Brody Dalle article from this month's German Rolling Stone
How awesome is this? Anika scanned the article on Brody Dalle from this month’s German Rolling Stone and shared with us. She did the best she could to translate the article and you can read it right below.
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She was the Rock’n’Roll pin up girl of the early zero years. But drugs, depressions and a baby threw her off track. Now, at 35, she’s back – and better than ever.
How can someone still be so rad, so loud, so fucked up on stage at 35? This show is her only one in Europe. Magnet Club, Berlin. Sold Out. Brody Dalle, the world’s hottest and loudest Rock’n’Roll pin up girl of the zero years. Tattooed, screaming with screaming red lipstick. Along with her band The Distillers she wrote the soundtrack for the Borderline sex of the young stumbled ones that consider a band with a woman, singing and screaming as usually only men do, feministic already. And since it has to be feminism when a young lady puts a guitar around her neck – the long serving phallus symbol of pop culture.
Anyway at 35 she now releases her first solo record “Diploid Love”. And the first song she plays that night is a Distillers song and then another one. She is standing up there. She rages, she screams like 14 years ago. Then she was 21 and married to punk rocker Tim Armstrong. Now she is a mother to two kids, living the Desert family dream in California along with Josh Homme.
The platinum blonde hair streaming out through the air, no stroboscope required: Brody Dalle is a stroboscope. Actually weird: releasing the first solo record in her career, both feet firmly on the ground, having arrived, musically and otherwise – and then slapping out the old punk songs. But she’s doing that. And the punk girls standing first row – with their hair shaved on the sides, rings through everything that’s piercable, a blue streak here, a cruel skull and flames tattooed there – celebrating heavily. Dancing the pogo of their lives.
Hotel room, next day. Berlin, still. Peach-colored shirt with little hearts on it. On stage one was afraid of her. But now you’d like to catch cotton candy penguins with her while riding unicorns, that’s how girlish she seems. Brody Dalles enchanting and depending on light incidence green or blue eyes lie somewhere above the dark circles. She’s sleepy, tired, sexily sedated from the jetlag. Now switching with her between awake and sleeping, giving oneself to the sleepless fatigue. “Permanent Vacation” in Berlin. “Only Lovers Left Alive” at the Spree. She’d make such a beautiful vampire. Those fast semiquaver guitars, like the Queens’, machine drums. “’Diploid Love’ is my baby” says Dalle and giggles deeply.
This at first sight worn-out metaphor carries a lot of tragedy though. 2006 she gives birth to her first child. It’s the 17th January when Camille Harley Joan Homme is born. And Dalle, who grew up in Australia, ran away from home, who took everything at 13 that you could possibly take, who loved Nirvana, Hole and Cindy Lauper, who cut herself deep wounds into her arms, who had a violent father, who stood on festival stages at 17 already, who is basically through with everything: marriage, divorce, second marriage – this Brody Dalle falls into post-natal depression, following a deep four year-long depression. “Meet The Foetus/Oh The Joy” is the matching song.
“I pull it down from the sky/ All the stars watch over you/ Shot through the heart, baby/ I’ll always love you forever”, a propeller bass and a propeller guitar in the chorus, just like the Smashing Pumpkins back then. Now the world can end it makes you think. “Every night I burn holes in your eyes”, so lasciviously bored. “Isn’t that an incredibly happy song? It’s so happy! I’ve been carrying all these traumata with me. And overnight it just resolves. I write to watch my traumata disappear.” And if you listen closely you can hear Shirley Manson singing the second voice in this song. And then you wonder whether it’s only auto-aggressive women that make good music.
Dalle has been with Josh Homme, the mastermind of Queens of the Stone Age for more than ten years now. In June 2003 they licked each other’s tongue on a picture of the American ROLLING STONE gathering media attention. Homme was the redhead giant, Dalle the blue-haired siren. She was still married at that point, to Tim Armstrong, the singer of Rancid, who released Dalles first records on his label Hellcat Records. Dalle met Armstrong and Homme at the same time. Each at festivals. Dalle fell in love with Armstrong. Moved with him to California. Homme fell in love with Dalle. He told everyone they had made out, even Mark Lanegan. Today she’s laughing about it.
“I’ve traveled all around the world/ And the loneliest place is where you are/ I don’t miss you much at all” and we hear a piano, strings, so tender and this fragile voice of Dalle, that you had never heard like this, because in all these years before she had only been screaming. “At first this song was called ‘Man vs. Magnet’ and it was hard and fast.” What a voice she has, so shot through! “I Don’t Need Your Love” – what a song! Kammerpop. “Alain then said this did not match the rest of the songs. This hard. So I threw it out. Finally only the drums were left and I sat down at the piano.” And at the end you hear her children. Chuckling and saying “Mummy”. And the song pauses shortly. Children smell so good and that’s what you hear in that moment.
Alain Johannes is an extraordinary producer, because he is not only a producer, but a musician. And musicians have a sense for these moments, because they hear music in the smell of chuckling children. Johannes belongs to the intimate friends of Homme – with QOTSA, Desert Sessions, Eagles of Death Metal, Them Crooked Vultures. In Dalles last band Spinnerette he was playing the bass guitar. Johannes is the kind of guy you get into the studio when you want it big, loud and dark. But just also the guy who takes the volume out of the loud and dark Dalle, slows down the speed and this way discovers a side of hers that nobody else could have had discovered. Because everyone thought Dalle could only scream, wear a “Fuck Off” tattoo on her shoulder and be “the wife of…”.
That’s in general an allegation that the singer has had to face since the beginning of her career. She’s just the wife of Tim Armstrong. Spouse of Josh Homme. She’s useless. Slept her way in there. “Don’t mess with me” she replies. Like the song on her album. You definitely shouldn’t mess with Dalle. She kicked a fan, who was holding a “Take Tim back” sign up at one of her concerts in the head. Dalle has settled. Even though you may not believe it, if you remember her concert the evening before where she was the young punk again. But now the mom sits in front of you, the jetlagged mom, who runs six miles every day when possible, because at some point everyone starts running six miles. At least if you have stopped booze, coke, drinking, smoking and still need the kick.
Runners, those are ex-junkies, cured borderliners, persons who let their lives gyrate so obsessively, that they now have to be obsessively straightforward. “Running is the better drug” and yet another giggle. An when you hear this “Hihi, ahaha”, look into her eyes and scan her pale facial skin with your own eyes, you truly understand why Josh Homme instantly fell for her. Brody Dalles secret is that she is everything: best friend, partner in crime, idol to many young girls that don’t say “Yes, Sir!” but “No fucking way!”. Brody Dalle is a girl, a woman, rebel, superwoman, art figure, mother of the year and pin up girl. Depending on the way you look at her.
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