“There have been a lot of insults flying my way from one particular direction. What happened needed making crystal clear”
The day before Ian Curtis died – on May 17, 1980 – Bernard Sumner was in Heaton Park, Manchester, the same place where the Stone Roses played three reunion shows in 2012. He was with Simon Topping from post-punk group A Certain Ratio, standing at the bottom of a hill. Suddenly and inexplicably, a white horse – no rider, no saddle – came galloping past the many other people enjoying the sunshine on that warm day. It stopped in front of them, shook its mane and dipped its head, then took off back up the hill.
Eleven years later, on the night before Sumner’s mother died, he had a nightmare in which he saw her slumped forward dead in her wheelchair (she suffered from cerebral palsy). The next day, Sumner, haunted by the dream, found himself unexpectedly getting into a fight with the driver of a car who had almost run over him and his family. Then, when he got home, he found out that his mother had passed away – exactly in the way he’d seen in his dream.
These tales and many more besides – just as intriguing – are included in Sumner’s recently published autobiography, Chapter And Verse; a book that’s so much more than another insider’s take on the already well-told stories of Joy Division, New Order, Factory Records and The Haçienda. Take a look at Sumner’s Wikipedia page: it’s pitifully short for a man who was at the heart of last two great revolutions in British music – post-punk and acid house – and remains a globally recognised music icon. But that’s not to suggest rock and pop history has forgotten Sumner’s contribution. It’s more than Sumner is an intensely private person who has chosen to not tell his personal story – until now.
“I’ve obviously done a lot of interviews in my career, but I always talk about music and I’ve kept my private life out of it,” says Sumner, who’s 58, in a hotel room in Manchester. “I felt I was at the right age to open up – not 100 per cent – and try get to the core of what motivates me to make music, and the type of music I make.
“I wanted to explain the background of Joy Division and where that dark, sombre music came from. At the time, we thought it was normal; I thought it was just rock music and it took time for me to realise it had such a dark colouration to it. I wanted to explain a bit about my background and how that affected my contribution to the music of Joy Division. And I wanted to correct the record on a few things that were just wrong.”
What things?
“The general overview. But obviously Peter Hook leaving New Order needed explaining clearly and not too emotionally, so I’ve tried to explain that without sticking the knife in. There have been a lot of insults flying my way from one particular direction. What happened needed making crystal clear.”
More on Hook and his departure from New Order in 2007 later, because Sumner says there are other reasons why he is telling his story now. It was recently announced that New Order’s forthcoming 10th album will be released on Mute next year. It’s their first album proper since 2005’s ‘Waiting For The Sirens’ Call’, first for the legendary independent label, and first without Hook – making 2014 a good time to look back before moving forwards. Also, Sumner was unhappy with a 2007 unauthorised biography, Bernard Sumner: Confusion – Joy Division, Electronic and New Order Versus The World, penned by a Manchester-based writer called David Nolan. It was, he says, “All a bit tabloid journalism.”
For Chapter And Verse – the title suggests the book is the full, detailed story while evoking both literary and musical traditions – Sumner worked Charlie Connelly, a travel writer he likes. They’d decide on a period in time to cover and Connelly would record Sumner talking for three hours or longer – without being asked questions. Connelly would then transcribe the conversation, making it suit the written word, and Sumner would edit the writing, correcting facts and adding passages he felt he’d missed in conversation. Crucial to Sumner, Connelly and Sumner’s publisher, Transworld, was that the book would read as Sumner’s voice and not be, as Sumner says, “like a celebrity fragrance; like Beyoncé coming along and going, ‘Yes, that smells nice, put my name on it.’”
Did Sumner enjoy the process?
“No!” he says. “It was bloody hard work. I thought I’d be swanning around in a quilted red smoking jacket with a cigar in one hand and a glass of claret in the other dictating my memoirs, but it wasn’t like that at all. I thought writers were all soft southern wusses who never did any work, unlike us tough northern musicians. It was as hard as making an album, and that caught me by surprise.
“It also forced me to be very self-analytical. I’m not normally a person that looks back on the past a lot; I’m quite happy living here in the present. But Charlie put me on a coach trip back in time, which wasn’t easy. You remember the good things that happened and you supress the upsetting things. I had to look at things in minute detail, and some were tucked away in some dark corner of my brain.”
He means, mostly, his relationship with his mother – a single, disabled woman who was unfailingly cruel to him throughout his childhood in Salford.
“I’m not saying I suffered child abuse – I didn’t – but my mother was overly strict with me, and at times scary. I needed to understand why she was like that and it’s hard understanding her circumstances – not just her disability, but her circumstances in general, of having my father leave her and bringing up an illegitimate child in the late ’50s and early ’60s. You were very frowned upon and many mothers gave their children away. The public regarded it as a shameful thing.”
In 1961, when Sumner was three, his mother married a man called Jimmy Dickin, who also suffered from cerebral palsy and, on her orders, also terrorised him. And there was illness elsewhere in Sumner’s family. “My mother had cerebral palsy, my grandfather got ill with a brain tumour and my grandmother had an operation in the 1960s – a simple cataract operation – that went wrong and she ended up blind. That was the family unit, and they all got ill. I think they used to use the working classes for medical experimentation in those days and, as I say in the book, I nearly got killed by a fucking dentist.”
Sumner writes with a kind, forgiving tone about his mother, saving what little anger he has for doctors, the local council and teachers at his schools. He remains disgusted by how the vibrant, close-knit community he loved growing up in was destroyed by the council after a national newspaper unreasonably called it “Europe’s biggest slum”. “They took the whole Lower Broughton community, which was very contained and village-like and shipped them out to tower blocks all over the place – randomly and miles away from each other,” he says. “There were only three of the old, Victorian houses left and my blind grandmother ended up living in one alone. I have recurring dreams of seeing the street boarded up, except my gran’s house and she’s at the window. She’s still got flowers in the window and curtains, and that image haunts me.”
Teachers – at his primary school, then at Salford Grammar – repeatedly told him he wouldn’t amount to anything (“All school did for me was completely crush my self-belief and make me feel worthless,” he says) and being told he was destined to fail is a recurring theme of his younger life, until punk rock taught the teenage Sumner that anything was possible. Somewhere inside that duality is the core of his true story, he thinks, and anything else is largely extraneous, particularly New Order’s legendary partying (although he does include countless hilarious anecdotes about the many good times he had in all of his four bands – Joy Division, New Order, Electronic and Bad Lieutenant). As he writes in the postscript: “Yes, we were hedonists; yes, we got drunk; and yes, we were off our faces a lot of the time. Big deal, yeah yeah, blah-de-blah, so what? That’s almost a conformist attitude for a musician… This book is about what it means to be truly alive. It’s about operating outside of the system and beating it. It’s about surviving catastrophe. It’s about hanging on to some of the things you once valued as a kid and how, along with that, just having fun can lead to – and in fact is – success.”
It’s noticeable, in fact, how shy Sumner is in the book about even mentioning drugs (“I’ve got kids, and I don’t want to set the wrong example,” he says) and there are other things he’s chosen to leave out. He doesn’t discuss in any detail his two marriages, saying, “I need somewhere to withdraw to that I feel is my mine. If you don’t have that, you can’t observe the outside world.” And some records he’s released are completely ignored, including New Order’s 1983 classic ‘Power, Corruption & Lies’. “How do you talk about an album without making it boring?” he says. “It’s hard. ‘We went into the studio, we picked up our guitars, started playing, the engineer ran the tape…’ I’m not a discography kind of guy.”
Instead, the book is much more about the characters in Sumner’s life, past and present. He writes beautifully about Ian Curtis and he’s at pains to give what he’s convinced is an “impartial record” of what happened between him and Peter Hook, his childhood friend and bass player in both Joy Division and New Order.
About Control – the Anton Corbijn-directed 2007 film about Ian Curtis that Sumner supported and likes – he writes: “Control was specifically a Joy Division film, based on a book written by his widow, Debbie, called Touching From A Distance. I’ve read Debbie’s book and, while it is the story of what happened, inevitably it’s a view of events seen from her perspective.” The same applies to Sumner’s views on his complicated relationship with Hook, who he obliterates in Chapter And Verse, making him out to be greedy, petty, bitter and devastatingly insecure. Even in Joy Division, Sumner writes Hook was “gradually turning into Mr Ego” and he says that Hook is “still trying to perpetuate this myth that we had a rivalry dating back to when we were kids,” but, “any perceived rivalry between Hooky and me exists nowhere except inside his own head.”
Sumner attributes the “denouement” of their falling out to Hook buying the Haçienda name off receivers after the club closed (which he then licensed to the construction company building apartments on the site) and telling the press that New Order had split up just as Sumner was helping promote Control (they hadn’t). He writes: “The final straw was this tornado of self-righteous rage at our audacity in feeling we [the other members of New Order and their associates] had a right to 50 per cent of ‘his’ Haçienda.”
“I think that if you’re on the same team, you should be pushing in the same direction,” Sumner says. “But this perceived rivalry has been there all the time. It gradually got worse till it was unbearable for us to work together. And if you end up in that situation, what’s the point of working together?”
Hook doesn’t “recognise” the New Order that started touring again in 2011 and are now recording a new album (“I call them Frankenstein New Order – couple of old bits, couple of new bits, jumpstarted by a dire economic crisis,” he said on BBC 6 Music in early September) and Sumner says, “It is New Order without him. He gets paid for us using the name and that seems to slip his memory sometimes. At times, he’s an angry man. He said it would never work; that it was like Queen without Freddie Mercury. That hasn’t proven to be true, has it?”
New Order’s 10th album will come out next year. “It’s going to be less guitar- and more synthesiser-based,” Sumner says. “The last two or three New Order records were quite guitary; I felt I needed a break from electronics. And now it feels like the time is right to get involved in electronic music again.”
Eight songs, three of which have been recorded with the Chemical Brothers’ Tom Rowlands are “fully demoed”, and Sumner says he’s got 15 or 16 ideas for other tracks: “We’ve got the rest, basically. We just need to record and mix the album now, which we hope to finish by the end of January.”
About being on Mute, Sumner says: “It might feel a bit more like being on Factory, but with better business managers!” It’s like he’s come full circle, making the timing of his book’s release all the more perfect. He’s excited by its publication, but also nervous: “I’m not unhappy about it, or else I wouldn’t have done it, but I feel slightly uncomfortable – so much of it I’ve never spoken about before. But if history remembers me, I’d like it to remember what was actually there, rather than what appeared to be there on Top Of The Pops, or in some interview I did when I was drunk and being an idiot. I’d rather there be a proper document.”
Finally, I ask Sumner about the white horse that approached him and Simon Topping before Ian Curtis killed himself, and about the strange dream that foretold his mother’s death. “I have no explanation for them whatsoever,” he says. “Weird things happen to me maybe every eight years, or 12 years – rarely. There are more things like that, but I didn’t put them in the book, because I didn’t think people would believe them. And – how can I put this? – I really don’t want to come across as being a total nutter.”
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The lighter side of Chapter And Verse: Four soon-to-be-classic anecdotes
1. Sumner confirms that the first Joy Division demo tape was indeed sent out to labels with a snippet of the Coronation Street theme tune included. Their first manager, Terry Mason, had made copies by placing two tape recorders next to each other, resulting in interference. You could also hear his mum saying, “Terry, come and get your tea before it gets cold.”
2. Sumner doesn’t dwell on debauchery in the book, but he does recount with horror how having “a poor, shrivelled, hangover-fogged brain” once caused him to walk through an airport carrying a bag full of his own vomit. Worried that dumping it might cause alarm, he decided to play it straight – passing unnoticed through security with the bag as his hand luggage.
3. For no reason in particular, Sumner planned to wear an Elvis impersonator’s costume in video for New Order’s 1990 World Cup song, ‘World In Motion’. He was told that the shoot was happening at Liverpool’s Anfield ground. It wasn’t, forcing him to make a hasty retreat. “Every time I pulled up at traffic lights, school kids were hanging out of bus windows shouting, ‘Hey, Elvis, you twat, where are you fokkin’ going?’”
4. Earlier this year, Johnny Marr fractured his hand after he supposedly fell over while jogging – right before his band and New Order were both due to appear on the touring Lollapalooza bill. “The concussion might have affected his memory slightly,” writes Sumner, “because a little bird told me that he’d actually run smack into a lamp post, probably while checking himself out in a shop window.”
This summer's high-profile festival cancellations exposed just how vulnerable ticket buyers can be. Here's how to avoid the pitfalls
The heavens opened on the night of August 10, 2011 in North Yorkshire, lashing the Dales with rainwater, causing streams to become rivers and rivers to burst their banks. For a promoter from Leeds called Ash Kollakowski, it spelled disaster. All year he’d be planning Beacons, a new, boutique-style independent festival near Skipton – a kind of Field Day or outdoor All Tomorrow’s Parties for the north. With one day before it was due to start, his site was a foot underwater. A health and safety officer employed by the festival had no choice: at 11am on August 11, the event was called off.
“There was a lot to deal with,” Kollakowski says. “First of all, you’ve got to put the message out there. We did that and obviously people were upset, but there was a lot of sympathy because there was a flood – an act of God. Then we said we’d try and get everyone refunded within the next couple of weeks. We’d partially used ticketing agencies, so people who bought tickets with them were refunded automatically. But we also used a company on PayPal. We’d had some of that money in already and we’d spent it. And we lost that money because we refunded people ourselves. One of our main shareholders had to remortgage his house and sell one of his businesses, but every single person got a refund and I’m glad we did that. The reason why we managed to pull ourselves back and put on the festival the next year was because we had so much good faith from people, and artists, many of whom waived their fee and even played in Leeds that weekend for free.”
Beacons took place for the third time in August this year and continues to go from strength to strength. There is, though, much to learn from the story of its disastrous debut: about how soggy – literally and metaphorically – the ground upon which small, independent festivals are built can suddenly become in the face of “an act of God”; about how risky it is for promoters to try and make money from live music; and, also, from a punters’ point of view, about how careful you need to be when buying tickets for music events. Kollakowski honoured his debts, but he could have chosen to liquidate his company (legally absconding him and his partners from financial responsibility), and the recent cancellations of two festivals in particular – ATP’s Jabberwocky, which was due to take place in London in mid-August, and Alt-Fest, scheduled for the same weekend in Kettering – have suggested the process for receiving refunds for tickets can be highly confusing. Both events have shone light on the grey areas of ticketing industry, a fiercely competitive business that the average music fan may not know much about.
HOW TICKETING WORKS
ATP made their name staging revolutionary festivals in holiday camps and started the fad for bands playing their classic albums in full. But in 2012 they hit a wall financially, and liquidated the company before – perfectly legitimately – starting a new one called Willwal LTD that traded under the ATP name. The report on the liquidation showed total debts of £2.6m with their two biggest creditors being ticketing agencies Gigantic (owed £876,716) and See Tickets (owed £749,355). If at first that doesn’t make sense, it’s because it’s not widely known that ticketing agents don’t just process tickets for event organisers, taking part of the booking fee as commission, but sometimes – not always – loan money to promoters ahead of an event taking place to help with upfront costs. Then, if the event goes ahead, they release the remaining funds from ticket sales. It’s normal practice.
Ticketing agencies advance funds at their risk. They’re keen to build relationships with promoters to ensure they keep using their services, and, as Martin Fitzgerald, chief commercial officer of See Tickets, says, “Withhold all funds from sales of tickets ahead of the event happening and half the events scheduled wouldn’t take place.”
Use a reputable company to buy tickets and whatever arrangement they have with a promoter will have no bearing on your ability to get a full refund if the event is cancelled. “Our terms dictate – and I’m assuming this is the same for all major ticketing outlets – that we hold all customer funds in a separate account from our operating account and the sole purpose of that is to guarantee the return of those funds to the customer if an event is cancelled or we go bankrupt,” says Steven Endersby, senior marketing executive of WeGotTickets, who are based in Oxford. “I think we’ve got about 9,000 events on sale. If every single one was cancelled tonight, we’d be able to refund every single ticket.”
There’s a legal point here, too. As consumer advice site Which? says, “The ticket seller is responsible for giving you your refund for tickets to a cancelled event,” and that, in its simplest sense, is a matter of law. So why then, if you bought a ticket for Jabberwocky using a relatively new and small New Zealand company called Dash, or a ticket for Alt-Fest using Clubtickets – and their company names appeared on your bank statement or Paypal account – have those two companies not been offering refunds? It’s here that things become murkier.
ATP told customers who had bought tickets with Dash to contact them for a refund, only to find out that Dash claimed they had “given to ATP all funds that Dash received for ticket sales to Jabberwocky” and wouldn’t be giving money back to fans. The conundrum was neatly summed up by Twitter user @shitmixtape: “So ATP blame Dash, who blame ATP, who tell me to ring my bank, who tell me to ring PayPal, who tell me to ring my bank.”
In theory, because Dash had sold the tickets – regardless of whether they’ve advanced funds or not, and ATP say they did receive some money – they are liable to provide refunds. But, at the time of press, it remains unclear what kind of company Dash is. Repeated calls and emails by NME to their headquarters in New Zealand were unreturned. Then there’s Ticketscript, another company that processed tickets for Jabberwocky, who describe themselves as a “European market leader in free self-ticketing software for event organisers”, rather than a traditional ticketing agency. They too claim that ATP is responsible for paying refunds. “Ticketscript only acts as an intermediary and the agreement to purchase the tickets arises between the customer and the event organiser,” says Jason Legg, Ticketscript’s UK commercial director.
The situation differs in the case of Alt-Fest, a first-year festival partially funded through Kickstarter, which was due to feature Gary Numan and Marilyn Manson as headliners. The husband-and-wife founders liquidated the company and, to make matters worse, a primary ticket-selling agent called Clubtickets also liquidated soon after the festival was pulled, effectively making anyone who bought Alt-Fest tickets using their service into creditors. When a company goes into liquidation, the order of payment after assets are sold is as follows: the fees of the liquidator (ie the company closing the business) are paid first, then debts owed to banks, the Inland Revenue and employees. Invariably, that means ordinary creditors rarely see their money returned and Fitzgerald says See Tickets never received a penny of the £749,355 they were owed by ATP, despite the fact that they were the second-biggest creditor.
PRACTISE SAFE TICKET BUYING
If all the above sounds alarming, know that there are simple things you can do to ensure you will receive a full refund for a cancelled festival. And, as many people who bought tickets for Jabberwocky and Alt-Fest have found out, even if the company that sold your tickets gets liquidated or, in the case of Dash, absolves themselves of responsibility, options still exist to apply for refunds. PayPal offer what’s called a “chargeback” on tickets bought within the last 180 days (not the last 45 days, as has been reported), while certain banks and credit card companies also offer chargeback terms, though they vary between companies. Check yours before buying tickets to festivals. (And in general, buying tickets on a credit card offers a level of protection that debit cards don’t have.)
Here are some other steps you can take:
1. Only buy tickets from a dependable ticket-selling agency. Online, you’ll find the site of the Society of Ticket Agents & Retailers (STAR), which is a self-regulatory (rather than government) body, but they nonetheless have a strict code of practice for their 45 members. If a festival isn’t using any of those 45 agencies (many festivals employ more than one), exercise extreme caution. Ask the festival why they aren’t before you buy a ticket and always check any ticketing agencies’ specific terms and conditions on refunds. If their terms and conditions aren’t clear, avoid their service.
2. Find out what level of insurance a festival has bought. Festivals might not appreciate you asking about what insurance they’ve purchased (they only need public liability coverage to obtain a licence to stage an event), but you’re on much safer ground if you can establish whether they have cancellation and abandonment insurance. It’s expensive (about £500 for the tiniest one-day festival and up to about £70,000 for big events, and that’s on top of other policy costs), but it’s good news for ticket buyers. As Steven Howell from Music Insurance Brokers says, “Ticket sellers have begun to force the issue. They now sometimes say to festival organisers, ‘We’re going to hold back funds we’re collecting from sales until the event has passed unless you have a cancellation policy in place and your name is on that policy.’” Put another way, having cancellation and abandonment insurance will help a festival get properly organised before it takes place, seriously reducing the chances of a cancellation, and help attract trustworthy ticket-selling agencies, who will be paying your refund if the event is pulled.
3. Think laterally. There’s nothing to suggest that a festival in its first year can’t be a success or that a promoter with an erratic track record isn’t capable of putting on an incredible event. Imagine, though, how much easier it is for festivals with impeccable histories to attract bands, sponsors, quality venues and business partners. Read between the lines and trust your gut. Each year, many festivals are cancelled and, in some cases, the signs will have been in plain sight. Is the festival you’re thinking of buying tickets to a member of the Association of Independent Festivals? Make checks like that.
IS MORE REGULATION NEEDED?
Invariably, after a summer of cancellations, come calls for more transparency and regulation – from fans online, and also within the live music industry. WeGotTickets are particularly vocal about the issue, often to the chagrin of their competitors. “It’s commonplace for agencies to secure ticketing for an event by agreeing to pay back a certain percentage of the booking fee to the promoter – a kickback, as we call it, or a rebate as the industry prefers,” says Endersby. “That’s the kind of thing that we’re going to start pushing against more, as well as stuff that’s come up like this ATP refund chaos. We think that transparency and protecting consumer rights are crucial to an industry that doesn’t have a great reputation anyway, partly because of secondary ticketing. There’s a risk of a loss of faith in the live music industry, especially with regarding festivals, and if we keep seeing things like Jabberwocky happen are people really going to want to risk buying tickets in the future?”
See’s Fitzgerald believes, however, that there’s already enough regulation in place. Consumer rights are protected by law, he mentions, and rivalries between ticketing agencies help tip the market in favour of the ticket buyer. “It’s hugely competitive; if there’s someone out there charging huge booking fees, and people perceived they're being ripped off, there’s always somewhere else to book,” he says.
On the other side of the coin – from the promoter’s point of view – Beacons’ Ash Kollakowski says: “If there was more regulation, I don’t think that 22-year-old potential promoters could go out and do something for themselves. If you’re putting on a festival, you know what the consequences could be and if you bring in Trading Standards you’re compromising what is actually an artistic thing to do. Good promoters are curating an event for a specific audience and they need to be trusted to know that audience. Trading Standards would come in and say, ‘This act won’t sell enough tickets – they’re from Sweden and they’ve only got one record out!’ and that would take away all the originality, passion and variety in a good line-up. The person who has the best idea of how a festival is going to do it the person who’s putting it together, not a man in a suit or an algorithm.”
In the wake of Jabberwocky, Alt-Fest and the many other festival cancellations this year, you may disagree. In August, ATP’s Barry Hogan said, “A promoter losing money is like saying a butcher serves pork.” About being a ticketing agent, Fitzgerald says, “You’re basically playing festival stock market.” Expect much more drama come summer 2015.
In Tampa, hearing how the 4AD band's new album is like a "suicide note" to everything that happened before in their lives
What is it about Tampa and how has this odd, mid-sized city on the other Floridian coast from Miami managed to produce one of indie rock’s most intriguing prospects – Merchandise, a band that last year joined the coveted roster of 4AD? At various points on my three-day trip to meet them, frontman Carson Cox calls his hometown “a hell hole”, “the void” and “desperate” – fair descriptions, perhaps, but they don’t conjure up Tampa’s distinctive mood. It’s my last night here, we’re drinking neat whiskey in my hotel room and I’m pushing him for a better characterisation. He talks about how Tampa is trying to become more “advanced” and “refined”, but also how, as in Miami and Atlanta, there’s a strip club culture that doubles up as a breeding ground for Dirty South hip-hop. With some pride, he mentions that one club in Tampa has a ‘make it rain’ machine (feed dollar bills in, watch them shoot out over the dancers) and then he says: “This is a greasy fucking town.” And that is the perfect description.
“I live a public life,” Carson says, “but I don’t really because I live in Tampa.” It’s easy to hide and for four years after Merchandise formed in 2008, they were buried underground. It was their 2012, second album, ‘Children of Desire’, that travelled far over the internet and caused a panic among labels to try and sign them. “I was washing dishes and living in our old house – a horrible, cockroach-infested punk house – but I was really happy, because I felt like we were playing a big prank on the world,” Carson says. “I remember when [Rough Trade boss] Geoff Travis called – I was grocery shopping. He introduced himself and I was, like, ‘Hmmm, I know who you are.’ He’s an unassuming man but, to me, he’s famous. I was very moved to speak to someone who had so many ties to so much music I love. And, at that time, I still just considered us to be a local band. I didn’t think we’d ever be picked up by a label, or that people would be interested in New York, let alone the UK.”
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It’s the day before and I’m in the front room of the new Merchandise House – or, as their female friends call it, the Boy House – in a neighbourhood five miles north from downtown and quiet enough to not disturb a lethal-looking snake sleeping on the road. When the band started out, they were a three-piece comprised of Carson (motor-mouth, looks like Leonardo Dicaprio, used to be straight-edge, certainly isn’t now), Dave Vassalotti (Italian American, guitarist, a kind of Johnny Marr to Carson’s Morrissey) and Pat Brady (big guy, bass player, went out with Carson’s sister for ages), then last year they expanded into a permanent five-piece, adding their old pal Chris Horn (sax and guitar, father works in military intelligence, only non-stoner in the band) and Elsner Nino (Latino American, drummer, moved down from New York to join the band). All five of them live together in this impressively tidy house, which is their home, their studio (they recorded ‘After The End’ here) and also the place where they smoke gargantuan quantities of weed (except Chris) and have regular sessions watching movies on a projector screen. Newly downloaded is Soy Cuba, a 1964 black-and-white Soviet-Cuban propaganda film about the Cuban Revolution, but for now we’re burning through old YouTubes, some shot by Carson, of hardcore and experimental bands they either played in or were part of their DIY scene in Tampa.
Perhaps we have a tendency to romanticise American punk scenes, believing them to be sanctuaries of universal cooperation, shared values and anti-corporate spirit. The reality, Carson says, is that you pick your friends (for Merchandise that means a few local artists and, from across the US, Olympia’s Milk Music and Arizona’s Destruction Unit, with whom they released a triple-split 12” earlier this year) and the rest is just rivalry and bullshit.
“When we started out we were making clear-cut, fuck-you-for-life, burning-our-bridges statements, like, ‘You suck, you compromise everything we want to do and you don’t respect yourself,’” he says. “Then we started getting national attention and it became about competition. We were considered elitist because we didn’t play noisy hardcore. Other bands thought we thought we were better than them, and maybe that’s true, but it doesn’t fucking matter – you can still come to our show. We had meaningless feuds over territory, but now it’s chilled out and with the benefit of hindsight, it’s like, ‘That was all a bit silly.’ We were still home all the time. Now it’s different.”
Signing to 4AD offered Merchandise both an out from the local punk scene and a structure for touring that didn’t require them to utilise the national DIY network, and, at the same moment, they also quit what Carson calls their “700 other bands”. Carson being Carson, though, he can’t help but throw one last punch at the punks. On ‘After The End’, there’s a deceptively peppy song called ‘Enemy’ which contains following Carson-penned lyrics: “If I’m what you say I say I am / Then it shouldn’t be hard to understand / If I’m your enemy / Then I’m keen to be your enemy / All your thoughtless words / All your trembling herds / All your point and blame / It just makes me feel the same.”
Asked what provoked the song, he says: “I’m officially over scenes. I’m 100 per cent dead to music scenes. I’m only interested in individuals. I don’t care what background you come from and I don’t give a shit about your politics; I’m just interested in you and your individual ideas.”
The surprising thing about ‘Enemy’ is not how aggressive it is (there’s always been anger in Merchandise songs), but where it’s sequenced on the new album – directly after a shimmering, Dave-written instrumental opener called ‘Corridor’. Placing it so high makes a clear statement, and also reveals what Merchandise are trying to do with ‘After The End’. “It’s like a suicide note to everything that happened before in my life,” Carson says, adding: “The beginning and end are concrete things in fiction, but life isn’t fiction – things just continue. We’re still putting out records, we’re still a band, and everything is so different now – the band is totally different, we’re writing songs differently, Dave has almost half the songs on the record, and I think we’re doing everything in a much more advanced way.”
It’s certainly the most sonically poppy and focussed of their four albums (or “edited”, as Dave prefers to say) and that has much to do with Gareth Jones, former producer of Depeche Mode, Einstürzende Neubauten and Wire, working closely with Carson on engineering and mixing the songs. But it’s also Merchandise’s most wild record. Dave describes his songs as being “bleak” and “hopeless”, and Carson comes across as being deeply frustrated and unhappy with his lot. “I’m through with begging for approval / Now I’m asking to be free,” he sings on ‘Green Lady’, and then, on ‘Looking Glass Waltz’: “O’ nostalgia is just a looking glass / It’s for us to distort and mould / Won’t someone please help me / I’m too young to feel this old.”
***
Carson is an extraordinary combination of characteristics. He can be lively, cocksure and glib, but when talking about his music he has a tendency to tie himself up in knots. He can speak for what seems like hours about the “deep concepts” in his songs, but equally say, “Most of the time we don’t know what we are doing. We’re wilfully ignorant – it’s pure pop experimentation.” He defines himself as a “conservative” – if only to prove he’s absolutely not a hippy – and you wonder at times whether half the enemies he claims to have even exist. He’s constantly striving to be different, but he hasn’t used the opportunity 4AD have offered Merchandise to completely rise above Tampa’s “trembling herds”, reminding me of something he said in 2012: “We seem to represent some kind of dignity to people in big cities elsewhere. But, you know, it’s hard to be a prophet in your hometown.”
He also says he’s undiagnosed dyslexic, a hypochondriac, and he probably has OCD. “My anxiety was really bad when I was younger, but now that the course of my life has played out a little a bit more, I can kind of tell what is happening. In 2012, I was like, ‘Anything can happen! I could end up homeless, or dying on the street on my way home from work.’ I felt like I was going crazy, whereas now it’s like, ‘We’re putting out a record, I hope this is good.’ I’m just glad it’s finished. I was in a really moody, emotional, bullshit place when we were making it that I don’t want to be in now, which is why I’ve been watching live wrestling and…”
“…a bunch of Jerry Bruckheimer movies,” says Dave.
“Now that the record’s done, I’m like, ‘No more emotional shit,’” adds Carson. “I’m just want to have fun.”
And so, the next day, we meet to eat monstrous plates of incredible food at the city’s best Cuban restaurant, La Teresita, after which I find myself in a cab with Carson charging down a three-lane trunk road in the city’s centre. Our driver sees a car coming directly at us, going the wrong way up what is a one-way street. “Look at that fool,” he says, and casually slides into the middle lane to avoid a head-on collision. Carson is equally nonplussed. He glances up from the backseat, rolls his eyes and says, “Pure Tampa. That shit happens the whole time here.”
It becomes a heavy, greasy night out. We meet Chris and The Hub, which correctly advertises itself as being “a true American cocktail lounge with honest charm, strong drinks, and best jukebox around”, then a situation arises where bodies are piled upon bodies in Chris’s car and suddenly we’re in another bar in the Ybor City district, then back at the hotel, with a friend of the band’s, Filthy Phil, wasted on some hideous malt liquor/energy drink crossover called Joose.
“None of my deep punk rock friends are just punk rockers,” Carson says. “It’s impossible to be just that, and it’s a waste of time. You can’t just be a cartoon. When labels starting getting interested in us, I didn’t know many people who were having similar experiences, but then other people we’d met touring – Dirty Beaches, Parquet Courts, Waxahatchee, Milk Music, The Men – got picked up by labels and the press. Suddenly, it seemed like all these bands from the warehouse scene, some of whom I had booked shows for in Tampa, had become the legitimate music world – the next thing on from Dan Deacon, Lightning Bolt and even fucking Matt and Kim.”
What does he expect to happen next? Could Merchandise become a band like R.E.M. who sprang from a similar DIY scene in the not so-far-away Athens, Georgia, then broke huge? “It’s still hard for us to think of ourselves as a professional band,” he says, “but we have begun to think longer-term, and in whatever shape the band takes – as a five-piece, as a 10-piece, doing four-LP operas, doing wilder stuff live, whatever. But for now, this is us – this five-piece, here in Tampa, Florida. We’re the cult of Merchandise. We’re the die-hards. We’re the baddest motherfuckers on the block.”
Burnout and a split with Ben Langmaid saw Elly Jackson hitting a new low. Now a long-delayed second album has “freed” her
On May 13, La Roux made a long-overdue return, announcing a second album, ‘Trouble In Paradise’, posting a new song online, ‘Let Me Down Gently’, and, just like when we first heard from her – or rather, them – everything came shrouded in mystery. Why the five year-gap between La Roux’s platinum-selling self-titled debut album and ‘Trouble In Paradise’? And what happened to Ben Langmaid, Elly Jackson’s original co-writer and producer in La Roux, who has been out of the group for over two years and doesn’t speak to Jackson anymore?
La Roux seemingly burst out of nowhere in late 2008 with ‘Quicksand’, then promptly had a Number 2 hit with its follow-up single, ‘In For The Kill’, propelled by Skream’s ‘Let’s Get Ravey’ remix. The band name was confusing – it suggested a solo act – and that was compounded by the fact that we never saw or heard much from Langmaid, who shunned the spotlight and was over twice her age. It was all about the then-21-year-old Jackson, who, brilliantly, turned out to be the daughter of Sergeant June Ackland from The Bill (actress Trudie Goodwin, who now plays Georgia Sharma in Emmerdale).
In April 2009, Jackson was interviewed by the Nottingham Post. “A friend of mine is concerned about the grammatical inaccuracy of ‘La Roux’,” the reporter said. “He says that it should be ‘Le Roux’ for a man, or ‘La Rousse’ for a woman.” Jackson replied: “To me, it means ‘red-haired one’ – and it does, vaguely. It’s just a male version of ‘red-haired one’, which I think is even cooler, because I’m well androgynous.”
The androgyny, which manifested itself in strictly no-dresses, ultra-vivid styling and a monumental quiff, was intriguing, too – a Technicolor flashback to Bowie, Boy George, Annie Lennox and other great British popstars of the ’70s and ’80s. At a time when radio airwaves and social media were being ruled by the likes of Lily Allen, who detailed her almost every move online, we’d forgotten how otherworldly a popstar could be. Jackson was radiant and she confused people, including the Daily Mail, who bluntly reported in November 2009: “La Roux doesn’t smile in photos and looks a bit like a robot.”
La Roux had a Number 1 single with ‘Bulletproof’ in June 2009. With a band that didn’t include Langmaid, Jackson spent much of 2010 touring the US. A year after ‘Bulletproof’ made Number 1 here, it went to Number 8 there, then, in February 2011, La Roux won a Grammy for ‘Best Electronic/Dance Album’. Langmaid made a rare public appearance, picking up the gong with Jackson, and the two were even interviewed together.
Problems, it seems, arose when they began work on the second album. “I came to him with some rare disco references and he made it very clear that he didn’t like them. There wasn’t a great deal of understanding,” Jackson said on May 19 when I first asked her about the split with Langmaid for an NME news piece, adding: “On the album, there are maybe two songs that have similar production styles to the way that I started them with Ben, but they were essentially demo tracks and I felt they needed a lot of subsequent work.”
I contacted Langmaid for comment, he declined to speak, but then, on the day the story runs I receive a text message at 9pm: “Do you still want to talk, Phil? Seen your post and it isn’t what happened.” We arrange a phone interview for 11am the next morning.
***
It’s earlier that day and I meet Jackson for a second time in a photographer’s studio in Brixton, where she grew up and still lives. Even between this interview and the last one, much has come to light about the five-year gap between the two La Roux records. Most alarmingly, in an Observer article, Jackson opened up about the acute anxiety she experienced while touring her debut album – long before she locked horns with Langmaid – brought by on the intense pressure of experiencing rapid-fire success in the UK and a subsequent drive to repeat it in the US. She lost her voice, but was still on the road, which exacerbated her anxiety (“I couldn’t even do vocal warm-ups without crying; it was like I paralysed a muscle in my throat,” she says), and when she returned to the UK, she found that no support system existed that could help with her very specific illness.
It was, Jackson says, a nightmarish, “soul-destroying” period in her life that took a toll not just on her, but everyone around her – her family, her friends, her band, her management and her label. For over a year she found herself getting “ripped-off” by private doctors until she eventually met a specialist called Andy Evans.
“He used to be a jazz musician – still is – so he understands performance and he understood exactly what I was going through,” Jackson says. “That was the difference.” And although for ages she refused to speak about what happened – for fear she might be “picked apart” or seen to be at “fault” – she’s recently changed her mind. “I’ve now decided that I will talk about it and I’ll talk about it at length, because I can’t bear the thought of anyone having to go through what I did and not knowing who to turn to,” she says. “I’ve tried to persuade my record label, Universal, to put a contact sheet together of emergency specialists for this kind of thing. There are loads of ear, nose and speech therapists, but you need to get the right one.”
One song on ‘Trouble In Paradise’, ‘Silent Partner’, directly addresses Jackson’s anxiety, although its title might lead people to believe it’s about Langmaid. “Whenever I think about my anxiety, the word ‘silence’ comes into my head,” Jackson says. “You just want that voice in your head that’s telling you you’re shit to stop, and you need to overcome it.” It really isn’t about Langmaid and, in fact, the song marks an important moment in her musical relationship with Ian Sherwin, engineer on La Roux’s debut and a crucial figure on ‘Trouble In Paradise’. After Jackson and Langmaid fell out, Jackson turned to Sherwin, who’s 38, to help interpret her ideas for the album. ‘Silent Partner’ was the first song they worked on alone and it helped them forge a strong connection. “We’ve found a very great thing with each other; it’s just as deep, if not deeper, than anything I had with anyone before,” Jackson says. “He’s like my brother. You have to be on a level with someone if you’re going to spend almost every day with someone for two years. Sometimes we were working 10 days on, one day off.”
***
The campaign for La Roux’s debut album ended on February 12, 2011; day of the 53rd Annual Grammy Awards. Afterwards, Jackson took time off, eventually put her health issues behind her, began work on new songs, then took them to a studio in Devon in late 2011 to begin sessions, once again, with Langmaid as co-writer and producer and Sherwin as engineer.
The situation between Langmaid and Jackson turned sour over the next few months, but Jackson won’t be drawn on specifics. “Whatever happened between us as people is (a) personal and (b) kind of irrelevant, because it’s not why we stopped making music together,” she says. “You can sort out personal stuff, but you can’t sort anything if you both want completely different things. It comes through in the music as a massive conflict.”
She continues: “I was 17 when I met him and he was in his 40s, and I changed a lot from the age of 17 to 23, when I started thinking about this record. I could explain this all to you in heartbeat, but it wouldn’t be right. There are a lot of personal things there and many reasons why it didn’t work, and it’s just not fair on Ben to talk about it. I love pop music, but there’s a line and he always wanted me to cross it. I didn’t want to do ‘Bulletproof Mark II’ and he found a lot of my ideas quite pretentious. I’d developed as an artist and he’d stopped understanding me. And that’s fundamentally the issue.”
“I can’t speak for people’s personal feelings, but I think that old cliché ‘creative differences’ is apt here,” says Sherwin, who spent six months working on My Bloody Valentine’s 2013 comeback album, ‘MBV’, before getting back together with La Roux for ‘Trouble In Paradise’. “In fairness to Ben, I don’t think anyone was really getting where Elly was coming from at the beginning. What’s great about her as an artist is that she draws from all sorts of things – it might be a particular song, or it might be the lighting in a film – and, whatever it was, they weren’t seeing what each other was seeing.”
“We were kidding ourselves,” Jackson says. “I realised that I didn’t like where the record was going and that’s when other things started to happen. Then, one day, he left out of frustration and I asked him not to come back.”
***
Ben Langmaid went to school with Judge Jules and Rollo Armstrong, founder of Faithless. A note on the Faithless website says he’s “solely responsible” for introducing the band – Sister Bliss, Rollo and Maxi Jazz – to each other. In the ’90s, he released several tracks will Rollo under the name Huff & Herb, and was even an original member of indie band Kubb, who had two Top 40 hits in the mid-2000s. After he was introduced to Jackson, they first worked on acoustic songs before discovering a shared love of early Depeche Mode, Gary Numan, Heaven 17 and Human League led them to make electronic pop.
Langmaid does occasionally do interviews. In an undated but recent one on the site for Source, a distributor of music technology products, he said he’s been working with Harriet Whitehead, who appeared on The Voice in 2012. It doesn’t seem a great gig for a Grammy-winning producer. And he’s on Twitter, too. In mid-May, in response to a La Roux fan, he tweeted: “I left a while ago but co-wrote and co-produced over half the album, including ‘Let Me Down Gently’,” which was posted online on May 12 as a means of introducing ‘Trouble In Paradise’. Pressed as to why he left, he responded: “I can’t say. Sorry. But I’m sure I’ll write a book about it one day!”
Why can’t Langmaid say, what exactly is his contribution to ‘Trouble In Paradise’ and what’s his take on the fall-out with Jackson? These are the questions I want to ask during our interview. But we never get to speak. Half an hour before our scheduled call, I receive a message from Tony Beard, Langmaid’s manager and also Elly’s, saying Ben doesn’t want to do the interview anymore, but he will provide a quote, via Beard, later.
It takes two days for the quote to arrive. With it, Beard clears up confusion over the songwriting/production credits on ‘Trouble In Paradise’ (Langmaid is getting co-writing credits on five of the album’s nine songs – a more than significant contribution – and what’s called a “second-line” production credit on two, including ‘Let Me Down Gently’), but the statement itself raises more questions than it answers:
“When we began writing again in late 2011, the early ideas we had needed a lot of work. We were on the same page and both wanted to improve on the first album. We were united in that. ‘Let me Down Gently’ is one of my favourite tracks. I don’t remember having a problem with it. But I do remember asking our manager if we could start things with this song when we first played it to him two and a half years ago.
“We’ve had creative differences in the past (what band hasn’t?), but we always got through then and usually the music benefits. I am truly saddened that it has ended this way, but I am immensely proud of what we achieved together. We’ve sold eight million records. We were nominated for two Grammys and we won one.
“We wrote five great new songs together, all of which are on the album. I’m looking forward to the record being a great success and I shall enjoy watching it unfold. I have immense pride in the part I played; no-one can take that away from me.”
***
It was March 2012 when Langmaid left the group; a bombshell moment that exponentially increased the pressure on Jackson. She knew she wanted to make a record that referenced a new-found love for “weird, late-’70s and early-’80s sci-fi disco” and didn’t sound “smashed – really limited, digital and small”, as she believed her debut did, but she was yet to have a creative breakthrough.
Sherwin: “We were having a stylistic conversation and Elly was talking about the kinds of things that intrigued her and she wanted to reference in the record. One thing that came up was the first Alien film, the lighting and this idea of futurism. I turned to her and said a phrase that had been running around my head for a while: ‘It’s what people in the ’70s imagined the future would look like.’ Elly just lit up: ‘That’s it! That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to explain.’ And I think for her that was the moment when she was like, ‘Right, you get it, and not only do you get it, you’re bringing stuff to me that’s in line with my thoughts.’”
‘Silent Partner’ became a key song for Jackson and Sherwin, and so did the album’s first official single, ‘Uptight Downtown’ – a song that’s influenced as much by ‘Sandinista!’-era Clash as it is by Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance’. It concerns the 2011 London riots, specifically the atmosphere that Jackson picked up on in Brixton.
“The recent Brixton riots had nowhere near as much positive impact as the ones in the ’80s, which we were far more directed [at the police],” she says. “I’m not making any political points here and I always want to stay away from politics, so that song is about the feeling of the riots – the energy in Brixton at the time – and the fact that I had never seen my generation in London stand up for anything before. Whether it was right or not to riot, or whether anything changed, is not for me to say, but I knew afterwards that I wanted to write a song called ‘Uptight Downtown’.”
The song ties in with a general theme of the album, which Jackson describes as “emptiness where there was once joy”. A riot is not a party, but Jackson found that she could correlate the mood she felt in London when she returned home in the immediate aftermath of the riots (she’d been in Croatia) with memories from her childhood that remain vivid – a sense of the difference between how something starts and how it ends up. “Ever since I was a kid, I’ve felt actual depression when a party is over – depression at seeing the debris of joy,” she says, and that feeling stayed with her as she grew older, started going to festivals and, in particular, to a place in the Caribbean that she won’t reveal the name of but first visited with her parents on holiday and has returned to four times since. Some of the action on the record takes place there (‘Tropical Chancer’ is the story of a local wide boy, or, as Jackson calls him, “a professional, island Del Boy”), but equally the concept of ‘trouble in paradise’ refers to love and relationships, as it does on ‘Let Me Down Gently’, ‘Paradise Is You’ and ‘Sexotheque’, a tale of a man who can’t stop “messing around” that’s as hilarious as it is desperate.
Jackson says that she loves “the juxtaposition between dark and light in songs” and ‘Trouble In Paradise’ is driven by the same clash of joyful abandonment and misery that you hear in Loleatta Holloway’s ‘Runaway’, ‘I Will Survive’ by Gloria Gaynor, Robyn’s ‘Dancing On My Own’ and countless other classic pop and disco songs. It’s ecstasy in a minor key, and that same idea extends to the album’s artwork – a portrait of forlornness in Arcadia.
You might also imagine that ‘Trouble In Paradise’ refers to Jackson’s struggle with fame over the last five years, but, regarding fame, Jackson has a well-rehearsed line: “I don’t feel famous.” Instead, she says just feels better about herself now – older, wiser and less like the “robot” that the Daily Mail imagined her to be back in 2009. “I was impressed with how organic and cool Elly was,” said Nile Rodgers after he popped in to see her and Sherwin while they were recording the album, and that seems a perfect description of Jackson in 2014.
“The music on this record has brought out another side of me that’s a lot less aggressive and lot more free,” she says. “When I started performing songs like ‘Sexotheque’ and ‘Tropical Chancer’, I found a whole new part of myself. Suddenly I found myself wanting to smile the whole time. I’ve never really done that before and everyone goes mental: ‘Oh my god, she’s smiling!’ I like having a lighter approach to being on stage, and I feel more natural. I felt so rigid before and it didn’t feel like who I am. I’m really not that stern; I’m not that jagged.”
Meet the artist behind 2014's most striking album covers and videos
On April 4, Kasabian announced their new album, ‘48:13’, by painting its cover design on the front of a building in East London. The building houses the studio of Aitor Throup, a 34-year-old menswear designer and graphic artist who Kasabian have collaborated with before. He was the art director of their 2011 fourth album, ‘Velociraptor!’ – designing the cover and directing the video for ‘Switchblade Smiles’ – and he worked just as closely with Damon Albarn on his recent solo album, ‘Everyday Robots’. That stunning CGI skull video? Throup’s work, as was the cover image.
Throup’s association with Kasabian on ‘48:13’ extends to designing the cover, directing the video for ‘Eez-Eh’ – the album’s lead single – and even helping the band conceptualise their Glastonbury set design. It’s almost like he’s become the fifth member of the band, whose debut album he discovered when he was doing his MA in fashion at the Royal College of Arts in London. Something clicked. “I thought, ‘This is it!’ It had the roots, but it wasn’t dwelling on them,” he says in his studio. “It became the soundtrack to what I was making at the time and that even goes for the England shirt I designed for the 2010 World Cup. The concept behind it was similar; there was analysis of the ’66 kit and the Umbro of old, but it was taken to the future without it being fucking glow in the dark.”
Kasabian’s Tom Meighan unveiled the red away shirt for Umbro at a gig in Paris in February 2010 and the band quickly formed a tight friendship with Throup, informed by an appreciation of his work.
“They learned earlier enough that I’m interested in three primary things – innovation and new ways of looking at things, telling stories, and authenticity,” Throup says. “I’m obsessed by justifying things; everything has to have a reason. But where in product design form follows function, in the more general art and design world, form can follow reason. Those are very much my words, but Kasabian just inherently get what I do. At the same time, their story always intrigued me. We’re the same age and we come from similar backgrounds, particularly Serge [Pizzorno], who has a Latin side to him.”
Throup was born in Argentina in 1980 and moved to Burnley in 1992. He’s equally a fashion, art, music and football fan, blind to any distinction between high and low culture. “I’m not into segregation of any sort,” he says. “There’s a story to be told and a beauty to be witnessed in everything. I make it my job to bring that beauty to the surface by working with what’s already there.”
“Aitor is a very interesting individual,” Albarn says. “He has the dichotomy of Latin spirit and Northern English sensibility.” As with Kasabian, Throup didn’t just take on a job of work, he became involved in the entire process of ‘Everyday Robots’, getting to know Albarn over the course of the year, during which time themes for the album’s presentation became clear.
“He’s a fluid character, but on that record he’s really laying himself bare,” Throup says. “It’s almost painful at times, like he’s stripped off his armour. So I wanted the cover image to show his vulnerability and authenticity, as well as his childlike mentality, which informs his music. The skull video, which also concerns identity, was about me getting out of my comfort zone, too – I’d never used CGI before. I’m fascinated by anatomical studies and forensic analysis, and I discovered a strong correlation between those things and making something in CGI.”
With ‘48:13’, the colour pink has become central to its visual identity. “It’s a subversive colour,” Throup says. “It’s really pink, which says, ‘We’ve got something to say and we’re not bothered by your reaction.’ It was the same with the punks, who used pink and other colours in a similar way. Also, I usually work in monochrome, mostly because I’m interested in form and graphical elements. I can only use colour if the colour itself tells a story, otherwise it’s just decoration. With Kasabian, colour combines in the more ethereal, layered, psychedelic sensibilities of their music. It’s full or swirls and lasers and textures, and the way I see it, if you package it into one colour, it’s bright pink.”
The title came about after Throup, who is currently working on two other music projects (although he won’t say what they are), noticed Pizzorno’s obsession with finding the perfect length for an album, and about Kasabian’s Glastonbury set design, Pizzorno says: “There’s tweaking left to do, but it’s more or less there. It’s not pomp; there are no ballerinas or trapeze artists – it’s kind of anti that. It’s making huge statements, but without doing the traditional things.”
Is it going to feature the colour pink? “Everything from now on will feature the colour pink!” Pizzorno adds. “I love that; it’s keeps it all consistent. There’s nothing better than putting an album out and owning a colour with it.”
Divorce, tax problems, a racist attack and how she combined two passions – music and food – to make a defining new album
When Kelis was invited onto Radio 4’s ‘Women’s Hour’ in early March, she was asked whether her four-year-old son, who she had with the rapper Nas, her ex-husband, knew what she did for a living. “By the time it’s bedtime for him, I’m getting ready to go out and do my show,” she replied. “I’m putting on my sequins and my feathers, and I’m, ‘Okay, momma’s going to work.’ Someone once asked him, ‘Do you know what momma does?’ He said, ‘Yeah, momma dresses up and momma sings.’ Then he was asked, ‘Do you know what your daddy does?’ ‘Yeah, daddy works at the airport.’ Which is hilarious, because whenever his dad says he’s going to work, he says he has to go the airport. It’s great that his momma’s got this really glamorous job and his daddy works at the airport. It’s perfect.”
That’s Kelis all over: bold as brass, funny, heroic, perhaps a little snide, but not cruel, and, on that day, absolutely truthful. Later, with a 10-piece band, she performed her entire new album, ‘Food’ – her sixth – to less than 100 people in a tiny, piping-hot room at Metropolis studios in West London. Dripping in sweat and in terrific voice, she relished being up close and personal with fans and fronting a crack band that she’d mostly picked up a few days previous. It was a magnificent show.
It’s also telling that Kelis is even appearing on programmes like ‘Women’s Hour’. Fifteen years since we first heard her on Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s enduring club anthem, ‘Got Your Money’, which she quickly followed with her wild, Neptunes-produced debut solo single, ‘Caught Out There’ (“I hate you so much right now!”), she’s become an almost-establishment figure, especially in Britain, where she’s always enjoyed more success than back home in the US. Here, we’ve revelled in the unpredictable musical path she’s taken since 1999 and recognised the strength of her personality, too. She filed for divorce from Nas in 2009 when she was seven-months pregnant, then ended up in a long court battle for child support. During that time, she came across as a woman of immense dignity and she still shows a startling lack of bitterness towards her ex-husband, namedropping a song from his celebrated album ‘Illmatic’ in ‘Hooch’, a track on her new record that’s about their son: “These are the days of your life when the price of time is free / Like your daddy says, ‘The world is yours,’ so let it come naturally.”
Today, Kelis is in a BBC studio in central London, still buzzing from last night’s show at Metropolis. She lives in LA now, having been raised in Harlem by a father who was a jazz musician and professor of music at Wesleyan University and a mother who ran a catering business and is also a fashion designer. And it was in LA where she was introduced to Dave Sitek, another transplant from the East Coast and producer of ‘Food’.
“We met professionally, but not really with any expectations,” she says of the TV On The Radio man, whose recent production credits also include Beady Eye’s ‘BE’ and CSS’s ‘Panta’. “He always said I was on a list of people he wanted to work with, and obviously I love TV On The Radio and all the stuff he’s done with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but I never have any grandiose ideas of how I’m going to get on with someone. With him, we had a really great first conversation about music and we never really had to go there again; we understood that we appreciated the same things. We’re both East Coasters, so we also definitely connected on that level.”
The shorthand on ‘Food’ is that it’s an indie-soul record – a wonderfully nostalgic slice of classic songwriting (soul, but also pastoral folk, psych, afrobeat and even, on ‘Friday Fish Fry’, rockabilly) recorded live at Sitek’s house with a full band, including a brass section. Of course it has a retro quality, but there are songs on the album, like ‘Forever Me’, that could easily have been on her last power-dance, EDM-inspired album, ‘Flesh Tone’, and she’s been playing tracks from ‘Flesh Tone’, like ‘Acapella’, live with her new band, as well as older hits like ‘Milkshake’ and ‘Trick Me’. To Kelis, a song is just a song and, as she always says, the sound and feel of her albums are dictated by mood and never genre or commerce.
“For me, my last album was the brightest, just because I was pregnant when I recorded it and that’s a really powerful time for a woman artist. If I think about female artists in the past 15-20 years that I love, I look at their body of work and I’m like, ‘Oh, she was pregnant then!’ It makes so much sense. And ‘Flesh Tone’ definitely signifies that. It’s about life; it’s a very robust record. ‘Food’ is different because I’m very settled and I’m very content, and as much as I didn’t want to acknowledge that that would happen four or five years ago, being a mother totally has made that happen.”
Nonetheless, this being Kelis, who has beefed with labels in the past and never been shy of shooting her mouth off (infuriating, for example, PETA for wearing fur, then writing to them to say, “Who on Earth are you to tell me what I wear?”), even the last couple of years have been fraught with drama. In 2012, she was the subject of a vile, racist attack by a British man at an airport in Spain who she said called her a “slave” and a “disgusting Nigerian”. Initially, the abuse was thought to have happened in London, forcing Boris Johnson to tweet at her: “Heard about the treatment you received at a UK airport. Want you to know this is not typical. I’m appalled & I’m on the case.” Then, in 2012 and 2013, the taxman came calling, saying she owed an alleged $741,027.59 going back to 2010 and 2004.
Regarding her tax situation, Kelis says: “I’m not big on putting blame on people, but did someone not do their job? Yes. Was I on top of it? No, I was not. I just assumed and I should not have assumed. It was something I had to take care of and I did. It’s been cleared up for quite some time.”
The racist attack, on the other, remains on her mind: “That situation really brought me back to a reality that I have not been reminded of in a long time. No one approaches me like I’m just some nigger – not that there’s any such thing, but some people have their own perceptions of who’s valuable and who isn’t. I honestly have no words to describe the absolute rage of that man. Also, I was standing in a queue of British people and not one person said a single thing, which was unreal to me. This 6’4” man is screaming at me, I have a child in my arms, and people were backing away. Are you kidding me? How is that okay?”
Kelis adds that the incident taught her much about attitudes to race and other issues in the UK – “The British would rather ignore things and pretend they don’t exist, which is ironic, because I would never have thought such problems existed had this man not been yelling at me” – and it says a lot about her character that she still loves being here. After a brief stint on Will.i.am’s Interscope subsidiary, Music Group, which a suitable home for ‘Flesh Tone’, she signed to London-based indie Ninja Tune – a shock at first, but it’s the perfect label to put out Kelis in her new indie-soul guise. These days, recognising that she’s not a mainstream pop star and never was (“I became a runner to escape the fame,” she sings on new track, ‘Runner’), she wants labels to be her partners, not rulers. Plus, she says, “Steve, my manager, has other artists on Ninja and I like what they do. I think they’re clever and I like how they move.”
Back in 2006, things were different. Riding high after ‘Milkshake’, but entangled in major label re-shuffling, she got put over to Jive, a label she despised. The album they released, ‘Kelis Was Here’, seemed to mark her departure from music and indeed she did drop out from a while to train as a saucier at Le Cordon Blue in New York. Now, food has become as much a part of her professional life as music. She has her own cooking show in the US, her own range of sauces and, brilliantly, she could be spotted at SXSW this year serving up grub from her own food truck.
As such, it’s no surprise that Kelis, who’s 34, named her new album ‘Food’ and its lead single is called ‘Jerk Ribs’, a song she says she wanted to release first because it sets the tone for exactly where she is in 2014. It’s not actually about ribs: “I’ve been doing this for a long time in a business where – and I say this with all the care I can muster – youth is the value. ‘Jerk Ribs’ is about strength in something else. I know how to do this now; this is what it should look like, this is what it should feel like and it’s about me feeling comfortable in that, especially as a woman. I am better now than I ever was and I’m really proud of my age. Not many people can say they’ve lasted as long. I’m not strung out and I’ve made it through. So that song is about still loving music. I appreciate where I am now, because I’m smart enough, and wise enough, and old enough. This really is what it looks like.”
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