rip punchy, spiky-edged pop songs with a smirking side-helping of subversion, it’s dead exciting stuff, this. And now, the rest of the world is playing catch up.

[elhunt]

Surrendering to Love: Savages are the Answer

Originally published in DIY Magazine, Feb 2016. Words El Hunt.

Savages don’t mess about. The first, carefully chosen glimpse of the band’s new record arrived as ‘The Answer’ - the very definition of a confident statement by title alone. Agitated razor blade guitars collide headlong with drums that pound the living shit out of everything in sight, with no relent. Sheer mechanical brawn smacks into the heart headlong, on the teetering edge of obliterating everything. In their second album ‘Adore Life’ Savages also unearth something less towering, that is subject to poor decisions, and vulnerability amid the onslaught of white noise. Savages write music that is completely human. They seem to provide an answer or remedy to the chaotic, tangled-up web of life. There’s nobody else around quite like this.

The band rock up in their customary all-black uniforms, cutting the formidable sort of picture you’d expect. When Jehnny Beth and Gemma Thompson order a cuppa, they make it seem swiftly efficient. Wrong-footings aren’t shot down in flames, but receive a far more cutting reply; the air of being mildly unimpressed. Frighteningly ambitious, and willing to give every ounce of their being to this magical beast that they’ve created together, Savages have more than earned their right to be imposing, and they are imposing. Truly scary, though? Nah.

Today, drummer Fay Milton is busy sparring with her granola bar wrapper. “Morning!” she exclaims chirpily, neglecting to notice that the clock has already chimed midday. “I don’t know what I’m saying,” she laughs, “a bunch of words. Let’s talk about food?” she eventually suggests.

“It’s not even that early,” concedes her band mate, bassist Ayşe Hassan.

Fay’s granola-based crisis surely marks out one of very few instances where Savages have been unsure of exactly what to say. Upon forming, the band set out with intense focus; eyes keenly trained on a single objective. ‘Silence Yourself’ was a debut concerned with insular hyper-concentration. Its end goal - amid everyone else outside their bubble trying to pull the new band in different directions - was total artistic freedom.

“If you are focused, you are harder to reach. If you are distracted, you are available,” declared the part-poem-part-manifesto printed on the debut’s cover. With the barriers up, and all outside interferers violently opposed, ‘Silence Yourself’ - by name, and nature - was a bolshy, confrontational first record. Intentionally so. “You have to fight a bit for your own space,” states Jehnny Beth. “I think every band that starts has to do it. It’s your first totem.”

The band certainly fought for space and control over the dialogue, and then some. They were unwilling to be shaped against their wills. As the first rave reviews began to come out, Jehnny Beth calmly took a biro to every press clipping that referred to Savages as an “all-female band” - quietly taking down the empty categorisation, and marking it out as irrelevant. When their debut was nominated for the Mercury Prize, Savages didn’t just zip up and sip the complimentary champers. Though they were grateful for the wider acclaim, they also openly debated what the nomination symbolises, and how it lines up with what they want to achieve as a band. That’s Savages, all over.

“I don’t want to carry any flags, I’m just doing my thing,” Jehnny Beth once told DIY over the phone, speaking from a bustling Italian restaurant shortly after that Mercury nod in 2013. “I will just carry my own armour,” she stated, gleefully, “and do my own shit!”

“I think we were very guarded on the first record,” admits Fay in a similar vein, today. “You have to establish yourself in the way you want.” Ayşe’s on the same page, too, though she insists that much of their debut’s confrontation was less to do with anger, and more concerned with survival. “‘Silence Yourself’ was about us having focus,” she explains. “We needed to protect ourselves as a band from everything; to learn how to be a band together. To keep what we had together, as a band.”

Savages quickly garnered a fearsome reputation; for their volatile live show, their seriousness, their artistic intensity, and their complete intolerance for dealing with other people’s nonsense. It also landed them with a name for being, to put it bluntly, scary.

“I think scary’s ok,” says a decidedly not-scary Jehnny Beth today, leaning across the table with an arched eyebrow and comedy shrug. “I like scary. Why not?”

“I think, as a woman as well, if you’re being serious, you’re scary,” adds Fay. “Ooo!” she exclaims, providing a pantomime villain noise for extra effect. “When you know what you want, you cut to the chase,” grins Ayşe. “You say it.”

“It’s an intensity,” expands guitarist Gemma Thompson. “Sometimes you have to just play. You can’t think of anything at all, past that point. That puts you in an intense place. That’s what you’re after,” she concludes. “That’s what you’re trying to find. It’s the reason that we do this.”

Standing tall and balanced precariously on the metal barriers of live shows, like a ship’s steely-eyed figurehead at the helm of the good ship Savage, it’s no real surprise that Jehnny Beth in particular revels in a confrontational strain of theatricality.

“The stage is a place of freedom,” she grins. “You can be anything.”

With every sweat-drenched club show, and every chaos-fuelled festival appearance that followed the band’s debut, that drama only grew more pronounced; more unlike anything else on earth. Gradually the instant magnetism between Savages and their surging crowd led them in a new direction. Their destination? The zest-for-life-filled, connection-seeking ‘Adore Life’.

“Our shows were getting warmer and warmer, and something was happening,” nods Jehnny. “There’s a really good French word I can’t translate,” she says, ”bienveillant.”

Meaning roughly the same thing as benevolent, it’s an accurate word for what Savages have become. For every move their debut made to build up walls, and assemble bunkers, ‘Adore Life’ tears them back down with vengeance.

“I think that comes from us playing together for three years,” Ayşe assesses. “Naturally we’ve grown together as a band, experienced things from the audience. I see a gig as a shared experience of emotion and intensity between the audience and us. It’s that transfer of energy that we’ve become more comfortable with, maybe, in a strange way. We embrace it more rather than being insular.”

In that muddied, indefinable way that electronic sparks and lightbulb moments tend to take on a concrete shape, ‘Adore Life’ steadily began to find its own form. Live connection was already firmly on the band’s mind. They watched Michael Gira - one of their heroes, and the man who infamously called Savages “terrifying” before later apologising - perform several years ago at Best Kept Secret festival, with his band Swans. Another handful of jigsaw pieces slotted into the hazy puzzle. After that Swans show Jehnny Beth went away and wrote down a phrase on one of her many online blog posts. “Love was the answer.” That sentence began to set down meaningful root, without Savages even realising at the time.

“That was a key moment in finding a way to talk about love,” agrees Jehnny, looking back on that pivotal Swans show in 2013. “How [Gira] does it, obviously, is very universal, and grandiose, goth-like. That was interesting for us.” Her initial jotting-down - “love was the answer” - would, over time, become the hell-raising second album opener, ‘The Answer’. The wheels were careering into unstoppable motion.

“Gemma came up with that riff, and we decided to make that the song,” Jehnny Beth explains. “That impact, and that sound - like being in the middle of the eye of the storm - made it possible to use this line. It allowed us to say something vulnerable, and naive, in a way.”

Once that idea of carefully tensioned contrast hit like a weighty tonne of feathers, there was no looking back. Savages found themselves writing sprawlingly ambitious music, as loud as it was looming.

“I remember the guitar sound and the bass invading all the corridors. Even to the toilets you could hear them,” observes Jehnny, remembering the band’s three-week stint in RAK studios in London. “Out the front, if the door was open, you could hear squalls of guitar,” says Gemma, looking back. “Down the street!” smirks a delighted Jehnny. “The posh street, the posh people. That was good.”

With these pillars in place, Savages set out with another of their infamous manifestos in mind for album number two. “We try to work with intention,” says Jehnny, who has strong feelings about the subject. “Writing manifestos can be perceived as too ‘serious’,” wrote the frontwoman three years ago. “It became rather playful for me,” she said. “This is not school, you don’t have to please anyone but yourself, you don’t have to be a good student. However, you are your own teacher.”

It’s a sentiment she reiterates today. “A manifesto is a positive statement,” she points out. “It’s something that should feel inspiring once you’ve read it.”

The manifesto for ‘Adore Life’ was focused on several distinct ideas. Firstly, they agree unanimously, the process was about trust. “We could leave each other to it,” says Gemma, “and they would understand everything we needed to achieve.” Throughout the process members of Savages were constantly “popping in and out,” of the picture, with full confidence that they were all picturing the same end result. “Freedom was rule number one,” states Jehnny, “create space for each other in what we’re doing.”

“We wanted to do a record about love,” she continues, moving on to objective number two. “It was instinctive, at first,” she says, referring back to those initial flint-sparks, “and then it became a decision. If we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it all the way. We’re not going to skip some parts of love, that are maybe more dark, or more shameful, more personal.”

No aspect of love escapes unstudied on ‘Adore Life’. Stealing away from anonymous bedrooms, fucking in corridors, balancing an entire friendship on the risky knife-edge of lust, and surrendering to all-consuming desire, much airtime is given to those gnarled corners of love that spell out danger in hastily scrawled warning letters. As much as Richard Curtis would have you believe otherwise, love doesn’t always end with a brawl for honour in a Greek restaurant, a choreographed snog in a scenic location, or a merrily rolling reel of credits. Love is usually far more messy than that.

“We were trying to make a record that was quite psychotic and nuanced,” Jehnny Beth says. “Love, with all different facets, and the contradictory feelings you can have, when in love.”

‘When In Love’, indeed. Just one prominent example of Savages’ newly-unearthed touch of warmth, that song hits an especially specific, everyday nerve. “I hate your taste in music,” spits Jehnny Beth at one point, her voice bursting with sheer, undiluted venom.

She roars with laughter today at the suggestion that conflicting music taste is a Tinder dater’s worst nightmare. “It’s interesting to say very detailed, trivial things like that, that really get under your skin for some reason,” she reasons, “and to contrast that with a more universal idea.”

Fay has her own favourite lyric on that same track. “I’m gonna leave you forever, but next time I’m in the neighbourhood I’ll be knocking at your door,” she beams. “You know, when you’re like ‘I’m leaving you!’ but you’re too mad to let it happen? ‘Please take me back!’ I love that. Melodrama, a bit rock opera.”

“I used to love playing that song, when we were first testing it out,” says Ayşe, “I used to look at Fay, and she’d be…” her bandmate fist-pumps exuberantly across the table. “Brackets: punching the air,” Fay quips for the benefit of the dictaphone. “It’s got some vibes in there.”

Despite their frequent - and tongue in cheek - insistence that they’re a “humourless” band, that same playfulness has always been present in Savages’ repertoire. A sharp-tongued lyricist, Jehnny Beth’s dry, dark bend on wit peeked through the deceiving surface rage of debut tracks like ‘Strife’ - a song which asked ”how come I’ve been doing things with you I would never tell my mum?” Those foundations are magnified on ‘Adore Life’. “We did humour!” announces Fay, wryly. “But you know,” reasons Ayşe, being - ironically - entirely serious at this point. ”People did think we were serious.”

While the stomping ‘T.I.W.Y.G’ - which is, according to Fay “intentionally quite mad.” - concludes with boisterous canned laughter, sort-of title track ‘Adore’ veers from goosebumpy sparseness to arm-swinging rock opera territory in a joy-filled skip. That’s not to say that Savages have donned comedy water-pistols. ‘Adore Life’ is also an aggressive, vulnerable, thoughtful, poetic beast of an album, and it’s very much part of the same journey.

“We couldn’t have done it without that first record being there, and that process of touring.” Gemma says. “It gives us the freedom and openness to say more within the context of Savages. We’re strong enough to do that.”

“Perhaps having deconstructed everything we should be thinking about putting everything back together,” concluded the band in ‘Silence Yourself’’s opening statement of intent. In the beginning, Savages set out like careful dissectors, peeling off every spare bit of musical gristle, and leaving behind a bare, minimal skeleton. Now, there’s a hopeful, utopian edge. An answer to the bleak and deconstructed, ‘Adore Life’ does seem like an album concerned with putting everything back together again, too. Space and time are no longer held hostage; eerie, suspended moments of silence ring through ‘Adore’, and improvised pockets building like tumbling boulders of noise. Jehnny Beth ponders this, frowning. “It could be seen like that, actually,” she decides. “Yeah. It could.”

“They inform each other,” she continues. “I wouldn’t say the second record is the answer, because that would mean that this is it…” she says, followed by an uproarious outburst. “That’s it! Done! That’s the answer!” laughs Gemma. “I understand where you’re coming from,” Jehnny picks up. “It’s a really instinctive process. A rise,” finishes Gemma.

“Rise is a good word, actually,” concludes Jehnny. “An instinctive rise.” “It sounds like intellectual porn,” exclaims Gemma suddenly.

As they attempt to regain composure, One Direction’s ‘Drag Me Down’ blares without warning out of the crackly cafe speakers. The pair wince slightly. “I don’t remember your question,” deadpans Jehnny Beth.

Savages’ gathering together today comes shortly after they played their final show of a packed year, in the school hall-type surroundings of Tufnell Park Dome. The band showcased a huge chunk of ‘Adore Life,’ menacing a transfixed room with the thudding bass of ‘Sad Person’ and the waltzing, meandering strut, ‘Slowing Down the World’. The reaction in that room was of the instantly palpable kind. The air hung thick with a rare variety of tingly, goosebumpy energy that can almost be grabbed a-hold of, because it seems so physical, so real.

“I felt it,” says Jehnny Beth, quietly, before grinning widely. “I can’t even imagine how it’s going to be when people know the record! It’s gonna be awesome.”

Lately, the band have been starting their sets with the sparse, isolated warm-up vocals of ‘I Need Something New’ - a song they originally wrote on the stage as “a way to speak to each other.” A search for newness, and a ferocious pursuit of the unexpected, remains Savages’ biggest manifesto point of all. “It’s funny,” starts Jehnny Beth. “I feel sometimes it calms my nerves if I know that something unexpected is going to happen. In a way it’s accepting the chaos. It’s less scary than thinking, ‘I’ve got to do this same thing, exactly the same as yesterday’. That feels scary,” she laughs.

“Make it yours,” offers Gemma, as a tailored alternative to simply making it new. “Make it new for yourself,” agrees Jehnny. “That’s enough.

[elhunt]

Tame Impala: “Being in unknown territory is the most exciting part”

Originally published in DIY Magazine, July 2014. Words El Hunt.

Kevin Parker’s brain isn’t wired up for taking breaks. Before Tame Impala even put out their breakthrough debut ‘Innerspeaker’, Kevin was already hard at work on the follow-up, and it’s a similar story when it comes to the Australian band’s third record, ‘Currents’. “I guess it started congealing when I finished ‘Lonerism’,” Kevin says. “As soon as I switch my brain off, it starts coming back. It’s just that amount of creativity I need running in my brain.”

After several years of living in Paris, Kevin returned to a familiar spot in Western Australia to create ‘Currents’ - “the shack-mansion”. “I always find myself wanting to go back there,” he says. “It overlooks this amazing bay, and it’s a ridiculous house. It’s falling apart. I set the drums up on the balcony, actually,” he laughs. If the band’s Instagram is anything to go by, it’s also filled with absolutely gigantic spiders, not that it fazed them. Returning to the place where Tame Impala first recorded ‘Innerspeaker’ made perfect sense. “I didn’t have my own house, I’d come back from Paris, and I didn’t have anywhere to stay, or a recording space,” he explains. “So I thought I’d go back to Wavehouse. I just set up all my stuff from home there.“

Like every Tame Impala album before it, ‘Currents’ charts completely new sonic territory, and is its own distinct entity. While ‘Lonerism’ was clouded, uneasy and isolated, on the follow-up, the haze of humid reverb has lifted. “That feeling that I’m traversing new terrain, or I’m in unknown territory is the most exciting part about making music,” Kevin enthuses. “The idea I’m uncovering some new building, even if it’s just for me.”

Kevin readily admits that in the past, he’s restricted himself by refusing to fully embrace his  natural inclination towards pop. “I grew up as a grunge rocker,” he laughs. “so there were always things that, inherently, I thought were kinda naff. If I ever had pop elements in my music, I would consider them guilty pleasures, and I would take the steps to discard them.” His mindset, these days, is completely different. “When I first wrote ‘Feels Like We Only Go Backwards’ I thought it was a Backstreet Boys song,” he says, being entirely serious. “I drenched it in reverb and I distorted the drums and made it into this rumbling boulder. I’m proud of it, and I’d never change that, but I guess I realised there’s no such thing as a guilty pleasure. Pop music is not a taboo thing.”

“Put it this way, when ‘Lonerism’ came out I thought that was a pop album,” he says, laughing. “I was convinced, I thought it was pop with a psychedelic pinch to it. I guess I have the same sentiment with this album.”

“Every melody I’ve ever written is a pop melody,” he goes on. “For me, pop is a flavour that you can bring in and out of a song, it’s like an ingredient. If you’re a chef, you sprinkle in a bit. In the last few years, being in the music game,” he says wryly, “it makes you realise those ‘rules’ are boundaries.”

With Kevin’s pop epiphany came a whole new realm of possibilities. The result is clearest in songs like the strutting, Hall & Oatesy ‘Reality in Motion’ and ‘Less I Know the Better’ - a track which he dubbed “dorky, white disco funk” earlier this year. Previously, they wouldn’t have made it anywhere near Tame Impala, and probably would’ve wound up in Kevin’s funk band AAA Aardvark Getdown Services, or his glam-rock side project Kevin Spacey. This time round, though, anything went.

“I was a lot more open minded,” he says. “On previous albums I’ve been interested in making old albums sound new, or trying to redirect new elements into the old. This time I felt that might be restricting my arsenal. I bought one of those giant workstation synthesisers, you know, like a Justin Timberlake-type artist, just to see what would happen,” he says, pausing. “I thought, fuck it.”

Strong narratives and themes soon started to emerge as ‘Currents’, gradually fused together, with realisation, acceptance and connection tellingly cropping up at every turn. “I think people thought ‘Lonerism’ was about loving solitude,” says Kevin, looking back on Tame Impala’s second record. “For me it was about trying to connect with people and go out into the world, and being rejected all the time. This album,” he continues, “is about someone that is now able to join the rest of the world and be a part of things. Someone who wants to evolve as a person.”

While the band’s previous albums were heaped high with unanswered questions, ‘Currents’ is Tame Impala’s most self-assured record yet. On ‘Eventually,’ Kevin sings the distinctly confident line “I know just what I’ve got to do, and it’s got to be soon, cause I know that I’ll be happier”. Down to the last melody, the entire record is bright, vibrant, and clear. “‘Currents’ is about someone realising that there’s a current within them to become someone else,” he concludes, “and they have no choice but to be the person within them.“

The album artwork - a diagram of vortex shedding - Kevin explains, is how he sees the lifeblood of ‘Currents’ visually. “It shows an object moving through fluid, or the air, kind of like an aeroplane wing, showing the direction of the air around it,” he clarifies, doing fairly well at giving a scientific explanation even though it’s still “early in the morning.” “The air in front is all flat, and calm, and straight,” he says, “and then when the object moves through, it disrupts the air, and rips it apart and leaves this train of mangled flow lines. I love that idea. It describes the album really well, because I think it disrupts the air around it as you move through it.”

Besides working on ‘Currents,’ Kevin Parker has collaborated with Mark Ronson on his recent album ‘Uptown Special’. He appears on three songs - one of which, ‘Daffodils’, was originally written for his own AAA Aardvark Getdown Services. “Mark’s an inspiring guy,” says Kevin. “I definitely learnt some lessons from being around him when he was making [‘Uptown Special’]. If nothing else, how open-minded he is about how a song can come together. I always thought a song has to be conceived from deep inside you, but for him an idea can come from anywhere - the engineer can come up with the whole thing.”

Despite having three albums under his belt now with Tame Impala, every album is a totally different challenge for Kevin Parker, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. “Does it get easier?” he asks. “No! God no. ‘No’ in capitals. This one for whatever reason drove me craziest, which is something I told myself last time that I definitely wouldn’t do. For me, making an album is such an intensive process, and it takes everything out of me. By the time I’m finished with it, as long as it’s good, and it accomplishes what I had in mind, I have that feeling where i don’t need to redo it. It’s like when you play a video game and you get to the end,” he laughs. “There’s not much drive to play it again.”

“Finishing ‘Lonerism’, I said to myself, right, next time I make an album, I’m going to keep it simple,” he says, evidently amused. “I guess I was kidding myself anyway. Making music, the whole point is being completely confused by it. It’s a ridiculous idea to think I can stay on the surface, I have to go a bit crazy. The confusion is the best part.”

[elhunt]

Anyone for hummus? At home with Laura Marling

Originally published in DIY Magazine, March 2015. Feature by El Hunt

“For a while, I thought I wasn’t going to come back to music,” states Laura Marling, taking a drag of a cigarette, before tossing her lighter off to one side to provide dramatic emphasis. “I really thought that.”

Aged just 16, Laura put pen to paper, signing a five-album contract with major label Virgin Records. Music quite literally became her life. Over the next eight years she travelled and played huge iconic venues across the world in several drawn-out stints of touring, and released four albums; three of which were nominated for the prestigious Mercury Prize. A staple artist on the folk scene by the time she turned 20, she seemed to have everything. Everything, that is, except roots.

“I was so exhausted and out of touch with the pace of normal life,” Laura says, sitting crossed-legged, surveying her Bethnal Green living room. She’s watched back by a quizzical-looking stuffed owl on a table across the room. “I was dealing with a lot of shit, and feeling like I wasn’t part of the planet in any way. I was like, what the fuck am I doing with my life? I had to think, am I interesting? If I took the music away, and the travel away, and I had to sit down and actually chat to somebody, would I be able to do it? The conclusion that I came to is that I would. But I don’t need to. It makes me really grateful that I do what I do. It fits me pretty perfectly.”

She might be gladly back in London now, but Laura’s vague wandering search for belonging took her to a peculiar destination; the thronging, neon-lit dreamland of Los Angeles. While she was there she took up “a fairly odd, specific kind of transcendental yoga,” and she adopts a theatrical faux-whisper for a second, “marijuana. Psychedelics and stuff. But that was only very occasional,” she hastens to add.  “I was pretty close to joining a cult,” she says casually, as an aside. “If you aren’t attached to anything, you can dangerously teeter on the edge of becoming a professional vagrant. It feels a huge relief to be back. I found LA liberating, and actually too much, in the end.”  

“And,” laughs Laura, continuing, “I quit smoking for eight months. A lot of stuff comes up when you don’t have a cigarette in your hand.” She pauses to blow a puff of smoke out of the window as if on cue. Evidently she’s over being straight-edge these days.

Throwing herself into LA life and occult extra-curricular pursuits, in the middle of what she dubs her quarter-life crisis, Laura didn’t end up over-doing the wacky-baccy and wandering round barefoot in white robes - though she points out that, in LA, that would probably be acceptable. She didn’t end up finding spiritual enlightenment, either. “Psychedelics, transcendental yoga, silent retreats - whatever takes you to see the face of God - that’s cool. But you have to be able to take it into modern life. I started to feel that this isn’t the way, or the answer. Nature isn’t good or kind. People have darkness in them. The message in that, and all of the occult stuff, is just be human.”

“It’s given me such a fresh love of people,” she concludes. “I value human connection now, above all other things. My criteria for judgement of other people, and myself, has changed.”

Connection, context and rewriting your own narrative is the crux of Laura Marling’s fifth album, ‘Short Movie’. While travelling around the East Coast of America and touring fairly anonymously “on my tod”, she befriended an old hippy in Mount Shasta, where “a lot of hippies moved in the 60s, because they believed that an alien spacecraft lived at the top of a mountain. It’s on Wikipedia.” Her new acquaintance apparently bookended almost every far-fetched tale with “it’s a short fucking movie, man.” It became, explains Laura, “the over-riding sentiment of what was driving me to do what I was doing,” and it tellingly became the bookend of her own record, too.

“I just got really into the idea that the life we live, as contemporary humans, is constructed,” she expands. “We build our reality, and give ourselves a story. We tell ourselves who we are in context to where we’re born, or what we do. I took myself out of that, and gave myself a new context. Human life is so short, and silly, and insignificant, in an enormous and incomprehensibly expansive universe. I still feel really strongly that I can get really dark, and at that time,” she says, referring to the last two years, “I was really dark. But I need to believe that there is fantasy; a surrealness to life beyond our control… a creative force in the universe.”

Since returning to England, Laura’s been reading lots of occultist literature, she says, brandishing an arm to wave roughly in the direction of Gurdjieff’s Collected Works; a ridiculously proportioned book the size of a very square-looking cat. It’s currently acting as a doorstop. ‘Gurdjieff’s Daughter’ - a song where she recites mantras like “don’t be impressed by strong personalities” and “never give orders just to be obeyed” - is inspired by the writing of Chilean spiritual guru and avant-garde film-maker, Alejandro Jodorowsky. She tosses this into conversation lightly, as if referring to her personal recipe for guacamole. “He was tracked down by [the mystic,] Gurdjieff’s daughter. She shoved him into a taxi after the premiere of one of his films, took him off to a hotel room, and…” she hesitates, attempting to form the right words, “did some… acts, upon him,” she coughs. “It’s really weird stuff that they were doing, and she was proving her capacity for sexual - and therefore, creative - power,” she goes on. “She said, I’ve tracked you down because you have to learn these moral values and put it into your art form, get it into the world.”

Flitting between tiny American towns, in a car stacked up with old records from 1969 (“I just noticed I was buying a lot of records from that year,” she shrugs) and textbooks by mystics, Laura had a sort of existential revelation, and eventually she returned to writing with a new outlook. She allowed herself to “fall in love” with a 1959 Gibson 335 electric guitar, and in doing so, had to adapt to a totally new way of playing. “Shaking it up a bit, and rolling the dice again,” opened her eyes to music again; she stopped feeling weary and contractually obliged to write. “I’ve got the joy back,” she smiles.

“I think my reality bounds got taken down to an extent where I felt like I wasn’t constricted to anything,” she adds. “I don’t think I took a particularly wide step out of what I was doing before, but I made the beginnings of a step. I hope to expand on that.”

“Complete insignificance is really liberating,” she nods emphatically. Laura says she takes herself less seriously these days, and she openly admits that in the past being a musician felt a little too ego-driven. “[The last two years] took away my own self-importance, and lightened me up a bit, made me a bit more playful,” she says, “‘Short Movie’ is less Romantic. The pursuit of Romanticism didn’t appeal to me anymore, and I mean in a poetic sense. I wasn’t trying to make gods of men anymore, or poetry of situations. I was just observing.” She pauses. “It’s allowed me to take myself less seriously. But,” she adds as a disclaimer, ”not to the extent that I’m a complete goof.”

It’s safe to say that Laura Marling is in no danger of being a goof. Between albums she applied for a poetry course in upstate New York, under a pseudonym, and was flat-out refused admission. “I thought it’d be the perfect thing to distract me from actually having to sit still. I worked really hard for it, but I didn’t get in.” She shrugs, and throws her lighter up in a somersault. “It was a challenge to myself, to see if I could be vulnerable in a different way. And I was vulnerable,” she concludes.

For the first time Laura took up a seat in the production chair for ‘Short Movie,’ a transition which she openly admits was daunting, too, “because I didn’t want to waste people’s time, I didn’t want to dither.” ‘Safe As Milk’ by Captain Beefheart, she says, is a huge influence on this record. “They went mental with panning - they have a kick drum up here, and snare drum down there,” she enthuses, picking random points in the air. “When you listen it’s like he’s in the middle of your brain. It’s really disorientating and brilliant. We were playing with panning a lot on this.”

“[Producing] really took away the mystery, in a good way,” she adds. “Who’s the guy with the beard?” she asks, moving towards the window for yet another smoke. “Rick Rubin. He’s the ultimate mystery.” It helped her to get right underneath the song’s skin, then? “Yeaaah,” she says slowly, turning the question over. “Under the song’s skin. I was like, ‘oh, you don’t know anything’, Again, proving to myself that I don’t know anything.”

Laura has a reputation for being fiercely guarded about her personal life, both in interviews, and as a songwriter. Today, though, not so much. On her last album, ‘Once I Was An Eagle’ she transformed herself into a bird of prey, a master hunter, and the water spirit Undine. ‘I Speak Because I Can’ - a song she released aged 18 - was delivered through the voice box of an aging, “poor and lonely wife.” It would be wildly exaggerating to call ‘Short Movie’ - or indeed Laura Marling - a totally open book, but the arm with which she holds back her audience has grown shorter. “Definitely,” she laughs, “yeah.”

‘False Hope’ she explains, is her most patently autobiographical song, a panning camera following three days that she spent trapped in a New York Air BnB during Hurricane Sandy. “Is it still ok, that I don’t know how to be alone?” she asks, and it soon transforms into “is it still ok that I don’t know how to be, at all?” She’s fearful, upfront, and unmuddied by complex imagery. On ‘Short Movie’ Laura Marling doesn’t speak because she can, she speaks because she needs to know that she’s not alone.

“I was with a boyfriend who I’d only just met, and we were stuck in this tight, dark apartment,” she says. “At the end of the street there was a Trader Joe’s [grocery store], and there was a queue round the block to get in, and there were only candles. There was this woman,” she says, “who was downstairs, and not with it at all, and she came and knocked on our door. She was just terrified. We checked on her a lot. I didn’t like the idea of someone living in this horr..” she stops herself suddenly. “Harsh, not horrible. Not being looked after. It had such an effect on me, those three days. They did what they did in the movies, they fucking cut off the bridges!” she exclaims. “We had to get on this dodgy mini-van that was leaving to the airport. I think we went to Canada, because… oh, he’s Canadian! Escape to Canada.” She laughs to herself. If her old friend from Mount Shasta was here, he’d undoubtedly be shaking his head, and adding “it’s a short fucking movie, man.”

“I think I could get away with saying only half what I say, no?” asks Laura on the title track, over grating strings, gathering motion, eventually deciding “I don’t mind”. Her convoluted journey to this record took her from Hollywood and the Flintstones landscape of Joshua Tree, to mountain carparks for UFOs and finally, back to London. Along the way “I lost my shame about being afraid, or being lonely, or being weird,” she says. “It’s probably the most important thing that I’ve learnt so far.” For the first time, Laura Marling seems to have written an album that she hopes liberates other people as well as herself. “I hope that, should anyone have experienced anything similar to what I’ve experienced, that they feel comforted by it, or liberated by it, and unashamed of anything to do with the darker sides of being human.”

“Right,” says Laura, rising from the sofa and making for the kitchen. “I’m hungry. Crisps and hummus?”

[elhunt]

Sleater-Kinney: 'Now we just want to be the greatest jazz band in America'

Originally published in DIY Magazine, February 2014. Words El Hunt.

“I’m so self-conscious about birds!” exclaims Carrie Brownstein, suddenly. “There’s a dress I wanted to buy which had these little lovely birds on,” she qualifies, “and I was like, I just can’t. I ruined birds for my friends,” she sighs, with faux-regret, “and I’ve ruined birds for myself.”

Carrie Brownstein is notorious for many different outlets these days, from her parodies of pernickety feminist bookstore owners and chaffinch-adorned designer goods on US sketch show Portlandia, to the now-disbanded Wild Flag. When she walks down the street these days, she most likely hears “put a bird on it!” almost as frequently as shouts of “Sleater-Kinney!” Her bandmate Corin Tucker, too, wields a fearsome stand-alone reputation; her tuned-down guitar and vocal barrage of wild, unleashed vibrato unlike anything else on planet Earth, let alone the universe. Drummer Janet Weiss meanwhile has forged a path as an untouchably immediate musician and a force of pure, pummelling nature; both on Sleater-Kinney records, and with her other bands, Quasi and Wild Flag. 

Today Corin Tucker snorts with derision when asked about that time Sleater-Kinney were proclaimed “America’s best rock band” by critic Greil Marcus. “Now we just want to be the greatest jazz band in America,” she laughs; “something to work towards on the next record,” archly quips Carrie in response. Likewise, Carrie is modest about the contribution to political dialogue that Sleater-Kinney made with albums like 2002’s ‘One Beat’, a record that arrived under the Bush administration and amid the grieving aftermath of 9/11. They’re more forthcoming about their ideological core feminism and social change; less so about their status as uncompromising flag bearers for the movement. Sleater-Kinney generally couldn’t give two hoots about being cornerstones of music past, or being remembered from eras long replaced by high street stores selling overpriced Beavis and Butthead t-shirts. They are a band that only exists in the present, and there is one word that Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker return to time and time again today. Relevancy.

On Sleater-Kinney’s last record, in 2005, the band infamously called nostalgia a whore in their tirade against industry puppets and shameless imitators, ‘Entertain’. Their rhetoric might have softened a little ten years on - mainly through containing fewer cuss-words - but their stance remains firmly the same. “It’s not an interesting place to create from,” says Carrie, bluntly. “It’s a rabbit hole to go down a path where [nostalgia’s] a motivating factor, or to be in a place where you feel like the past is better. That’s a very diminished way of existing in the present tense. How can you work from there?” she asks. “How can you make something new if you think everything good has already happened?”

It’s the logic behind why Sleater-Kinney aren’t just back blazing a trail on the reunion circuit, or slapping a greatest hits collection down on the counter. Far from it, they’re back with ‘No Cities To Love’; yet another Sleater-Kinney album that magically seizes on the precise moment it operates within, and creates an entire cracked sonic mirror out of the chaos. “Relevancy is a very important element to longevity,” explains Carrie. The decision to record together again was not one that the band took at all lightly. “It’s been percolating for a few years, and it took a while to carve out the time,” Carrie says. “It wasn’t on some kind of timeline - it could have taken years to write [‘No Cities To Love’]. You know, it had to be very intentional.” “Yeah,” nods Corin. “We wanted to come out with a new record. We worked on it until we had an album that had something new to say.”

‘No Cities To Love’ certainly has plenty of that, and then some. “I always think of Betty Davis - she’s a funk singer - and she has this song called ‘The Anti-Love Song’,” says Carrie, shedding light on the album title. “It is actually about love, but you put the word ‘no’ in front of it and you still think of all the everywheres and nowheres, and how you sit within a given space, how you relate to context and yourself, and the people you love,” she ponders. “When you tell someone there’s no cities to love, you think about all the cities that you do love. It’s more about claiming the things that you do love, because it forces you to, as a title. You’re like, no! That’s not true! “

Unrest, worry, and barely tensioned anxiety continually threaten to topple over into anger on ‘No Cities To Love’, and it’s characterised by barbed, spiky guitar lines, While Sleater-Kinney’s last record ‘The Woods’ was vast, expansive and cavernous, there’s an almost claustrophobic tautness to its follow-up. “Expansion does not exist on this record,” agrees Carrie, “except in little moments. We wrote it in a very airless, soundproofed space,” she says, referring to her narrow basement space in Portland. “It has an airless quality to it, the playing, which I think has a buttoned up anxiety.”

Buttoned-up anxiety is a fitting emotion to hold up next to an age that doesn’t really know what to do with itself. ‘No Cities To Love’ is concerned with striving to take back agency, and occupying a new shape in a world that keeps on blurring the boundaries and withholding the rulebook from all but the super-rich. “It’s a search for connection and it’s about understanding the power of relationships,” says Corin. “To me the creature of the album is questioning, and very hungry,” she adds. “I think it’s couched in a very aggressive form, though,” adds Carrie. “Even when the subject or scene isn’t angry, it’s very unforgiving. The guy who designed our album artwork was working on it, and listening to the songs, obviously,” she pauses, smiling. “His kid came into the room and said, ‘oh, you’re playing music by the crazy band!’”

Back in 2005 Sleater-Kinney sang “reality is the new fiction,” and they may as well have been predicting the advent of social media. “Realness does have a tenuousness to it [now],” agrees Carrie. “It’s like there’s an invisibility if you don’t document. A lot of this record is about power, and a sense of finding yourself,” she adds. “If you feel a sense of other, or outsiderness, you try to find these shapes, or roles, to fill. That can be a very alienating process. Ideally the space that you find for yourself, the shape that you end up filling, is yourself. A couple of the songs are about that sense of being half-formed and blurry, and trying to find solidity of shape.”

One such moment is the anthemic declaration that “no outline will ever hold us” on ‘New Wave’, accompanied by the grisly notion of humans being raw materials; fodder for the churning capitalist meat machine. On the title track, Carrie sings about wanting to walk out to the edge of her own life, leaving her body behind as a souvenir. Bodies on this album are everywhere but never quite complete, missing limbs or existing as weird empty voids. On the first single ‘Bury Our Friends’ they’re “stitched-up and sewn”, while ‘Price Tag’ takes a different tact; the voice of a mother who does everything she can to follow the rules and fit into the prescribed mould. Try as she might, she just can’t assume the right shape. There’s no way to win, even if you play the game to the letter.

“She will never achieve what she’s trying to achieve,” explains Corin, expanding on ‘Price Tag’. “Even though you’ve followed all the rules, and done everything that you’re supposed to do, your job still won’t provide what you’re looking for. Corporations in America switch people’s hours - especially working moms’ - to be less than 40 hours a week. There were huge stores like Walmart doing it. The idea that having a strong labour voice is no longer necessary in America anymore…” she clearly pauses to emphasise, “is bullshit.”

The solution being to break the rules and play by entirely new ones? “Absolutely,” answers Corin with total certainty.

Sleater-Kinney don’t just treat rules with a vagrant disregard; they continually advocate changing them entirely. ‘No Cities To Love’ is no exception. George W. Bush might be a nightmarish figment of the near-past, but the so-called War On Terror is still raging, and across the Atlantic protesters are out lining the streets of Ferguson and New York, railing against police brutality. Inequality is still the currency of society, and despite the progress that has been made since Sleater-Kinney last made music together in 2005, their concerns remain every jot as relevant. Not only do they have something new to say on this album, they have something absolutely vital that needs to be heard.

“There’s still such an unrealised existence in the United States,” says Corin. “It’s such an incredible dichotomy; this promised land, for certain people. Other people will never be able to achieve that. That frustration is still there, and the inequality. We have to speak up about it, because if we just let that kind of privilege exist with wealth in America, then as a country we’ve failed,” she says, “absolutely failed.”

‘No Cities To Love’ contains “an element of wanting to do something that isn’t binary or defined by a shape that is familiar,” adds Corin. “[Society’s] resurgence of negativity and violence has to do with this fear of huge shifts where the binary is starting to break down a little bit,” expands Carrie. “That’s very scary for some people. Hierarchy is very comforting for a lot of people. It benefits some, and completely degrades others. When iCloud was hacked, you know, those nude picture leaks, there was this idea that women’s bodies are just available and objectified and made into commodifications.” It’s another idea slam bang wallop at the centre of this record. It’s not an easy dialogue to start up, and progression will be slow, but, Carrie adds, “people are starting to speak up. I think that the collective voice of power from the feminine is scaring the shit out of a lot of people,” she says with a glint.

“I think it’s so incredibly important that more women are feeling free to speak out, and to say that it’s unacceptable,” says Corin. “There are new ideas and ways of re-defining our interactions with each other. The whole yes means yes campaign for colleges,” she continues, referencing sex education in schools, “it’s brilliant that we’re reinventing how we start to interact with each other. Let’s make it like a weird French play where people are like ‘Do you want to have sex with me?’” she laughs. “It’s obviously really funny and awkward, but let’s make these relationships that we have with each other very specific and observed, and very public. It will be awkward and we’ll laugh in 20 years, but re-examining that is important.”

Besides their tongue in cheek quest to become the best jazz band in America, and their deadly serious pursuit of musical and social progression, Sleater-Kinney’s parting goal is an unlikely one; to return to The Planet, a fictional venue in America’s unofficial Most Ludicrous Gay Soap Opera, The L Word. At the height of their success, touring ‘The Woods’, Sleater-Kinney played ‘Jumpers’ on the show., and they’d go back and do it again “in a heartbeat,” says Corin. “We’d open for a band at The Planet. Who wouldn’t?” she adds, with a barely-maintained poker face. She can’t keep her composure any longer, and howls with laughter. “Everything about that is so silly,” laughs Carrie. 

It all returns to Sleater-Kinney’s favourite word: relevancy. They might roll their eyes, but they remain one of the biggest rock bands in America, and they connect with everyone equally - even noughties teenagers watching episodes of atrocious TV programmes. Whether the person picking up ‘No Cities To Love’ is brand new and arriving to the band for the first time, or a die-hard from the very beginning, Sleater-Kinney “want people to see this album on its own terms, and hopefully it holds up.” “I think it’s one of our best records,” assesses Carrie, and she’s right. “I am very proud of the fact that we put out six great records, and then our first is kind of like ‘we’re here’,” she laughs. ‘No Cities To Love’ simply holding up is surely the understatement of the year, and it’s only just started.

[elhunt]

Sex, power and chilli cheese fries: meet Charli XCX

Originally published in DIY Magazine, Oct 2014. Reprinted in London's Evening Standard with permission. Feature by El Hunt.

Ever spotted a pop star? They’re pretty unmissable. Entourage in tow or not, they carry an aura on their person at all times, with star-shaped sprinkles orbiting around the edges. The people turning round and double-taking might not quite recognise them yet, but in a few months’ time they’ll see them again on tube adverts and hear their songs on every radio station. Casually strolling down one of London’s grey streets of taxi ranks and takeaway sandwich bars in a fairly impractical feathered gown and sunglasses, surrounded by a small, important-looking team, Charli XCX has created a stir of this exact variety. A city worker freezes, and then remembers he’s half way through taking a bite out of a baguette. A pair of tourists are frantically taking photos of her crossing the road, and they don’t really know why. Disappearing through a door in a way that seems somehow business-like and razzmatazz, Charli XCX is a pop star, alright.

It hasn’t always been this way, but with Charli XCX it has never been a question of if, but rather when. Most 14-year-old girls circa 2006 were busy frittering their pocket money away in Tammy Girl on diamante slogan t-shirts and camouflage trousers; Charli XCX was far too busy convincing her parents to give her a loan so that she could make an album. She did just that, and made ‘14’, along with her own record label, which she called Orgy in typical haughty style. All of a sudden Atlantic snapped her up. There were two mixtapes in 2012, with a Brooke Candy writer credit, and enough buzzy sampling to short circuit a bumblebee. There was her first major label studio album, too, the highly-glossed alt-pop world of ‘True Romance’. Charli XCX wrote and featured on ‘I Love It’, and Icona Pop made it one of the biggest songs of last summer. She wasn’t a pop star at that point, though, not on your nelly. By her standards, Charli XCX was just getting started.

“A couple of days ago I was in Washington airport getting a Wendy’s, and this Belgian girl came up to me,” explains Charli, having absconded from the street to take refuge in an American-style diner. “She was like, ‘Oh my god, you’re Charli XCX, can I please have a photo?’ I was literally so fucking tired with my chilli cheese fries,” she laughs, pulling out her best impression of jetlag and recreating the moment vividly. “Shit like that happens to me more now; since ‘Fancy’ [Charli’s collaboration with Iggy Azalea] I suppose. People come up to me on planes asking me to sign shit. I’ll always oblige because I want to make my fans happy, but it is strange for sure.”

“Even just last week I was in three countries in one day,” she says excitedly. “We took a private jet which was fucking crazy. We were all very excited, and probably really annoying to the flight attendant. We got there an hour early so we could just take photos of ourselves outside it and shit.” Being busy, these days, is the norm. “This year has been totally hectic,” she concludes. 

With a one-off show at London’s Heaven pencilled in for 30th October, and endless promotional duties leading up to the release of ‘Sucker’, it’s a frantic schedule that shows no signs of letting up, but Charli feels ready to meet it all head on.  “I’ve been doing this for quite a long time now and I can really feel it; I’ve become more sure of myself as an artist and I feel my music has just got better,” reasons Charli in response to the question ‘Why now?’ It’s certainly a confident answer, but then again, considering ‘Sucker’ bursts into life from a bratty launch-pad of bubblegum popping in a teacher’s face - accompanied by the decidedly radio unfriendly announcement “Fuck you, sucker!” - her matching gustiness doesn’t really come as much of a surprise. Reflecting on her previous output though, she’s her own harshest critic, and it wasn’t really until ‘I Love It’, she says -  “which was literally just me writing a song in a hotel room alone” - that she actually believed herself capable of penning massive pop songs.

“I feel like throughout ‘True Romance’ I was quite insecure as a person, as an artist, and very unsure of myself in terms of songwriting, still,” Charli admits. “Even though it was my voice, I feel there were a lot of other voices on that record, too. When I grew up I was really worried about being cool,” she adds. “I felt that pressure. I was never the cool kid in school, and loads of people told me that I was weird, that I dressed uncool and did uncool things, that I was too nice, too happy, all this. All of that made me a bit ‘ugh’, and made me want to compensate for my personality by making quite a muted and shy album, really. That was the outcome on ‘True Romance’. Now I really don’t care what people think,” she shrugs. “ I’ve made this album because it’s what comes naturally to me. I feel less afraid to say that now, y’know?”

This time round, Charli is far less bothered about how people perceive both her and her music. “I’ve already started reading ‘oh, she’s sold out!’” she laughs, “and I’m like, but you haven’t heard the album! The first song says ‘Fuck you’ about 25 times and it’s a two minute song!”

They’ll have to wait a little longer to hear ‘Sucker’ before making up their minds, though. Following this interview Charli announced that she would be pushing back her album release date to January next year, citing the unexpected success of ‘Boom Clap’ as the main reason. “I’m overwhelmed by the love for boom clap & the support from all u angels,” she wrote on her twitter account, “I need to put the date back so I can launch the album properly…”

‘Sucker’, after all, is an album that Charli XCX seems determined to get completely right, and she repeatedly emphasises the importance of releasing something that is “100%” her.  Above and beyond anything else she’s put her name to, ‘Sucker’ does feel and sound unmistakably like an album that only Charli XCX could write. The sheen and polish is gone, making way for something rawer around the edges, exuding more attitude than John Bender with his feet defiantly on the desk in Breakfast Club detention. Her influences range from infectious French yé-yé pop from the 1960s to ‘Feeling Alright’ by The Vibrators, which Charli discovered on a punk compilation she bought in WH Smiths for two quid. 

“I think I’ve always been very inspired by Paris,” she states. “With my first record I was very inspired by [dance label] Ed Banger. With this, it was 60s pop, and this whole idea of Lolita; the way that the music all sounds so child-like, but really sexy and feminine at the same time. That inspired me a lot, and even the way that the vocals are cut in those songs; the gang-like chants. That was something I was thinking about pretty much straight after ‘True Romance’ came out.” She pauses. “Following ‘I Love It’ I pushed away from all pop music and felt very inspired by punk. I remember towards the end of last year I was in Sweden, with [collaborator] Patrick Berger, and we were writing songs. Both of us felt angry and aggressive about being asked to replicate ‘I Love It’, and we both wanted to fuck everyone off for a while; not tell people where we were, what we were doing. I was just covering songs from his band, Snuffed By The Yakuza, to get out our aggression, and I think through that I was able to fall in love with pop music again.”

The roll call for ‘Sucker’ is a diverse one, featuring the likes of Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo, and Rostam Batmanglij of Vampire Weekend. She nearly did a song with Pelle from The Hives, too, she adds; “it was cool, but didn’t work out in the end.” Having the freedom and confidence to work with whomever she likes, and write however the hell she fancies on any given day, Charli agrees, is hugely important. “I’ve always been in control of everything that I’ve done, but now so more than ever,” she nods, “I feel 100% confident in my own vision. I have discussions and ask for opinions, but at the end of the day it’s me making the calls and calling the shots. This wasn’t something curated by my record label. If I wanted to do a session with someone, I’d reach out to them and go do it. I do feel more confident, though, yes, and it comes across on the album,”

“I think the best artists are the ones who constantly change,” adds Charli. “Madonna, Bowie. This idea of building a brand seems to have come about super strong in the past ten years, but I don’t understand that so much. I don’t think it makes for interesting art, I think it makes for selling a product. I’m less interested in that, and more interested in challenging myself and my audience.”

‘Sucker’, for all intents and purposes, is huge. It’s also a self-aware pop record, and stomping its own path through a chart already crammed full with stars and big names, ‘Sucker’ seems to clear a new space. Having previously informed DIY that this is an album written for “for girls, and for everyone on the planet with a pussy,” Charli is delighted at the suggestion that ‘Sucker’ is sexy, albeit in a way that feels honest and real. “Absolutely!” she exclaims slapping a hand onto the table in agreement, startling a nearby customer.

“I think it’s a feminine album, and a sexy album,” she expands, “but when I think about what the stereotype of sexy is, to the average person, I don’t think it is that. I feel sexy singing these songs, and I hope that inspires other girls and other women, because you can totally be confident and feel amazing in your own skin without having to try and conform to what Heat magazine, or FHM or any guy says is sexy. I think what women think is sexy is what is sexy.”

“Girls eating pizza is massively sexy,” she announces abruptly, “that turns me on.”

She pauses to offer round the onion rings, clearly pleased with the appropriate comic timing. “I really just want to change the way that women think about themselves,” she continues. “A lot of young girls are quite lost. I was. In parts I still am. I think it would be cool for women to feel like they connect to someone who is also a bit scruffy. I’m not clean-cut and perfect, I say dumb shit and I fall over, and I want girls to know that’s cool.”

Not afraid to speak her mind, Charli XCX isn’t going to pass media-training for the Disney Club, and she doesn’t especially care for celebrity culture. “It’s all about rules, and what you can say, and what you can’t say,” she sighs, ”gossip, reality and celebrities. It’s not about iconic moments in music history.” Talk turns to the MTV Music Video Awards. “I was kind of bored,” she puts it, quite bluntly. Riff Raff and Katy Perry’s denim homage to Britney Spears’ and Justin Timberlake’s matchy blue ensemble from 2001, she says, in the interest of fairness “was the best thing about them! That’s exactly what I’m talking about.”

Charli has a plan to up the ante, however. “I’d like to arrive on my school bus with an army of punk ten-year-olds spray painting the step-and-repeat [red carpet backdrop],” she laughs. “That’d be tight. That would be amazing, like the ‘Break The Rules’ video, but permanently. My band would hate me, though, there’d be no beds, they’d be just sat up the whole time. I’d love to roll around in a school bus, though, uh huh.”

Although she jokes that she’d love to blow everything on making her live show like a “Japanese gameshow,” Charli recently bought a house, instead, which you’d think would make her feel rather sensible and adult. “It makes me feel grown up, the fact that I have a house,” she grins, “but when I think about how I’m doing it up it, makes me feel like a child. There’s carpet all over the walls and hanging chairs and glitter curtains with tiny mattresses and dens on the floor, so it’s like a playhouse. That makes me feel about 12. My neighbours are all super old and they’re like, oh god, who’s this girl who knocked down all the walls in her house on day one?”

Will Charli XCX be hosting elaborate parties at her new madcap pad? She looks a little sheepish for a moment; “Um…” she hesitates, before laughing. “I mean, probably. Yeah. It’s going to be hard not to.”

Private jets, VMA parties to attend, and Hot 100 billboard topping singles to her name, Charli XCX must surely feel like a pop star by now? “It’s funny because I guess I’ve just really shut myself off from the idea of that now,” she reasons. “I feel like an ice cube floating around in a sea of chill. It’s not something that interests me. I really do just want to be in the studio or on tour all the time, and everything else is just beginning to freak me out.” She looks around and a nearby punter quickly looks away, pretending not to be at all affected by the fact that Charli XCX is sat in a feathery dressing gown eating onion rings on the next table. “I guess that’s what being a pop star is, you know?”

[elhunt]

St. Vincent: ‘There’s Nothing As Weird As A Person’

Originally published in DIY Magazine, March 2014. Feature by El Hunt

On an average-looking grey London street, there’s something very strange on the wall: a plaster of Paris nose protrudes out of the brickwork. Through an inconspicuous doorway and a rabbit-warren of corridors, St Vincent sits in an upstairs room. She’s here to talk about her new self-titled album. It’s not just any old record, either.

For her fourth full length, Annie Clark has created something almost unbelievably exciting and unique. After all, who else could possibly dream up a fully functioning, massively infectious song solely about a rattlesnake? Who else could write pop songs that casually reference modern American authors like Joan Didion and Lorrie Moore, and historical, divisive social figures like political activist and Black Panther co-founder Huey P. Newton? This is clever, witty, pop music; both without fear and immediately accessible.

“I love pop music,” Clark enthuses. “Stevie Wonder is pop, Michael Jackson is pop, Talking Heads,” she laughs, name checking recent collaborator David Byrne’s band, “is pop. To me it’s about living in that place where accessibility and weirdo meet. That’s where all my heroes have lived. It’s cool to try and push pop music forward, to see what it could be. It’s important for me for things to be accessible. That’s the kind of music I like.”

Fearless is a descriptor Annie returns to time and time again when she talks about the process of making ‘St Vincent’. There’s a certain wriggling exposure that comes with writing, and while her previous album ‘Strange Mercy’ was a dark record, written during what Annie admits was “a really sad time in my life,” the follow-up seems to strike a balance between ugly truths and a joyful pop abandon.

“I think that it takes courage to be ugly, and to admit that you have misanthropic or self-loathing thoughts. It takes courage to be a narrator that is maybe not that likeable,” she explains. “If you can admit to your flaws then it’s just freeing. Being able to admit your ugly parts is one thing, but this is a less self-lacerating record. It’s sort of come out the other side into really wanting to connect with other people, and not just be insular, on your own, in your own cesspool of anxiety and self-loathing.”

Part of her move towards connection, Annie agrees, stems from her work with the previously mentioned David Byrne last year, on their mighty brass monolith ‘Love This Giant’. “People would dance at the shows,” she says, “like, dance! At St Vincent shows people move, but not with that kind of collective consciousness. That was really interesting, because I think a lack of self-consciousness from the performers meant a lack of self-consciousness from the crowd. There’s something really communal about it that I liked, so I wanted to make sure the new record had a groove.”

Following the ‘Love This Giant’ tour, she had previously planned to take some time off, “to learn how to be normal.” That plan, like the television in the lyrics of standout track ‘Digital Witness’, quickly went out the window. “It was kind of like being let down at the end of a tornado,” she says, “and I started writing the record about 36 hours after I got back, just because I realised it was the way to get through the strange, brackish waters of tour and sedentary.”

Admittedly it’s hard to imagine Annie, perched upright on the sofa today, slumped like a coach potato in front of Netflix, but that’s apparently just what she did in her 36 hour break. “There was just a dial-tone in my brain, like static,” she laughs.

She approached the album with a similar level of discipline – to her, St Vincent is like having a day job. “The way that I like to write,” she explains, “is where I’ll wake up in the morning, work from 10 til 7 or something, and then go drink tequila with my friends at night.” It’s a similar practice to another American author that Annie admires - Philip Roth. He once said that if you sit there for long enough, for two or three years, you will eventually make something worthwhile, and Annie agrees with this ethos. “I think the more that I do music, the more mysterious it is to me. There’s probably a mythology about creativity that involves a tinkerbell muse coming down, and that does happen, but you have to be in a place where you can catch it.”

One such muse descended whilst Annie was staying at a friend’s ranch in far-west Texas. “I went out walking on the property one day, and I was feeling very free and existential. I decided I would take my clothes off and wander, because when do you get to be that free? I was having a great time, and then I heard something. My brain went to rationalise it very quickly, like, oh maybe it was the wind. Then I realised that there wasn’t any wind.” She places down her tea cup with a clink, which unexpectedly provides an extra dramatic effect to the tale. “There hadn’t been any wind. And then,” she goes on, allowing her voice to quiver, “I heard the rattle. Out the corner of my eye I saw a fucking snake! I took off running, my clothes were dropping out of my hands, and it felt like I was running for a very long time.”

She laughs. “I think about Timothy Treadwell the Grizzly Man [and documentary-maker], and I know you should do something if you see a bear, but I don’t remember if you should make yourself as big as possible, and scare it, or make yourself small and harmless. One will get you killed, and one won’t. I realised that I didn’t know anything about nature. I would see cows, and I would think, do they attack? What do cows do? Are they going to trample me, or should I go and pet the cow? I had no idea about these things.”

“I did have a moment where I was eating a burger and looking at a cow, actually,” laughs Annie, suddenly moving off on another of her weird, loosely connected tangents. She doesn’t elaborate, but the grisly metaphor speaks for itself. If ever there was a trademark St Vincent image – darkly funny, and ever so slightly uncomfortable – then it’s that.

The real question is, would St Vincent stand more of a chance against a grizzly bear or a rattlesnake? “The rattlesnake!” exclaims Annie with no hesitation. “I think about dying all the time, and I would rather die from poison, than, like, a hippo or a bear biting my face off. I think the poison would go,” she clicks her fingers, “quicker.” The fact that she has an answer ready is maybe part of the same reason that Clark calls herself a ‘not that likeable’ a narrator. She and her music are interested in dissecting things in a surgeon-like fashion – even if the contents are not that pleasant or comfortable.

Returning to that nose mounted on the wall outside today’s meeting place; the internet, as always, holds the answer to the mysterious nasal-shaped appendage. Seventeen years ago, amid a debate over the growing number of London’s all-seeing CCTV cameras, a sculptor called Rick Buckley didn’t much fancy the prospect of the city being transformed into a real-life version of 1984. In response, he stuck noses on walls around the city, right underneath the peering eye of the camera lens. If those faceless people tucked away in hidden spires with fingerprint entry pads are going to insist on watching us, they may as well know that we can see them, too.

It’s an idea that takes precedence on ‘St Vincent’. Technology and privacy, alienation and connection are all recurring threads that wire their way through. “If I can’t show it, if you can’t see me / What’s the point of doing anything?” Annie sings on ‘Digital Witness’ – an ambivalent tug-of-war between embracing the new world order or throwing the television straight out of the window. It’s a modern day catch 22 – if a meal is eaten but nobody instagrams it, did anybody really taste it?

“It’s a scientific law that something that is watched is different from something that no eyes are on,” Clark ponders, taking a contemplative sip from her cup of tea. “We live in a time where we’re aware that we’re being watched. Look at the NSA scandal – which I don’t think anyone was that surprised by – it’s horrifying! It’s almost as if we’re making ourselves transparent as a means of protection. I think in the future, the real commodity when we talk about the 1% is that they will have privacy and nobody spying on them.”

“I’m not casting judgment on it,” she adds, “so much as I’m noticing that I’m in it. I think that people start to do more and more extreme things to get noticed, to get the validation that they’re seeking from other people. If we’re all performers, none of us know how to self-soothe.” We’re all projections of ourselves on the internet, then, in a sense? “Absolutely!” she agrees. “I was with my friend who downloaded that app, Tinder. We were scrolling through, and it was… it felt bad! You have one to three pictures of someone, and you’re kind of like, next, next, ooh, not good enough for me. It’s like who the fuck are we?! We’ve created this other place where there are no real life consequences for being an asshole.”

Clark has an uncanny knack for observing things from an odd, detached, intrigued perspective. She might be useless in a fight against a grizzly bear, but St Vincent is like a David Attenborough equivalent armed with distortion and “swampy evil shit” instead of a dulcet soothing commentator’s voice. She narrates on humans, in the most acerbic, forthright way possible.

“I’m not interested in the romanticised version of people, but what they actually are,” she explains, selecting her words with the careful precision of a bibliophile scanning across the shelves of a piled-high second-hand book shop. “Not because that’s all dark, but because it’s a lot of things. It’s generous and empathetic, and it’s also vile and crass. We’re all these conflicting things melted into one. I feel like a student of human nature. I like to explore what it actually is, because that’s more interesting than rainbows and butterflies.”

The freaky stuff humans get up to is a pretty endless topic to write about, after all. “People are weird!” laughs Annie, “there’s nothing as weird as a person.”

“I’ve been thinking…” she drifts, “I think there’s a particular kind of Texas freak, and I’m still trying to figure out what exactly breeds one. John Congleton [St Vincent’s long-time producer] and I, we’re both from the suburbs of Dallas, both just kind of weirdo. I think there’s something about the religiosity in the air, and the big tough Texas thing. I think the freaks are even freakier because they have more to rebel against.”

Flannery O’Connor, another American writer, wrote a piece speaking about the grotesque in Southern literature, saying that Southern writers have a penchant for writing about freaks because they are still about to recognise one. Annie giggles with knowing agreement. “I feel that way too. I know that freaks exist everywhere – and I mean ‘freak’ in the best possible way, it’s a compliment for sure. I mean, who’s going to be a freak in New York? Everyone’s a fucking freak. But in Texas you kind of have to work for it, because everyone’s a good ol’ boy.”

If Annie’s aim was to write an album of freaky, rebellious slightly grotesque, and completely infectious pop music, that breaks the mould of normality, then she has certainly succeeded. Step inside, join the freak show, and dance. ‘St Vincent’ lives in its own bizarre universe, but this time, Annie Clark seems to have left the door wide open.

St Vincent’s self-titled new album is out now via Loma Vista / Caroline International.

[elhunt]

Warpaint: 'If I wasn’t in Warpaint, I’d be counting sheep'

Originally published in DIY Magazine, Feb 2014. Feature by El Hunt.

Warpaint have just narrowly escaped a hailstorm and are in slightly chaotic moods as a result. “Where are we?” asks the band’s drummer Stella Mozgawa, peering around the room looking slightly dazed. “North of Shoreditch, right? So Northditch.” Emily Kokal is looking for the chai tea, and meanwhile Jenny Lee Lindberg is busy trying to beat Theresa Wayman to the seat nearest the heater.

Still, the band quickly go quiet when they hear that people were singing new material at the top of their lungs at the Warpaint’s Brixton Academy show late last year – despite one song in particular having been out just a few days. “Really?!” Emily exclaims. Stella throws out a silencing arm across the sofa. “Did you hear that? They knew ‘Love Is To Die’, right to the back!”

The response might come as a surprise to Warpaint, but everyone else probably saw it coming. Virtually the moment ‘Love Is To Die’ surfaced, Twitter timelines and Facebook newsfeeds everywhere turned into walls of scrolling misty artwork the hue of oxidized copper, accompanied by endless excitable comments. The atmosphere in Brixton on the night the band made their return was akin to Murray’s Mount at an alternative rock Wimbledon. Warpaint are a band that seem to unite people, and almost everyone is universally losing it over the prospect of their second album.

“It was exciting to play a show that big after not playing for so long,” says Emily, “it felt good.” The band were nervous, quite understandably, but their two staples, chai tea and a pre-stage sing-along of Billie Holiday helped. Nerves, agrees Emily, help Warpaint give everything when they get on stage. “It prepares you - you get in the zone. It was just so exciting to play that show. We were majorly ready for it, and the outcome was a lot better than other shows where you kind of just roll up all tired. You don’t feel that same sort of edge.”

Warpaint’s second self-titled album has the small task of following ‘The Fool’ - a blinding debut. The only push to make an equally stunning follow-up, Stella says, comes from within the band, who are self- confessed perfectionists. “It came from us, the pressure. I don’t feel a tangible threat or external pressure,” she says. “We had time to focus on what we were doing naturally - in that way we’re really lucky that we have a team that believes in us.”

It quickly becomes apparent that Team Warpaint are a tight-knit bunch with a huge deal of trust between them. Chris Cunningham, Jenny’s husband, has been filming the band throughout the whole process, and the result is a stand-alone multimedia film complete with song re-workings and iPhone footage – Jenny summarises the project as “an insight into the band… with really weird quirky shit.” It was a relaxed, comfortable experience making the film. “Basically he just started shooting us…” adds Jenny, and the others erupt into laughter. “Oh god! That sounds bad. No, he wasn’t really following us round or anything. Whenever he was round at the house he’d take photos, film us writing some songs, he’s sort of been gathering content that way. Having him around is a joy. I mean it’s obviously a joy for me,” she laughs, “but I’m sure for the girls too.” Theresa nods, “he’s family.”

Producer Flood, too, was an ideal match for the band, and waiting to work with him was a main factor in the band taking so much time over ‘Warpaint’. “We had blind faith from the beginning that it was going to work out,” says Stella. “We decided he was the person for the job.” In the meantime Warpaint escaped out into the South Californian desert, and holed up in Joshua Tree to write and demo solidly for a month. In such a concentrated place – the band compare it to a bubble or a dome – they could let loose with creative push-and-shove, and flesh out every idea. 

“Flash out,” says Emily, giggling, “flush down.”

When asked if it ever gets difficult deciding which ideas to take forward, with four different forces pulling in different directions, Jenny has one word – yes. “You can intellectually decide what you think you’re going to work on,” she expands, “but then certain things just hit, there’s all this randomness, in a sense. It ends up working based on what day we’re at, or where we’re at. There’s no shortage of ideas, and it ends up being what hits in those moments.”

One idea that has been explored widely on ‘Warpaint’ is a subtle interweaving of electronics and affected guitar sound. Having supported The xx, and Theresa’s boyfriend James Blake on tour before, electronic music has always been something the band have been interested in, and they’ve sung the praises of Aphex Twin in the past too. Typically, it wasn’t a conscious decision to go in that direction, though.

“It just kind of happened,” agrees Stella. “It was more like a substitution, you know, do we do drums or electronic drums in this part, do we want a cleaner texture? Rather than thinking ‘let’s do an electroclash album’ it was a playful thing, experimenting with all these different sounds. It’s really natural.”

“It’s cool that you, and other people, picked up on that fact we sound a little electronic, even when we’re obviously not electronic,” adds Theresa. “I think that there’s a lot of influence in our music from electronic bands, and it shows itself in our mood.”

In a strange turn, Warpaint created their most electronic music yet in the least synthetic place imaginable. “It
 was otherworldly,” Emily says of Joshua Tree. “There’s this thing called The Wildlife Corner by our dome,” she laughs, “our little dome. That’s where the animals go past from one place to another or whatever. At night we would go out onto our porch, our little deck, and we would see so many stars. It was kind of like living in nature, which is always so grounding. Natural elements complement music, and vice versa.”

Emily keeps using the word “little” to describe the band in comparison to their sprawling surroundings – the mountains and the endless bizarre Joshua Trees poking up towards the endless blue sky made them feel tiny in comparison. Even Warpaint couldn’t compete with a place like that, surely?

After spending a month in Joshua Tree though, Warpaint seemed to smash through into a new exciting place, and their music became a force of nature in itself. Towards the end of their time, they found themselves creating something that burst out of their self- contained dome, sending industrial post-punk flying out of a crack in the double doors, along with fleeing bobcats in its wake. ‘Disco // Very’ it turns out, upset a few of the neighbours. “The police came over, straight up, to the door,” laughs Stella, “they said this lady was feeling nauseous!”

“I think that’s a very good example of how we were playing differently in the desert,” agrees Emily. “That was in our last week there, and that was the most intense playing we were doing, when we got that complaint. That person definitely would have heard us before, but [before] it was fitting with the atmosphere. This one was very abrasive.”

“Disco… very,” says Theresa slowly with a giggle, letting the words mush together into an apt descriptor for Warpaint’s most pronounced change of direction yet. The band have always been a dab hand at cloaking melody in rich velvety layers of vocals and stunning textural interplay – but while writing this second album, Warpaint seem to have discovered a talent for creating discord and tension, too.

“We’re chomping to get [the album] out,” says Theresa, “such a long process, isn’t it?” The other girls nod. “Half of it’s a waiting game.”

Still, the band finally have their release date, and next on the agenda, after that, is a summer of festival slots. Jenny gives another of her excellent one word answers – “yes” the band will be playing festivals. “Probably the ones you’re going to ask,” she adds with a grin. “Yeah, all the ones you’re thinking about…” says Stella. “We’re playing Laneway Festival, in Australia, I can say that.” We move off topic, and have a quick drool about the famous milkshakes served in huge metal buckets, straight from the mixer on The Rocks, over Stella’s hometown of Sydney. Emily doesn’t look as content with her chai tea any more. “I want one! We might just stay there and start working in a coffee shop.”

Hypothetical talk of Aussie coffee shop pipe-dreams aside, Warpaint are ultimately focused towards the band’s future, and they’ve already got new material they want to start working on. “As much as we love [this album],” says Theresa, “it’s exciting to think about all the other things we still want to do. We just got a practice space to work in, so we have recording and demoing capabilities, and it’ll be a lot easier to keep things going.” It’s clear that Warpaint can’t imagine doing anything else.

“If I wasn’t in Warpaint,” ponders Emily, “I’d be counting sheep.”

[elhunt]

Courtney Barnett:  she’s anything but pedestrian

Feature published in DIY Magazine, March 2015. Words: El Hunt Photography: Mike Massaro

There are lots of things that Courtney Barnett claims she’s not very good at. Anyone who’s seen the video for ‘Avant Gardener’ from 2013’s ‘The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas’ will know she’s rubbish at using inhalers and smoking bongs, not to mention that her two-handed backhand shots leave more than a little to be desired. As evidenced by the video for ‘Pedestrian At Best’ - the first single from her debut album - clowning isn’t her ideal profession, either. She can’t make balloon animals, and she has a tendency to misfire water pistols. Fair enough. “I’ve got such a bad memory,” she says. Later on she concedes “sometimes my brain doesn’t work with words,” along with “I’m not a great artist or anything.” Now she’s just being very self-deprecating.

She might not enjoy sitting on a pedestal, but Courtney Barnett is wrong on that last point. She is a great artist, as it goes; though she deals in words and killer guitar lines rather than standard-issue paints.  Her music regales bizarre, witty little stories in brief snapshots. Her album opener tells the story of a man who’s sick of his 9-5 job and dreams of being an elevator operator (with clear skin) instead. When he stands on the roof of Melbourne’s Nicholas Building watching the ants below, he’s mistaken for somebody contemplating suicide. Really, he’s just skiving off work, and he’s never been happier. Elsewhere, on ‘Dead Fox’, her thought-tracks wildly career from nicotine-injected apples to taxidermy kangaroos lying at the side of Hume Highway - the ten hour long freeway that links her hometown of Melbourne with Sydney - in the space of a couple of sentences. She’s an artist, alright. She might not have a natural flair for tennis, or in fact ping-pong, but when it comes to serving up wry observations she outplays everyone else on the clay.

“It’s like turning my brain inside out and showing it to everyone,” laughs Courtney Barnett, speaking with the same meandering drawl that characterises her music. “I try to keep my eyes open and take it all in when I see things. Even if I do see something I love, I forget I walked by it straight away, but I always remember the feeling that things give me. I keep a little book and write down absolutely everything,” she says. “A lot of the songs and ideas come from those ideas, and my drawings. I work on them, and…” she hesitates, tracing a shape on the table. “What’s the word? Elaborate. Yeah, I elaborate on them more, and they turn into something else. That ‘Dead Fox’ song grew from taxidermy kangaroos, that one line. It took me another year to figure out the rest.”

That one line, indeed. “Taxidermy kangaroos are littered on the shoulder / a possum Jackson Pollock is painted on the tar / sometimes I think a single sneeze could be the end of us.” It’s a bizarre, macabre mirror image, but it’s disconcertingly funny, too, like a warped hall of mirrors in an episode of Happy Tree Friends. “So much roadkill!” cackles Courtney, before scrunching up her face in an unconvincing effort to look more reverent. “So many dead animals, it’s so sad. But then you see all these stiff…” she grins again, thinking back, “… and I just thought it was the funniest line. And the possum, Jackson Pollock, as well,” she smiles, “it’s so fucking gross because there’s blood all over the highway from a dead animal, with gaps everywhere, and crows eating it.” She laughs, “No, it’s sad.” She falls silent for a moment as if paying her respects to Jackson. “I thought it was good imagery.”

It’s just one still from the flickering stop-motion book of ‘Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit’. “All those different pictures, even though they’re so simple, you can sorta see what they mean,” says Courtney. “It’s nice being able to say so much with so little. Sometimes it takes a while to figure out what a song’s about,” she adds. “The songs off the last two EPs [‘I’ve Got a Friend Called Emily Ferris’ and ‘How to Carve a Carrot into a Rose’] have grown into totally different things over the last two years. They reveal themselves in different ways, I reckon. It’ll be interesting to see where these songs end up.”

Letting her songs grow into wild little roaming creatures that make their own way through the world, Courtney Barnett is a relentless documenter, and she’s more interested in capturing specific moments than big floating concepts. Everything, she agrees, is in her songs already. Her lyrical stream-of-consciousness, and her unfussy approach to tidying up a recording’s edges means she’s received comparisons in the past to anti-folk outsiders like Daniel Johnston and Jeffrey Lewis. Courtney Barnett, though, has found her own distinct voice; an unpolished and acutely observational vernacular.

“When I sing I try to keep my own [first-take] vocals, but sometimes they’re shit so I have to re-do them,” she laughs. “But yeah, I try to capture that moment of the songs coming together, and those small imperfections. I’m not too precious about my vocals. I only do them two or three times - and actually it’s the same with everything. I try not to let anyone get too precious about stuff. Otherwise it gets way too polished and perfect. I only showed the guys [in Courtney’s backing band] the songs a week or two before, so it was all fresh and new. I think it comes across that way,” she says decisively, “to me it does. It feels like there’s energy, and everyone’s kind of on the edge of their seats, wondering if they’re gunna fuck up or not.”

“I’m happy with the energy that we captured,” she concludes, laughing. “I’m really annoying in the mixing process. I’m like, nah! Make it shitter! I want it to be kind of shit!”

Despite her relaxed approach to recording, Courtney Barnett’s been busy sharpening up elsewhere; namely Milk! Records, the label that she runs, and uses to release all of her music. “It’s going really well, actually!” she enthuses. “We re-grouped and tried to write a business plan…” She stops mid-sentence. “Business plan?” she asks herself with some disgust, “gross. It’s more like a manifesto. We’ve found more clarity. I feel this year it really dawned on me what Milk! Records is. It’s this amazing platform that has been created, that we can produce art from without any of the bullshit, or people wanting money, or all that other boring stuff, y’know?” Frequently Courtney Barnett is asked why she decided to start up Milk! Records; when really, she agrees, the question should be ‘why the hell not?’

Above everything else, there’s a sense that Courtney Barnett likes to keep things grounded and importantly, in the moment. Last summer, she says, her and her band ended up running around the hazardous and watery streets of Venice, because they only had two hours to look around the whole city. “It was like express Venice,” she grins. “We went to the Grand Canal, or whatever, we got in a gondola, did a quick ride, headed to the square, and then ran into another boat. Then we left. I was like, what just happened? Is that real?”

Though she’s played on radio waves worldwide these days, Courtney still runs things herself, as much as possible. She still draws her own artwork like she did at the very start, and she releases her own records on Milk! too, along with all her other musician friends from Melbourne. Touring last year was the first time that Courtney had ever travelled outside of Australia, and the wacky old world of jetlag played a big part in ‘Sometimes I Sit and Think and Sometimes I Just Sit’.

“It fucks you up!” she exclaims. “Everyone used to talk about jetlag, and I was like, whatever. Stop whinging. But yeah, ‘Illustration of Loneliness’,” she says, referring to an especially dazed song on her record, “that’s very jetlaggy. It really messed me around, I have always worked to a weird time, with weird hours, but it’s so spacey, it feels like some other world.”

Courtney Barnett first started writing for the same reason that lots of people start writing songs; because it felt like the most natural way to express herself. What began as “mucking around and experimenting with different ideas,” has grown into something far greater, and her inner thoughts resonate with a lot of people; not just in Melbourne, but across the world. “It’s very surreal,” she agrees. “It definitely gives you a happy feeling inside. Everyone’s so nice, they know what I’m talking about, and they get the humour, and come and talk to me. I feel like I’ve got quality over quantity of audience,” she says with a smirk. “I’d way prefer a small amount of awesome people to like my music. Rather than a thousand redneck idiots buying my records, and being like,” she giggles, “derrrrp!”

“I feel like I’ve achieved so much already,” says Courtney Barnett, looking back at her whirlwind year. “Songwriting wise, and musically-wise,” she adds, “is that a word? It was a new experience and it feels like I’ve already achieved something. Hopefully people will find something in there that means something.”

[elhunt]

Alt-J: 'We're not trying to subvert anything'

Originally published in DIY Magazine, Sept 2014. Feature by El Hunt

Picture this scene. There’s a slushy romantic film on the telly, probably involving montages of reunited couples jumping into each other’s arms in the airport, along with Colin Firth taking up a new role as a stuttering, awkward Englishman in love. He’s probably eating blue soup, omelette and marmalade with an American woman who has inexplicably decided to holiday alone over Christmas in a cottage in the Home Counties, and it’s the clichéd scene at the very end where he has put his heart on the line. Taking her by the hand, shaking, he looks into her eyes and says: “I’m gonna bed into you like a cat beds into a bean bag. Turn you inside out and lick you like a crisp packet.” The credits roll. Everybody in the cinema cries. 

Only a band like Alt-J could direct a romantic comedy this strange, soundtracked by spliced five-way vocal duets, wonky, slightly sordid declarations of love, a Miley Cyrus sample and a gaudy, twanging Southern Rock anthem called ‘Left Hand Free’ for good measure. There are slow, plaintive, weirdly lust-filled laments, and even a lyrical nod to KRS-One’s ‘Sound Of Da Police’. Not only have Alt-J ignored any outside pressure to stick to a template; they’ve gone a step further, and totally defied it.

Repeatedly, Alt-J are adamant that far from being removed from their debut sound, their second album ‘This Is All Yours’ isn’t taking them to a drastic new place; experimenting has always been in their blood, and a number of songs on the record have been kicking around for several years. The bat-shit crazy lyrics to ‘Every Other Freckle’, for example, have been floating around frontman Joe Newman’s cranium since the early days of playing local pubs in their university town of Leeds. “Thom was talking about how a spider was bedding into his brain,” explains Joe, gazing across the park. “I was like… wow, bedding. I was telling my ex-girlfriend about this song two years ago, because it was written then, and she said it reminded her of this poem [‘I Wanna Be Yours’]. ‘I want to be your park bench, I want to be your heater while you sleep’ - that one. So, anyway, it sounds like I took that idea and went in a different direction, but I didn’t. So actually,” he laughs, “I’m as good as [John Cooper Clarke]”.

Since the early days of faceless press photographs and their wily, evasive approach to genre that persisted from the very start, Alt-J have been a band that escapes concrete definition. It’s given them the freedom to follow up the Mercury Prize-scooping ‘An Awesome Wave’ with the weird, unpinnable, ‘This Is All Yours’.

“People can’t define our sound, so we play with other people’s uncertainties,” Joe says, sipping coconut water on a bench. “Not coke,” observes his band mate Gus Unger-Hamilton, laughing, “just coconut water.” “Being able to do what we like is the best position to be in,” adds Thom Green, “because you don’t have to prove anything.” In contrast to the countless bands that push forward a strong persona, but have very little to say musically, Alt-J prefer to let their music do the talking. One of the band could politely bump into you on the street without raising a flicker of recognition, and indeed, the only person to notice Alt-J today so far is a small child intent, not on commending them for their latest single, but on getting past them and into the park.

With a record that has a personality as varied and unpredictable as ‘This Is All Yours’, it’s certainly music able to make a statement alone. “It was kind of a statement,” agrees Gus, referring to the first new song the band released from the record, ’Hunger of the Pine’. “We went with it because it was an unexpected thing to start the ball rolling with,” says Joe.

Unexpected, of course, because of a certain sample provided by a young woman best known for riding giant metal demolition balls and rolling down sculptures of wagging tongues. “It’s quite funny,” says Thom, who initially started talking to Miley Cyrus through remixing work that he was doing outside of the band. “We’ve met her once and I speak to her now and again.” Sampling Miley, say the band, was natural; they liked her vocal hook, so they used it. “If we all loved the song, that’d be the case with any band,” says Joe. “If Gary Barlow came up to me and was just like, ‘I’ve written a song’, I’d be like, alright Gary, calm down, but email it to me. If I liked it, I’d be in.”

The triangle association found in Alt-J’s keyboard-shortcut styled name has always attracted a few rumours, and the connection now shared with Miley has only added fire to forum speculation that the band are members of the Illuminati, the shady, and perhaps fictitious secret society that supposedly manipulates us all through popular culture to move towards a New World Order. It’s an accusation that amuses Alt-J no end. “Is that even a thing?” asks Gus incredulously. Joe, however, plays along. “I’m not going to say yes, I’m not going to say no. You know, fuck it, I’m not going to say if it’s true. I might be in it. I might not.”

Moving from conspiracy theories to illumination, ‘This Is All Yours’ could have easily been an album to come from a place of drama and tension, but for Alt-J, a change in their line-up proved productive. The departure of one of a band’s original founding members can often lead from ripe to ruin, but when Gwil Sainsbury left the band, there was little time for squabbling, apparently, and in fact it all went down very amiably. “There’s no ill will or regret,” explains Joe. “[Gwil’s] completely happy with the decision he’s made and the life he’s living without the band looming over him.” Gus agrees. “He knew he was leaving at a good time that wouldn’t disrupt us,” he adds. “If he’d left now it would be hugely confusing, and we would’ve felt a lot more resentful; financially, emotionally, all kinds of fuck-ups. This way it was easy to draw a line under his involvement and move on.”

Riding on the momentum left over from the massive, runaway success of ‘An Awesome Wave’ made that transition easier, no doubt. “We felt vindicated by the success of the first album,” nods Gus. “I think it gave us the right kind of boost of confidence that didn’t tip into cockiness,” adds Joe, “and I think that made us play better together. We refined our chemistry, and it matured into the second album because we understood that people liked what we’d done.” 

The process of inducting the band’s new touring guitarist Cameron is currently underway, and Alt-J agree, unanimously, that he’s fitting in rather swimmingly, and if anything, he’s pushing them even harder. “He’s got a better work ethic than everyone else,” laughs Gus. “He’s trying to not look lazy, but he’s probably shitting himself, to be fair. He’s going straight into playing Ally Pally and doing American TV appearances, so it must be absolutely bizarre. It’s terrifying enough for us!”

Alt-J might have healthy levels of self-belief, but their second album does come with one extra swaggering anthem, too. It sticks out, noticeably. It sounds like Alt-J if they were the sort of band who made headlines for inciting riots and slagging off other bands constantly in interviews, and it is derivative and cock-sure almost to the point of satire.  “We’re not trying to subvert anything,” states Gus, but despite his insistence otherwise, ‘Left Hand Free’ sounds like a song that knows exactly what it’s doing, from its almost tongue-in-cheek sense of twanging swagger, to the cliché-riddled music video that comes with it. “We really don’t do that intentionally,” insists Joe, “we really just go with what feels right when we’re playing together. ‘Left Hand Free’ was a leap into a completely different world for us, but we were enjoying it, so we kept doing it, we thought it was funny, we thought we could play characters. That’s what we do with all of our music, we do it because it sounds good.”

Mention of the record label’s supposed involvement in pushing it forward as the lead American single however, receives a less cheery response. “We wouldn’t have necessarily chosen ‘Left Hand Free’ as the single,” answers Gus, choosing his words carefully. “We just sent everything to the record label, and they said, ‘That’s the single’. But,” he adds, suggesting it wasn’t quite that civil after all, “we’ve patched things up with them now.”

Despite the irresponsible lake jumping and campfire dancing in the video for ‘Left Hand Free’, Alt-J say that they’re well-behaved in comparison. “You don’t want to end up like The Stone Roses,” laughs Joe, glancing down at his rather eye-catching socks bearing bright green marijuana motifs. “I think we enjoy recreational drugs just as much as anyone else…” he starts, “but we’ve agreed that we don’t talk about it in interviews,” finishes Gus with a pointed look. “I’d so much rather that was our reputation than the opposite.”

“We’ve got a good life where we write music but we never get recognised,” says Joe, and, he admits, “we’re not one of those bands that likes being involved in interviews. They’re a good thing for us, of course, but it’s not why we make music. We just really love writing the songs that we write, we love working together, that’s the joy of the whole thing, the core of all it is that we do and who we are.” Thom agrees. “We don’t want to make a point of having a persona. There’s no point, it’s only ever been about the music that we make. Some people feel the need to put out an image, but we don’t care.”

Alt-J prefer to keep the limelight firmly on their music, and persistently, it’s an approach that appears to be winning out. ‘This Is All Yours’ is a record that absorbs and plays with traditional genre, like a cat toys with a mouse, before mangling it out into a painty spew with little regard for convention. They might insist that nobody can define them, but still, the same misty, triangular essence that shrouded their debut floats round their second album. Playful, experimental, and ever so slightly arch in places, only Alt-J could write an album quite like this.

[elhunt]

You’re songstressing me out

Language is an endlessly evolving thing. Anybody with an Oxford English Dictionary has access to about half a million entries right now, and that’s a figure that currently increases at a rate of about 900 words every 3 months. The upshot of this is that theoretically there are billions of combinations of words with which people can express and describe things – and yet when we’re talking about female musicians, the available vocabulary seems to frustratingly plummet and condense into a pool of about 50 available words.

All too often female artists are reduced to songstresses or pop divas, sultry vixens or quirky, left-of-field ‘indie chicks’. This is language that mythologises a female artist as somehow otherworldly, or otherwise typecasts them as a certain ‘type’ of woman, in order to be understood. A diva, means, by definition a “goddess,” a force of female divinity – and yet it’s a term attached to almost every woman who gets behind a microphone and makes pop music. Male musicians, in contrast, only win comparisons to god-like deities when they have proven themselves as a musician over many years.  Their godlike status is intrinsically interwoven, not with their gender, but with their actual musical talent. Dissect a few more commonly occurring descriptors, and a similar pattern emerges. A vixen is a “she-fox”, and a songstress “a female singing-bird”. The songstress crops up especially often in literary history, and most often she is conjured as a nice, calming voice to soothe the male protagonist after he’s done his thing slaying dragons and all that other historically macho ‘guy stuff’. Have a read of Metamorphoses’ myth of Philomela – where an innocent woman suffers brutal violence, and as some sort of compensation is turned into a nightingale for voiceless freedom - for a specific example. The idea of the ornamental woman who has no voice-box setting other than prettified melody is thankfully absent from most parts of logically functioning society today - so why is this vocabulary still something that peppers the latest buzzy blog posts? Female musicians are not demi-gods, magical woman-animal hybrids or melodic nymphets – they are women who make music. The very broad category of ‘female musician’ is also a bit of a non sequitur, too. Just because two women share a talent for shredding the hell out of a guitar, or have a knack for crafting vaguely similar sounding music, they are clearly not the same thing, at all. The only thing that they have in common, in fact, is that they both identify as female. Calling a female musician a songstress clearly isn’t the pinnacle of the music industry’s issues with sexism and misogyny – it’s mostly just slightly lazy writing that buys into language that should be outdated, and does a talented musician a disservice in the process. There are at least half a million words far better than the paltry selection of vocabulary that currently gets over-used.  It won’t change the world completely, no, but a simple switch away from vocabulary that sexualizes, mythologises or otherwise typecasts female musicians will contribute towards creating a new pattern of change.

[elhunt]

The Smashing Pumpkins: 'I’ve had to change my path a few times'

Originally published in DIY Magazine, Dec 2014. Feature by El Hunt.

Nostalgia is worth big bucks. If anyone knows that full well, it’s Billy Corgan. The only original member of The Smashing Pumpkins left, he’s in part responsible for ‘Siamese Dream’ and ‘Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness’ – two monumentally iconic albums. From later Pumpkins albums ‘Zeitgeist’ and ‘Oceania’ to the short-lived Zwan - Billy Corgan’s band with Pumpkins drummer Jimmy Chamberlin, along with Matt Sweeney and Slint’s David Pajo - The Smashing Pumpkins have seemed under constant scrutiny. It’d be easy for Billy Corgan to silence everyone with a new, formulaic record cooked up from a sprinkle of melancholy, a glug of melodramatic production, and a fuzzy hint of debut album ‘Gish’. Billy Corgan doesn’t believe in easy.

“I just wish someone would give me a little bit of prop for costing myself a gazillion dollars,” laughs Corgan, sat in the middle of a slightly dated hotel suite, which, according to him, resembles a “granny flat”. “It’s the mouldy death part that scares me,” he continues. “I know what I was thinking when I was 21 and I watched some fucking old crustacean get up there and plod around,” he laughs, exasperated. “Here’s my theoretical brutality on it all – if you can’t supersede what you did before, you don’t belong out there.”

“It doesn’t sound dated,” says Billy of ‘Monuments To An Elegy,’ “like something from the past. I’ve been in that position too many times. Pop is the new pornography. It’s not Elvis shaking his hips that you need to be worried about, it’s Iggy and JLo rubbing their butts against each other. Rock seems very flat-footed to respond to the speed and sensorial necessity of the crowd to be titillated. I really don’t want be in a corner of the world’s cultural market that is making itself more and more irrelevant by the day, and celebrating its irrelevance. Do I wanna sit and look at my old pictures for two hours? No.”

“In 1984 when I started going out to the alternative clubs, I had the ‘Robert Smith’,” he reflects. “That haircut. I would go to wait for the bus at midnight, and guys would pull up in cars and threaten me with my life - for the haircut. That’s alternative. Kurt [Cobain] and Company made alternative music big business,” continues Billy. “All I’m asking is don’t ask me to wave a flag for something that doesn’t mean anything anymore, and then don’t give me shit when I don’t want to wave the flag, as if I’m being cranky.”

Intended as a conclusion to the expectation, tabloid gossip, and petty ridicule that has followed Corgan around more or less since ‘Mellon Collie…’ came out in 1995 and the original line-up disbanded, ‘Monuments To An Elegy’ marks the final backward look. True to name, it’s apparently something of an abandoned memorial to the band’s muddy and complicated history, too. “There’s a sense of futility, or something being lost…” Billy begins, before abruptly shifting tact. “I’ll tell you this story,” he announces suddenly. “I’m walking along and I see this World War I monument. It’s all dirty and there’s garbage, but at some point this really meant something to somebody. Right now it’s just something that people walk past when they’re looking at their cell phones. There’s a feeling sometimes, that with my life, or my musical life, I did these great things. It’s no different than a plaque on a wall. Now it’s all down to what Courtney [Love] said about Billy.”

Looking back over The Smashing Pumpkins’ long journey to ‘Monuments To An Elegy’, Billy Corgan flatly says that he’s not happy with how things went down. “Obviously I went on this weird journey for some reason,” he ponders. ”I would stick by the statement that the original [Smashing Pumpkins] not staying together or sorting out its issues was idiotic. I wish the band would’ve done what the band was meant to do. We didn’t, through our own darkness, blow something up that was quite magical – that’s the shame.”

Widespread press reports took Billy Corgan’s claim that he was planning to “bail on this ship for good,” following ‘Monuments…’ and the linked second release ‘Day For Night’ as intention to pack in The Smashing Pumpkins if he misses out on the reception that he’s looking for.

Billy insists that his words have been misinterpreted. “This ship,” he clarifies “[is] all that kind of stuff where you go, why am I out here slinging hash when other things seem less difficult for people to understand? We’ve all been to that show. Classic band, new album out,” he says, before briefly singing a short excerpt of ‘Stone Cold’ by Rainbow. “They play a bunch of their classics and everyone’s fucking jacked. I don’t wanna live that life; death of a thousand cuts,” he adds. “I’d rather be home with my puppies.”

[elhunt]

Sing it, ladies: some thoughts on*that* festival line-up poster

Last year the first line-up announcement for Reading and Leeds Festival went viral, though probably not for the reasons that they had hoped. After taking an eraser to the poster, music blog Crack In The Road noticed that the line-up boasted a stonking eight acts containing at least one woman. Afterwards, quite rightly, many people asked important questions of Reading and Leeds, and Melvin Benn, the head of the event’s promotion company Festival Republic. He argued that, though women have been historically sidelined in music, those barriers no longer exist. Line-ups, he said, are chosen solely on a basis of quality.

Placing the blame squarely on Reading and Leeds isn’t fair; mainly because it’s just one detail in an incredibly depressing overall picture. It’s the most visible result of a trickle-down effect that begins with a huge lack of women working behind the scenes, and ends with “ironic” tweets from BBC Radio 1 calling the girl from London Grammar fit. “The girl from London Grammar” has her own name in fact - Hannah Reid - and she is responsible for penning virtually all of the band’s (Ivor-Novello award-winning) lyrics and melodies.

When other festival posters got the same treatment as Reading and Leeds, a trend started to emerge. As a whole, bands including female members are dismally represented, and solo female artists don’t fare much better. On average, just 16% of solo acts appearing at some of last summer’s biggest festivals - Glastonbury, Bestival, Reading and Leeds, V Festival, Latitude, and Isle of Wight - were female. That’s not just sidelining - it’s absolutely atrocious.

Instead, the top spots at festivals, and Brit Awards reserved for the most exciting new acts in the country are given over freely to bands like Catfish and the Bottlemen. This is a group, by the way, that played a tour of the UK’s student unions with a sign on their merch stand advertising “signed titties” for “£1 per melon.” In between calling their own audience “a bit gay,” and requesting that women in attendance at their shows remove their tops, they also found time to spraypaint a single lonely-looking sperm onto their amplifier. You’ve probably heard their biggest single, ‘Kathleen’ played on the radio thousands of times, too, along with a belting chorus of “I’ve gotta give it to you/You give me problems/ When you are not in the mood”. Nice.

Though they’re a prolific example, it’s hardly just Catfish and the Bottlemen reinforcing the message that sexism is somehow acceptable in music - particularly, it must be said, rock music. While Robin Thicke came under fire for stalking creepily around naked women in his notorious ‘Blurred Lines’ video, festival favourite Jake Bugg did… well, more of less exactly the same thing in his own video for ‘‘Messed Up Kids’. Nobody really seemed to notice. Fat White Family had a similarly packed summer of festival appearances in 2014, and the band were hailed by a sizable chunk of the music press as saviours of Rock n’ Roll.  A quick summary - a band who masturbate onstage, wrote the repulsive lyric “I’m pleading for you baby, your fifteen year old tongue,“ and - to top it all off - have their own record label called Without Consent, were considered representative of the very best that music has to offer. But lighten up, everyone. It’s all in the name of arch, faux-seedy, meta-banter.

Despite what they’d have you believe, these kinds of bands aren’t presenting clever, explorative parodies of lad culture at all. By repeatedly being handed the top stage slots at music festivals, the most lucrative record deals, and coveted places in the A-lists of primetime radio playlists, they’re not even being questioned on their at-best dodgy credentials. Giving these bands platforms, time and time again, perpetuates the idea that women are not welcome in music unless they’re sexualised, and that guitar-wielding men are entitled to free passes when it comes to being sleazy misogynists .

Shaping the alternative narrative is left to women in music. Post-punk band Savages have taken to crossing out every mention of their being a “female” band, while Björk spoke out about her authorship being constantly under scrutiny. Kanye West - she pertinently points out - would never face the same doubts, despite enlisting some of the most talented producers in the world to put down beats for ‘Yeezus’. Speedy Ortiz - one of the most talented new bands to come out of America in the last few years - chose to answer with the empowering, bullshit-busting song ‘Raising The Skate’. “It’s crazy frustrating seeing women and girls, myself included, put in positions in which they have to shirk credit for their talent” Speedy’s frontwoman Sadie Dupuis told The Fader, echoing a sentiment that is sadly all too common.

Across the board, the personal experiences of young women - who are groped at gigs, openly heckled on-stage, and repeatedly demeaned by lazy, sexualised vocabulary - confirms that sexism in music isn’t a problem restricted to laughably male-dominated festival line-ups, or certain isolated genres. It’s an issue that pervades the entire music industry. The Reading and Leeds poster that went viral last year for boasting just 8 bands containing women on its entire initial line-up is just one symptom.

A lack of female-led musicians ready to take up the helm is not the cause, and quotas are not the magic cure. Listing all of the women who are trailblazing creatively and leading the way in music doesn’t seem like the right response, either - and on a more practical note, it’d be incredibly time consuming. It’s also hard to imagine anything more patronising than radio executives, A&R Scouts and booking agents wielding “binders full of women” like the music industry’s own Mitt Romney.

Instead, we need to lead the way in fostering a positive, encouraging environment that actively empowers women to enter music; playing in bands, performing as solo artists, and working behind the scenes - in production, sound engineering, talent scouting, and promotion. We need to take a stand and continue calling out the deplorable “antics” of the bands that currently make that kind of environment impossible, and promoters need to follow in taking their giant platforms away. There’s nothing edgy, or groundbreaking, about sexist men playing songs on stages that they don’t truly deserve, after all.

Originally appeared in GIRLS/CLUB zine issue 2