Carter's Corner

INTERVIEW: The Decemberists (January 2011)

2011-09-01T05:04:00.000-07:00

Pilgrims accompanying The Decemberists on their ongoing trek into the great musical unknown may find themselves pleasantly wrong-footed by the band’s latest album The King Is Dead, which marks perhaps as much of a U-turn as it’s possible to make within the folk genre - particularly in relation to their last release, 2009’s ambitiously theatrical 17-song suite, The Hazards Of Love.

If The King Is Dead does have an encompassing theme, it’s inextricably linked to the circumstances of the album’s conception, being recorded in ‘Pendarvia’ – a secluded, 80-acre countryside estate situated outside of Portland, Oregon. The locale’s rustic ambience is audible in each of the ten tracks, most notably in the twilight, old-time country feel of Rise To Me and the poetic June Hymn, which could almost be classed as the band’s first ‘sitting-on-a-porch’ song.

Notable guest performers on the album include Gillian Welch (providing an Emmylou Harris-style vocal foil to Meloy’s lead), together with legendary Georgian jangler Peter Buck – a happy result of Meloy penning several songs which he cheerfully admits to being “out-and-out homages” to R.E.M. It’s not hard to see why: Calamity Song pulses to an early Bill Berry drum beat as acoustic guitars pick out ringing hook-lines in the style of Talk About The Passion, while the coded political commentary of album highlight This Is Why We Fight could sit comfortably alongside the likes of Fall On Me and Cuyahoga on Lifes Rich Pageant. (Don’t tell anyone, but the chorus of lead single Down By The Water also offers a chord-for-chord likeness of The One I Love).

I caught up with Meloy in the middle of an all-day session of Canadian promo for the album, just one day before it improbably entered the US chart at #1. For the meantime though, I’ve got twenty minutes and we’re against the clock. Let’s go!

Word! If The Hazards of Love was The Decemberists’ ‘British’ folk album, would you say this is your ‘American’ folk record?

Uh, yeah, I think that would probably be safe to say. I think that the influences on this record draw more from the American folk tradition than the British, and The Hazards of Love was influenced not only by the British folk revival but was largely based on it.

Gram Parsons famously made that comment about ‘cosmic American music’ – a tradition of slightly skewed Americana that seems to have run through him, The Band, The Byrds, R.E.M. and beyond… do you see where the band are at now as part of that trajectory or lineage?

Yeah, well, I think that a lot of stuff on here owes a lot to Gram Parsons and that kind of West Coast ‘hippy country’. That’s what I grew up listening to – my intro to country music was not from your more ‘traditional’ output, you know: the Nashville country. My parents were really into a lot of that Bakersfield and Southern California, Laurel Canyon country: Buffalo Springfield, Neil Young, The Byrds, Bob Dylan… Marshall Tucker Band, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, stuff like that. So that’s really what I grew up listening to; that’s sort of the soundtrack of my early childhood. And so that music is definitely in my bones, for sure, and I think it definitely comes out in this record.

The first thing that struck me when I heard it was how compact and direct it is – it feels like a bit of an inverse reaction against the last record in many ways. Is that a fair assessment?

Yeah – I think in a way it’s a reaction in my head to the last three records that we’ve done. I think probably the last four or five years of our career we’ve been just kind of expanding and expanding and expanding, casting and experimenting with how far we can go with a sort of over-the-top, cinematic approach to writing and arranging. And I think this was like a really quick kind of ‘in-breath’ after all that; it just really made sense. The songs lent themselves to a more economical approach. And it was just where my head was at, too – I just liked the idea of trying to make a kind of lean and mean record, and that’s sort of what came out. I mean, really one of the only kind of rules that we set for ourselves was ‘Okay let’s try to make this short’; let’s try to make this fit nicely onto two sides of a piece of vinyl. Because everything we’ve done from Picaresque on, those are double-records, even if it not by traditional standards of ‘What is a double-record?’ – everything’s a double-record! But it pushes, like, 45 minutes, which is what most records do these days. So really it was as much trying to fit to the medium as it was trying to accomplish some sort of concept.

Like you said, it felt like the band had been progressing towards something like The Hazards of Love for quite a while - did you feel like you’d maybe exhausted that particular mode of narrative and character-driven songwriting on that album?

No, I don’t feel like I’d exhausted it – I just didn’t see myself doing that over and over. I think that doing a full-record concept is not the most comfortable way for me to work – it felt, even at the time I was writing it, that it was kind of a ‘one-time’ or rare experiment. It was as much of an opportunity for me to challenge my own way of thinking about music and way of writing, as it was trying to satisfy some sort of artistic or creative itch. And so doing The King Is Dead is sort of more typically how I would write, you know: just writing songs as they come, and once I’d amassed enough decent ones then we’d go and make a record. Whereas with The Hazards of Love, any song I was writing that didn’t fit the narrative kind of had to be shelved. And I had to sit down, and I wrote that thing from start to finish – the first song being the first song written, and the last song being the last song written. So it was as much of an experiment in form or in process as it was an experiment in, like, a ‘finished product’.

I remember watching you perform The Hazards of Love live and thinking that it must have been such hard work – you couldn’t really ‘deviate from the script’ at all, as it was so tightly put together. Are you looking forward to being able to have a bit more freedom with this record when you play live again?

I guess so – I mean, it’s going to be going back to how we’ve always played, and doing The Hazards of Love tour was a nice break from that: having this project every night, this piece that we would focus on, and we knew that it would be the same every night. You know, I never really got sick of it, I really enjoyed doing it that way – it just felt like a completely different kind of setlist, a different kind of show… and doing kind of ‘mixed bag’ stuff, it’ll be fun to get back to it, but it’ll feel more conventional, for sure.

Seeing how and where the album was recorded, it has a very rustic feel to it – is this a ‘nature’ record, by any chance?

Yeah, definitely! I mean, a lot of our records are ‘nature’ records, you know – I think that the woods loom as large on this record as on The Hazards of Love, and the ocean has been a part of a lot of records. I guess that’s just where my bed of songwriting ends up, you know, is being affected by my immediate natural world. But maybe this one it’s a little more apparent – my wife and I two years ago moved sort of outside of town, up in this neighbourhood tucked into the woods a little bit. That definitely spurred a lot of thinking, and a lot of different ways of songwriting.

Given the range of instruments within the band – upright bass, accordion, mandolin etc – is it kind of a surprise to you that this is the first time you’ve got round to exploring this sort of music and making what you’ve described as your “barn record”?

Yeah. I mean, it’s something we’ve really threatened doing ever since Picaresque – I think once we started availing ourselves of as many instruments and tracks as we possibly could, you know, building something. And we’d walk away from it going, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe it’ - The Infanta on Picaresque has, like, 64 tracks on it! And after that record, walking away and being like, ‘Okay, next one in a barn, we’re going to do it in two weeks, it’s just going to be stripped down’ – but then we went ahead and made two records which pushed what I think we were doing on Picaresque a little bit beyond. So I think this time it really felt right to make good on that promise.

Gillian Welch and, perhaps most prominently, Peter Buck both make appearances on the album. Is it strange being able to call up someone who was a bit of a boyhood hero for you growing up?

[Laughs] Yeah! It’s a trip, for sure. I think that’s one of the nice things about our little bit of success, you know – being able to meet one’s heroes is a pretty mind-blowing thing. I never thought my life would be long enough to spend any time with these people, let alone play with them. That said, Peter is really a pretty down-to-earth guy – he’s not remotely untouchable. He’s aware of his legendary status, but it doesn’t seem to have affected him that much; I think he’s happy to kind of scrap it out with bands like ours! And I think the fact that I was writing songs that were so heavily influenced by his own playing, he was sort of flattered by it and just kept saying: “Well, I stole everything I know from The Byrds!”, so…

What’s the most star-struck you’ve ever got around someone? Who’s reduced you to a gibbering schoolboy?

I think the first time I met Robyn Hitchcock was when I was at South By Southwest in Austin, Texas, and he was just coming out of the bathroom. And I was kind of waiting in line and I saw him – I was loaded too, it was pretty late! – and I just stopped him and just, like, threw my arms around him. And he was very kind about that – he didn’t think that was creepy or anything…

My favourite song on the album is This is Why We Fight – it might be the fact that it recalls R.E.M.’s Lifes Rich Pageant in tone and carries that baggage with it, but it seems to have a covert political message built into it. Is that really off the mark?

Uh, no – there’s something there, for sure, I mean, obviously: ‘This is why we fight’. It would hopefully make sense to anyone who had felt like they’d had any kind of struggle and had questioned why they continue to do it if they’re pushed back again. I think of it as being maybe a summoning of courage a little bit, you know, when you feel like there’s too many obstacles. So yeah, that’s certainly there.

Is it difficult in the current climate to not ‘do’ politics, even in a satirical or jocular way as you perhaps have in the past on songs like 16 Military Wives or Valerie Plame?

Yeah. I guess I never thought of myself as a particularly political songwriter, but it tends to come out, I think, depending on my headspace. Over the course of the last ten years of the band I feel like I’ve become more politically aware, and I began to establish more of a sort of social and political identity for myself, and have become more secure in what my views are. And I think that probably inevitably comes out in the songs.

When I last spoke to you, we talked about the ‘community theatre’ elements of the band – a few bands who’ve made similarly ambitious albums over the last few years have taken the plunge, so I wanted to ask you: have you considered doing Decemberists: The Musical?

[Laughs] I don’t know that I would ever take a record and turn it into a musical, but I grew up doing community theatre, I did theatre at college, and I’m a fan of certain kinds of musical theatre. So I would definitely try and… I think I’ve even kind of been roped into at least working on some kind of theatrical project. But I don’t think it would be taking a record and turning it into… these records were not really intended to be musicals, they were intended to be records. But I’m excited to try and write in that vein, for sure!

Here’s my closing gambit, then. Are you familiar with ‘Multiverse’ Theory?

The Multiverse – that there’s many different universes, all being parallel?

Right, and the outcome of each hinges on one specific factor changing. So my premise is this: in the early 1980s, The Replacements were snapped up by a major label and told to clean up their act, eventually becoming a Monkees-style boy-band. R.E.M. and The Smiths saw this as a fast-track to success and promptly followed suit. So Let It Be, Reckoning and The Queen Is Dead were never made - those three albums simply never existed. In that parallel reality, what would life be like for Colin Meloy?

[Laughs] Hahahaha! God… I would probably be working at, like, a hippy bakery in Zula, Montana, and wondering if there was something out there that I’d somehow missed! But overall, feeling fairly content, I think…

The King is Dead is available now on Rough Trade.

INTERVIEW: The Levellers (November 2010)

2011-09-01T04:35:00.000-07:00

They say time flies when you’re having fun, but those who remember dressing in a tie-dyed T-shirt, growing out dreadlocks and chalking anarchy logos in their local underpass like it was just yesterday may still care to whisper it: this year marks the twentieth anniversary of the release of The Levellers’ 1991 folk-punk classic, Levelling the Land. The record that rocked festivals, Students’ Unions, campsites, squats and schoolyards – hell, seemingly every type of venue during the early 90s - is officially two decades old, and back with a vengeance. To commemorate the album’s twentieth birthday, the band have been out on the road performing Levelling the Land in its entirety for the first time, providing a long-overdue celebration of what is undoubtedly one of the key records to have emerged from Britain in the last quarter of a century.

Talking to the five original members from that period – Mark Chadwick, Jeremy Cunningham, Simon Friend, Charlie Heather and Jon Sevink (a sixth, Matt Savage, has since been added on keyboards) - you’re really able to get a distinct sense of the different personalities which make up the group. Mark is dry and sardonic, Jon bright-eyed and perceptive, Simon philosophical, and Jeremy and Charlie both warmly nostalgic when recalling the events of 1991 and its aftermath. They are, like many bands who’ve stayed together over such a long period, a bit like a dysfunctional family - however, while they often express conflicting opinions, one common point of agreement is that they all seem pleasantly baffled to still be talking about the album two decades on.

I caught up with the band last November in a small venue in Poole as part of their Weapon Called the Word tour to discuss the ongoing legacy of the album which continues to define them. Here, then, in the band’s own words, is the story of Levelling the Land…

It’s coming up to 20 years since Levelling the Land, and nearly quarter of a century in the band’s own history. Did you ever think twenty years ago that you’d still be talking about this record in two decades’ time (much less to someone who was nine years old when it was originally released…)?

MARK: [Laughs] Errr… no, to be honest! No. Maybe ten years. But twenty years since the making of that record… I definitely didn’t. I don’t think any of us did.

SIMON: Well, given the mental age of most of the people on this bus, nine’s about right! No, I mean, obviously nobody really thinks about - certainly, ‘real’ musicians don’t think about the success they’re going to have, because I just don’t think it occurs to people. It didn’t to me when I was younger – or maybe it’s just us. I think The Levellers are a bit of an enigma at that one, because we never did think, “Right, we want to be successful at this”; we just wanted to do it. There was no sort of hope to gain any kind of… it just happened, so no, I didn’t think I’d be talking to anybody about it - sort of as much, anyway. Because Levelling the Land is still, I think, our best-selling album – we went platinum with it in the mid-90s I think, and that to me was kind of a shock because I guess I did quite a lot of the writing for that. It was my first album with the band, and it was I suppose a culmination for me of a lot of years of busking and writing stuff and trying it out in folk clubs around Derby and Nottingham way. Things like the Beanfield and that, and… Is This Art?, Sell Out – they were all written I suppose about ’87-’88, and Levelling the Land was the best thing that ever happened to me because I got to do it with a band that were great, and it was in my first year of the band. So I mean, yeah, it’s a great feeling to think 20 years, it’s lasted that long – and I think the songs are just as relevant if not more so, in some aspects, with the sort of massive social upheaval that’s going on, not just in this country, but worldwide.

JON: When you’re making a record, we’d played the songs live and we knew people liked them, but all the reviews we had at the time were pretty damning, so the aftermath of that record really was that none of the press liked it. So you try not to let it get to you and you try not to take it personally, but there’s still a part of you that’s just gone: “Oh, well, we’ve made a record and we can carry on touring”, but there was no idea at the time that we’d made a really good record. But they were just live songs that people liked, and it’s only with hindsight that you can look back and say, yeah, they were all good songs. It’s very difficult with press to not take any notice of it – because it was really, really slammed.

JEREMY: We knew we’d made a good record - we knew we’d written the songs and that it was a good record, but we never looked that far ahead in those days. When we made Levelling the Land we’d just started being able to pay ourselves – I think we’d just signed off a couple of months before, and that was when we always said we kind of knew we were successful, when we could make our living out of doing music. We finally managed to pay ourselves what the dole was, which was £25 a week, and we thought: “Fucking brilliant, that’s it!”, you know? That was as far as we thought ahead… [Laughs]

MARK: We didn’t have a gameplan, not really. We knew that we would last longer than most bands because of the way we’d set things up – as in we didn’t rely on anybody too much, so we knew that we’d last a bit longer than most. But I don’t think we really intended to, or wanted to – whatever, really! It just turned out that way.

CHARLIE: I remember at the time really kind of, like, enjoying absorbing this experience. I remember thinking: don’t let those little things get you down. I just knew it was a good thing. There was a real vibe about us, a real sort of comradeship between us. To know that we were going to be that far away… Obviously at the time you couldn’t think, but the thought process at that time hasn’t changed a bit, in a way – in as much as, when you’re seventeen, or when you’re thirty, forty or, I’ve been told, when you get much older, the thought process as you wake up in the day is the same. So it feels like that with The Levellers – it’s become very timeless in our relationship. Don’t forget that there’s a lot of tension when you go onstage – we’re not the closest friends all the time, but through that we have become amazingly close. So no, I’d never have thought that we’d be that good mates for that long, because that’s the only way it’s gonna work: if we can actually really power it off. So I think we’ve all been through a lot together – I mean, growing up, Christ, it’s twenty years, that’s getting on the other side of growing up, quite frankly! – but it has been a great journey.

Looking at the album art, I noticed you were rocking that pony-tail look back then, Charlie… any regrets?!

CHARLIE: Yeah, it was a pony-tail, wasn’t it… short hair on the top, proper fucking crusty… it was a real travellers’ thing, wasn’t it?! But I don’t know, like, other bands that’ve been brilliant, like The Undertones, they never took on fashion as their main thing – we were being anti-fashion, and it really was just being part of hanging out with friends of ours who were either travellers or moved around, just kind of got that… I don’t know, ‘we can survive as we are’. The style of the kind of rave culture, but then dipping into the drug culture, you know – good and bad, obviously! So yeah, it’s been an interesting journey and that… but at that time, why I had a pony-tail? I don’t know why I had a pony-tail, but I had a short haircut. It was kind of an attitude thing, I think – like, nothing to do with fashion…

Well, it certainly was nothing to do with fashion…

CHARLIE: No, quite clearly! But being the drummer, it didn’t fucking matter, did it?!

Levelling the Land has a far greater cohesion and sense of purpose than your debut album – tell me how the bulk of the songs came about. Did they evolve from time on the road, were they songs that had been kicking around for a while and honed, or were they brought fresh to the table by individual members?

MARK: They came from a writing session we had down in Dorset as a band, and stuff we’d come across that we’d been working on on the road. We lost Alan Miles from the first album and then Simon joined the band, and he had a collection of songs that were just perfect, that married beautifully into the collection of songs that we had. And so we just had a great bunch of songs that we could record quite easily, quite quickly, because we all knew them - they were well-rehearsed and well-played, really.

JON: For Levelling the Land it was a meeting of songs that in the break-up of the line-up that made Weapon Called the Word, when the guitarist Alan Miles left, we had the bare bones of maybe three, four, five songs that we’d started writing with Alan - and then Alan left the band and we carried on as a four-piece for really only a few months I think before inviting Simon to join the band. Simon had half a dozen - he probably had ten songs from his own solo career that we took six of and applied the band to his solo material. So I would say it was half and half – we got him to join the band so we could take his songs. Apart from liking him as a person…!

JEREMY: I still really love the first album, I think the songs are great, but it’s kind of us finding our feet, really. And then after we did the first album we went out on tour with New Model Army, and just before that we did one writing session, and we kind of took all the things we’d learned from recording the first album and we wrote Liberty, which was the first song we wrote for Levelling the Land, and we played it in on the New Model Army tour and thought oh, yes, that was the kind of direction we were gonna take with the album. And Simon had Beanfield already written, and me and Mark wrote One Way pretty much around that time… ah, I can’t remember a lot of the songs now! But yeah, it evolved – I wrote a lot of the lyrics, Simon and Mark wrote a lot of the songs, and we all wrote and arranged everything. And the other thing that’s gotta be said is that Al Scott, the producer, he was like the other member of the band. He had that much input, and is still a good friend of ours, is still someone we see all the time and work with.

I noticed something I hadn’t picked up on previously while listening to the remaster the other day – all the bits in the background on Liberty Song, is that you?

JEREMY: That’s Mark, going: “Get orf moi laaaand!” on the megaphone… [laughs]. Yeah, I didn’t realise it was all the way through, either – it’s just him screaming all the way through…!

SIMON: I wrote a lot of songs in this period from around ’85 when I was still at school. But things like The Boatman – again, Wendy, who, strangely enough became our tour manager in the end and went on to do all other sorts of stuff, it was her 21^st birthday – or was it her 18^th? – her Mum said for her birthday, we’d have a narrow-boat for the week. There was eight of us on this narrow-boat and we just had a great week – you know, I took my mandolin and guitars and everything and we were just playing along and stuff… when I got home the next week I was sat in the back garden, I got this banjo and I just started playing it and the riff for The Boatman came out. So I started singing, and that was how The Boatman was written. But it was all about that week on the Thames on a narrow-boat, which was great fun. Beanfield obviously kind of speaks for itself really in its subject matter – I’d been spending quite a lot of time in ’85-’86 on the road really, living with mates on buses and going to lots of festivals, sort of busking my way round the country and Europe, hanging out at Stonehenge and Glastonbury and doing the Teddy Bear’s Picnic – very sort of strange, different things that we all did. And I actually went to Glastonbury in the end, we got headed off before the Beanfield happened – which was lucky for us, I suppose…

It must’ve been quite scary to think you’d avoided that by chance.

SIMON: Well, yeah, but I mean, we came across the police all the time, and that just happened to be the climax of a lot of abuse and hatred that had gone on for quite a long time. Beanfield just happened to highlight it massively in the press… in some ways it was the press’s fault for building it all up, like: “medieval brigands, axe-wielding maniacs”, all this sort of stuff. People who choose a different lifestyle, that’s up to them – they wouldn’t call Darwin a traveller, but you could in effect call somebody like Darwin an explorer who’s happened to live under canvas and would go anywhere to find something. Well that’s kind of in some ways what the New Age Travellers were seeking, anyway – what’s over the next horizon, if they’re truly New Age Travellers as opposed to New Age Settlers, which is a different matter entirely. But yeah, you know, I could understand the people who were pissed off with the whole thing, with the benefits and that sort of thing, but back then it wasn’t such a big thing – a lot of the travellers didn’t want to sign on, they couldn’t because they weren’t in the same place at one time. But it wasn’t about that, it was about making bags and making music, selling whatever and doing fruit-picking, and so the Beanfield just angered me massively socially, and hurt me personally through what happened to some friends of mine. And really the song is dedicated to them, and has always been talked about as that thing.

Was Simon kind of the missing piece of the puzzle when he joined?

MARK: Yeah, I think so, when he got involved with the band. I mean, he’d supported us and stuff with Alan, and we were like… mmm, Alan’s not comfortable in a band, he was never comfortable with that situation and I had an eye on Simon I think, because I really liked his songs – they were like Levellers songs, really. It was weird. So a combination of the two, really.

JEREMY: It was a seamless transition, really easy. Battle of the Beanfield - that’s how Simon got the job in our band! I heard him play that, and when our other guitarist Alan left, I was like: we’ve gotta have this guy in our band, just so we can play that fucking song!

SIMON: I had ten days to learn the set, to get to grips with kind of what they wanted – some of which being learn the harmonica, which I’d never really played; you know, Carry Me’s not the easiest song to start with as a harmonica song because it’s very much harmonica-led, but that sort of thing was a great challenge; I love doing that sort of stuff anyway. But yeah, it just seemed to happen – strangely enough, I’d been pestering Phil, the Levellers’ manager at the time, for gigs and support slots, stuff like that, and I’d done a couple of support slots with the band in Brighton – and strangely enough he sort of rang me a few months or so before I joined, which was in May of 1990, to sort of say: “Have you ever thought of putting a band together, Si?”! So, strangely enough, the night I actually got asked to join I’d been out to rehearse with a mate of mine who’s a bass player, and it went really well – we did things like Beanfield and stuff, and sadly for him the next night I said “Sorry mate, I’ve just joined the band!” Which is sad for him in some ways, I suppose, because it could’ve been a very different world – for me, anyway… But yeah, it was a great, it was a really easy transition – I sort of got on a bus to Brighton with all my instruments and Mark met me down in Brighton, and I lived at his place in the spare room for months and months, it seemed… But it was great, we all got on really well. We’d met before anyway, they’d stayed in Derby at our house - a friend of mine, Wendy, who ended up came and worked for us – they came and played and asked for somewhere to stay, and we said “Yeah, come and stay”, so I got to know them anyway. Loved the music, loved the politics, loved everything about it - it was right up my street for everything I was doing myself at the time. For me, it was like they were the other missing musicians in my life – it was so easy to walk into The Levellers for me, because it fulfilled everything I at the time had, which was mandolin, guitar and some songs. And obviously since then it’s been great – I’ve learned to play other instruments, it’s been great.

Even if Simon hadn’t joined the band, do you think that Battle of the Beanfield would’ve become a Dirty Davey-type song that you covered?

JEREMY: Yeah, probably! [Laughs] But we did want him - I mean, Simon had supported us a few times on his own, and we loved his songs – Levelling the Land is half his fucking songs that he brought anyway, so…

JON: He was certainly a really vital part of making that record, because he’d been a solo singer for a few years I think, following New Model Army around, busking outside their gigs. So he’d worked on his own songs and played them live over a period of those two or three years - he’d accumulated some really good songs of his own in terms of their structure was pretty sound, and certainly the lyrics were all finished. And so we grabbed half a dozen songs and added them to ours, and were able almost straight away to go and play them live as Levellers songs.

Apparently there was a tour you did with New Model Army where their fans would turn their backs on you while you were playing, is that true?!

JON: Well, they were a weird bunch…! It’s very difficult to tell, because they have this strange kind of… they gave themselves a name, this particularly hardcore following of New Model Army fans, who used to stand in a big circle, maybe ten in a circle so it would open up a space in the middle of the gig, and they’d do this strange punching routine… [Laughs] Oh, it’s so bizarre… and one by one they’d take little solo turns to do this strange, like, air-punching to the music! And so yeah, some of them would’ve had their backs to us. Half of them really liked us, and half of them didn’t get it at all – we weren’t heavy enough for some of them.

Did they think you’d kidnapped Simon from them as well? [At the point where he joined The Levellers, he had apparently also been asked to join New Model Army].

JON: No, because I think at that point Simon was just a follower, so I think the people that knew him were really pleased to see him doing well and playing in a band. And the way it goes with a following for any band, if they know other bands, they’re quite happy for those to support and go on tour with them – it’s a fairly organic way of travelling around with your mates. But they got upset because Simon was quoted in a music magazine saying something about not liking New Model Army, and it was something actually I had said in an interview, and New Model Army were very upset with him. Well, rightly so - they obviously thought: “Who’s this guy who’s been following us around and now he’s slagging us off?”, but it was me that said it and not him!

The final album has so much energy to it, and I think it probably captures the vibrancy of the band’s live performance better than any other studio record you’ve done – how was it recorded? Were the basic tracks cut live as a band, or was it built from the ground up?

MARK: It would depend on the tracks – I think most of them were recorded quite independently, because we didn’t really know much about recording then. We would have cut it live if we’d have known, but it was recorded in the 90s end of the 80s – really, that was the vibe that we were recording under, and so doing live recording wasn’t really the done thing. It was like, do the drums, put a layer on top of it – that’s kind of how we did it. But we did it by playing together – just not recording the whole sound together.

It sounds absolutely effortless - was it a difficult album to record?

MARK: It really wasn’t, no – we recorded quite quickly in Ridge Farm. Because we were doing this about 40 miles outside of Brighton, me and Jon cycled there. We were there for two weeks, we enjoyed the swimming pool, and I think we made a record. That’s what’s in my memory – we made a record while enjoying the luxury in this luxury, fantastic farmhouse, really! We brought all our mates up, you know, parties and everything, and in the background we made this record.

JON: I’m not sure it ‘accidentally’ got recorded - I mean, there was a purpose for being there and it’s not cheap to go into a recording studio, but we were all on the dole and really not making a great deal of money out of the band, so to turn up at this country manor house where we were getting all our food cooked for us and there was a swimming pool and a big recording studio, it was absolute heaven. And all our mates came up from Brighton and they were hanging round the studio as well – I had two young children at the time and they were spending time up there, so it was recorded with our friends and family all around. I remember more of hanging out with friends up there than I do about recording!

SIMON: We’d toured a lot and we’d played a lot of the songs so in live, that when we came to play it, it was almost like making a live record, even though we did do it individually. For me it was the first time I’d ever done anything like that aside from recording myself, not thinking about drums and stuff. So for me, no, I had a great time - swanning about at Ridge Farm was fantastic, it was a lovely 15^th Century mansion set in the Surrey countryside: swimming pool, tennis courts, everything. It was gorgeous. Beautiful staff; women who were just gorgeous, really flirty! So in that respect for me it was a dead easy album.

JEREMY: It was fucking easy. It was effortless. The first one was a fucking nightmare – really hard. You know, we had a really hard producer and we wanted to play it live, and we just weren’t good enough, really! And so we had a lot of grief trying to play that first album. But Levelling the Land, it was so easy, especially working with Al Scott – we’d get the band in, do all the live takes, and then if something sounds a bit wrong, we’d just fix it. No grief! And we did that for all the basics – the rhythm guitar, the bass, the drums, and when we came to do the tunes, the fiddle and mandolin and stuff, he really sat down with Jon and Simon and worked everything out with them so everything worked together. I don’t think we’ve done a record since then that we actually did that on – sat down and worked everything out: mandolin, fiddle, you’re gonna do this, you’re gonna do that… it’s a really good, really interesting process. I really think we should do it again, that kind of thing: that really in-depth working out the bit that holds your interest at the top end of the song once you’ve got all the noise down.

So did he help to craft the structure of the songs?

JEREMY: Yeah, yeah – he helped arrange them… he fucking played on most of them. You know, he played guitar on Beanfield – Simon couldn’t play it in time… [laughs]. We’d been playing it live like that, but we when we came to do it in the studio, Si just couldn’t fucking do it! So Al Scott did it. And he played piano on The Road… there’s bits of him all over it.

Is he a bit like your George Martin in that respect?

JEREMY: Basically, yeah. He has to be given credit for being the sixth member in creating what people think of as being The Levellers’ sound - which is Levelling the Land, pretty much.

What are your favourite memories of recording the album or from around that period? Are there any funny stories, or what’s the strangest thing that happened to you?

MARK: It was probably just to be ushered into this world that we really weren’t aware of – you know, we’d all been on the dole and whatnot, and really had no idea what rock and roll was going to be like. And so that came as a bit of a shock to us really, the luxury element that was involved in it all. It was like, “Oh, wow!” Like I say, me and Jon cycled there – we didn’t have cars back in those days; none of us really had anything. We didn’t have a pot to piss in – we only paid ourselves twenty-five quid a week at the time, which wasn’t a great deal of money. But from that point onwards it snowballed quite quickly, so we never really had time to think about it – up until, what, twenty years later, now!

SIMON: There were some great, funny moments – I still remember to this day having to stand to do some electric guitar, because I used to have this weird thing with electricity which has gone a bit now, but I’d just make anything buzz and break down. And we just couldn’t get the buzz off the electric guitar - I had to stand with one foot on a stool and another foot on a massive £300,000 desk, with the guitar sort of pointing north, and that was the only place in the room we could get the guitar buzz-free! It was fucking bizarre… A big reverb plate, I remember that, Ridge Farm had a great massive reverb plate, this fucking massive metal thing. It was great! Yeah, good memories actually, really good memories - then I think we went to Parkgate or somewhere like that to mix it, which was a bit more sort of rock-starry; I didn’t like it. The guy who owned it, they’d some big hit in the 70s, and it was all sort of, suede blue sneakers, white trousers: I’m not sure what these people are…! But yeah, it was good fun to make, and it was easy because most of the album, either I’d written it, or we went up to Charlie’s brother’s place and did quite a lot of stuff up there which was great, up in Wales. And that was great, like, just sort of sitting around in the spare room really, like a bunk room that they had, round a stove banging it out and working on things like Riverflow – stuff like that came out of that.

It seems like something you would’ve done for fun.

SIMON: Well, kind of – we knew that we weren’t the most organised people as such, but that was the whole point – it was chaos, it was anarchy. It was where most of us came out of in some ways, whether it was punk rock, or there’s a bit of Mod in Charlie in places, I’ve always been a bit of a rocker – we all came out of social atmospheres that were uneasy, and were looking for something. So we were all of that age where we weren’t quite old enough to hit that punk thing, but we hit that early 80s kind-of-punk thing… I guess for me, people like New Model Army, and The Clash were still knocking around, but The Clash weren’t so much in my face - like I say, I was more rock-oriented anyway, so I went into the folk-rock world probably earlier than these guys did because they’re more like punk rockers, and the folk aspect sort of ‘happened’.

I think there are two key misconceptions about The Levellers that have been perpetuated over the years. The first is that you’re an angry band – obviously there are elements of this in some of your work, but actually I think the first thing that hits anyone when they first hear this album is its sheer exuberance.

MARK: Yeah, I mean, the music was designed to uplift people. Some of the lyrics might be angry, but the music was really consciously designed to make sure that you enjoy listening to this experience – it’s not like heavy metal where we’re just drilling it into you about how crap life is, essentially a lot of the lyrics are quite uplifting. We’re saying, this is a pastoral existence we’ve all lived in in England - maintain it, look after it and look after each other, is essentially the belief we had.

JON: We weren’t ‘angry’ in the sense that we were shouting at people from the record – I’ve always thought it was life-affirming rather than that. And I think that’s really what we do best: it’s about saying to people that there are positive things that you can take, people are capable of great things if they join together and do them, and I think that’s really what we felt.

JEREMY: We always thought it was optimistic, and we were very conscious of coming from a… we come from a punk rock background, and we are really angry a lot of the time! And we realised that the lyrics we were writing were quite intense lyrics – when we started The Levellers, we gave ourselves a mission statement: we’d formed The Levellers just after the kind of mid-80s miners’ strike and Battle of the Beanfield, and we’d been going to lots of benefit gigs and listening to politicians speaking and stuff – having messages just rammed down your throat. And we just weren’t really… some of the messages we agreed with, but we just weren’t really keen on having them bashed down our faces all the time. And when we started The Levellers, we went, “Right: we’re gonna sing intense lyrics, because that’s what we wanna do - but we’re gonna put them in as optimistic kind of music as we can, so it doesn’t sound like we’re trying to ram it down people’s throats”. So people could dance to the tunes, basically. And in the end, that’s the best way of subverting anything, is through fun! [Laughs] You know? And the music press did completely miss that – they all thought we were out selling Socialist Worker in our spare time, when actually we were out doing loads of Es and going to raves… [laughs].

SIMON: I’ve always been anti-politics, I hate it. For me, life’s quite simple, really, but a lot of people wouldn’t agree with me. As I say, I’d quite happily live in the woods, and a lot of my friends and family know that! [Laughs] I spend quite a lot of my time up in woods with a chainsaw, just chilling. I love it! It’s a simple thing. And okay, I do have an iPhone, and I have to be realistic about life – particularly working in the band, but I’m fully intending to do a wood course next year, chainsaw and tree-cutting, so if the band ever finished I’ve got something else under my belt anyway. Sorry, I keep wandering away from the question here…! [Laughs]

If a record is just that – a record of a group of people at a certain time - looking back at the album now, do you think that it’s an accurate representation of you as a band and as people at that point?

SIMON: Yeah, I think so – and also for the times that had been. Because a lot of people think Stonehenge and the Beanfield killed off that whole thing, but it didn’t because I went several years running after that and people were angrier – people were fucked off and wanted some kind of justice, really. And I think they set themselves up, and they realised it – ‘them’ being the powers that be! – realised that, oops, we’ve dropped a bit of a clanger here, because we’ve martyred this. And for the people that cared, it was like, right: this is our Alamo-type thing and we are fucking gonna get you back somehow. And whether that’s twenty years of writing records telling them how wrong the system is and how I don’t like it, then so be it, if that’s my way of doing it. But yeah, I think it does – they were good times, there was a lot of free festivals, a lot of travelling going on; a lot of people were opening their eyes, it was a great sort of ‘alternative university’ to attend. It really was, you could get out there and do stuff, see things, meet other people and discuss politics – whether it’s Communism in Greece or whatever, with people who were happy to do it. As opposed to, what was the option? Get a job, go to the pub, come home, slap the wife, whatever… there was no great options for people who are intelligent, because I think most of our generation are quite intelligent people. So we give people the excuse to have some kind of social outlook, so I think it’s really important that bands like us continue, and hopefully younger bands pick up that kind of vibe around you and keep the flame going. That’s always what folk music’s been about, is about protest, really – there’s quite a lot of love and stuff in there, but it’s mainly about protest and historical battles, fights, murders, that sort of stuff. It’s always been a social comment. When folk music becomes folk music, I don’t know, because some people call old music ‘folk music’ but it might not have been that at the time; it might’ve been Radio 1, if they’d had one! But who knows…

MARK: As a band and as people, and as also a branch of society at that particular time – I think that was a really accurate representation of the travelling community and the sort of outsider world that existed then. It certainly doesn’t exist as much now, and if it does, I don’t know where it is.

On a Rapido feature from 1991, the announcer made quite an astute observation, which was that the rise of The Levellers also represents the rise of the festival circuit and alternative lifestyles. You obviously had massive success in uniting various different underground groups - did you feel like you were channelling a mutual feeling or expressing something that was going on in the culture at that time with this album?

SIMON: Not really – only as much as we wanted to, ’cos we always shied away from being labelled the heroes or the leaders of the movement. Because there were no ‘leaders’ – the whole point of it was there were no leaders as such, it was a movement, a bunch of people who agree the same. You don’t need a leader if you all believe you think the same. It’s like a religion, I suppose – maybe not a religion, that’s dangerous ground, but I call it common sense, you know! The average man, woman or child has that – if only they’d use it sometimes…

MARK: I think we probably were, but at the time we vociferously denied it – we were like, “No, we’re not the spokesmen for anything!” So we didn’t want to be spokesmen for it, but we definitely were a part of something at that time that was quite big, you know - that term ‘crusty’, and all those phrases that sound so odd now. To the media we represented it; to us, we were it; but I don’t think anyone else who believed we were were exactly the people we represented. I don’t think they really believed that we were.

JON: I remember we were dead-set against being labelled as any kind of heroes of that underground movement – at the same time that we were being written about in not any kind of encouraging terms, but it was bringing attention to that way of life, we were being slagged off by the rather hardcore element of the underground travelling movement, and we were very nervous about being seen to represent them. They didn’t like that, and we also didn’t want to be labelled as representing them. They represented themselves; we just happened to be a band that were in the newspapers more often than they were.

JEREMY: We were aware of it, but that whole time, the media was trying to throw us up as the spokespeople for the New Age Travellers and the Ravers. And the whole thing that we said was, “We can’t do that – people go on the road so that they don’t have spokesmen, so go and talk to them!” But we were aware of it – it really happened because at that point there were very few bands that would play the squat from the traveller – their gigs, basically. We didn’t make any money off it, but you got a good crowd – sometimes…! Sometimes they might steal everything, you know?! [Laughs] But you take your risks, you know, whatever! We had basically spent two years playing the University circuit, which doesn’t get reported as much, but for every free festival and travellers’ gig and squat we did, we did about three or four student venues to two pissed students or whatever – and every now and then we’d do a really good one… but those gigs used to be able to pay for us to go and do a squat gig where we wouldn’t earn anything, we’d probably lose money. So that’s kind of how we balanced it out. And then basically after two years of doing that, suddenly all the students that we’d been playing to and accumulating this fanbase left college, and all the travellers that we’d been playing to, the word had spread, and they started coming to see us even when we didn’t play the travellers’ sites and the free festivals. And then suddenly we were playing venues, and all these students and travellers were turning up and our audience was just massive. It wasn’t overnight – it was two years, or three years, even – but we could see it coming.

CHARLIE: At one time, it really did feel like we were the only band that was saying anything. And that was the thing, like: “Oh, don’t do politics; politics and music don’t mix”. But there are great artists who can touch on that in a sort of ambiguous way, whereas we’re a bit more crass about it and just go: “Actually, have you seen this shit?!” There was a point where I thought, what’s really kind of done it was the Criminal Justice Bill - not just the band, but the organisation we had around us were picking up on that: “Have you seen this? Have you seen what’s going on here?” Like: “Whoah…!” And so we really did get politically activated at times – especially when we had the office in London with the team we had. But I think we didn’t quite follow it up - that album [1993’s Levellers] didn’t match what we were actively doing, and for the critics that was a real good way of slandering it down. So we had a couple of really good songs that summed that up - but it’d be so overly-U2 or Bob Geldof, you know what I mean?

You were accused in the press of being middle-class boys ‘dressing up’…

MARK: Yeah, well, that was absolutely nonsense because none of us are! It’s really weird, because as a band we were mixed but mostly working-class, so that was very strange. But I don’t know, you wouldn’t really do that so much nowadays, accuse bands of ‘class’… it’s because of Jeremy, look at his name: Jeremy Cunningham! And he’s a working-class boy from fucking Crawley… d’you know what I mean, it doesn’t get any worse! I’m an army brat all the way through, really, so… none of us were. So it was quite odd. But we just ignored it, really – and we probably went to war with them a bit too much, with the media at the time, because a lot of them went to become quite powerful people in various branches of music media! But yeah, it was weird being tarred with a brush, but once you’re tarred with it, you’re tarred with it – there’s nothing you can do about it, so we decided not to get too stressed about it eventually…

The second key misconception is that The Levellers are a ‘political’ band. However, I don’t think Levelling the Land is a particularly political record – if anything, it’s anti-political in the sense that it seems to be trying to escape the world of politics. Would you agree with that?

JEREMY: Apolitical, yeah! I mean, we’ve always said we come from an anarchist background and we don’t hold by any political parties - full stop.

JON: We were anti-party politics in the way that anarchism in its many varied forms is against a party-political system. We were far more into people’s power within themselves. You know, when we were going to all the festivals back then, there were no police on site, people just got on with it and dealt with things amongst themselves, and that’s what we believed in. We still do, funnily enough.

MARK: We’re trying to escape the world of ideologues – you know, anyone that is an ideologue is a dangerous person who is there to interfere in your life to the death of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people. And that sort of conviction and belief, it’s like: just leave us alone. We are the people, and we just want to go about our business. We want our food and our shelter, our education, and that’s it.

Was it frustrating then to be accused of sloganeering?

MARK: Oh, God, yeah - we were accused of being left-wing, sometimes virtually right-wing – but we’re not political. Everyone’s like: “But you’re a political band”… well no, we’re not! We’re very wary of politics and what they can do to people, but does that make us an angry political band, you know? That’s Billy Bragg - that’s not us.

Obviously around the time of the Criminal Justice Bill though you did become quite prominent figureheads - did you grow into that role?

MARK: Yeah, we grew into that role and took that on. Basically, I really wanted to take that on, because I realised that we had a position of power and we could be a unified force for various disparate groups, and really went for it – spent a good year really championing that cause.

JON: We could’ve – and you know, looking back, maybe we should’ve done [more], I’m not really sure. Maybe we should’ve made more efforts to sort of sit everybody down and say “Right, how are we going to do this? We should do this together”. But we are musicians, and so we reflect the times we live in, and we try and tell stories and carry whatever messages we feel need to be carried, rather than to be spokespeople necessarily.

CHARLIE: I mean, we were involved in that – we were right up for it, and loved it. I’m just thinking, looking at it retrospectively, had there been anything that were better, it’d be a song that summed that up. What we’re doing now – if we could place it there.

Do you think, then, to coin a phrase from Easy Rider, that you blew it?

CHARLIE: Well, it felt like kind of a…I think all of us felt, really: oh, we were touring America a lot, trying to do a deal with that and it wasn’t working – we made the right decision to go: “forget it”. There isn’t enough time for us to physically do that. I mean, people like U2 would go out for months and months, and years and years, and then you’ve got it, great, but we just couldn’t do it that way round. But I’m talking, after the 90s here.

Do you think The Levellers are a quintessentially English band?

CHARLIE: I think we’re the most English band that’ve been around for years, really. You know, years ago we weren’t sure what we could do, we had that sort of Celtic folk thing, but then it’s like: “Oh, we’ve got you a gig”. “Alright, when is it?” “St. Patrick’s Night. I’ve put you down as an Irish band”. “Oh, for fuck’s sake…”! So we did the gig and it’s like: “So which of you’s from Oirland, den?” Errr… his Mum’s from Ireland…!

The underlying theme of a lot of the band’s early lyrics seem to concentrate on the tension between wanting to be an active and beneficial part of society, but being out on the sidelines and holding different ideals from the majority. As young men in their early twenties, was part of your rebellion against the roles that society was trying to thrust on you?

MARK: Yeah, yeah, absolutely – I was expected to join the army, for example, that was the most natural thing to do, but I failed on the day due to my psychological… [laughs] due to the way I think about the world! I failed all those tests – the army, the police force, the Air-Force, the Navy…. And then it was like: then what? What next for me, you know? I wasn’t interested in working in the wider world, becoming an accountant or a lawyer, or a historian… but yeah, there were pressures to work at that time. And now there are pressures to work again, it’s weird.

The key line seems to me to be “All my friends and all their jobs, and all the bloody waste” [from One Way] – were you struggling at that time to cope with those pressures that were being put on you?

MARK: Well yeah, because you could see people doing things – they’d been forced or gerrymandered into a situation they’re not happy with, and they’re gonna be in that situation for the rest of their life until they break. And it’s just by guile and luck that all of us managed to maintain a lifestyle and a way of being outside of that.

JEREMY: It was more to do with the fact that we were living in squats and stuff like that. I lived in a bus on the road, and we didn’t have really any money, but we felt really connected to the country, to the environment. We felt really connected to that, but there’s no way of really expressing it because we weren’t kind of nationalistic – we hated all that nationalist, racist shit. But we loved the old, cheesy concept of sort of, like, ‘England’, if you will. And so most of those early lyrics are trying to come to terms with that – we love our country, but we don’t love it in a kind of nationalistic way; there’s no kind of ‘English’ way of saying it in one word. Germans have a word for it, but we don’t! So a lot of those lyrics were written with that in mind.

On the album artwork, you seem to really tap into this idea of the oppression of the city versus the escape of the country – is that what you were trying to do with that piece?

JEREMY: Kind of, yeah – I dunno, because I grew up in Crawley, which is kind of a ‘new’ town… and when we started The Levellers in Brighton, Brighton was going through a kind of regeneration. So the places we were living in were sort of like the tower blocks and the grey concrete bits, but then five minutes up the road you have, like, Devil’s Dyke, which is an amazing… like, the edge of the town falls off into this huge great big dyke, as it’s the South Downs, basically, if you go hang-gliding and stuff. Yeah, so it’s just trying to kind of express that, and express the lyrics in a visual kind of way. And kind of… accessible as well – we wanted it to be kind of angry but accessible. And also, the back cover was almost the most important thing with that record, ’cos we wanted to have, like, symbols, you know? On the back cover it’s got the sun and it’s got crossed spanners – and that was basically that we wanted: a skull and crossbones, like, pirate thing… but we thought, “Ah, skull and crossbones, it’s a bit cheesy, a bit fucking negative”, you know… so we thought, oh, we’ll have the sun, this smiling sun face, but a bit kind of evil – not evil-looking, but you don’t quite know what’s going on in his head. The image of the sun is instantly quite positive - and then we had the spanners because we always had this thing about being a spanner in the works, this anarchist idea, and also because a lot of us were living on the road and we used to have to fix things with spanners, and break into things with spanners… so that was our skull and crossbones, basically!

When I talked to Mark about his solo record, he made reference to “the characters he fell in with” – did you get a sense of the stars aligning around this time? Did you know you were on to something special with this album?

MARK: Yeah. Yeah, I think all of us noticed that at that point – so much so that the making of the next one was incredibly daunting, because when you’ve made something that is that special, it has been noted. But it was just weird, because everybody kind of bought it – it was just one of those records that everyone ‘bought’. It wasn’t like Screamadelica or something like that, where everybody bought it because it was so visible – everybody bought it but no-one really talked about it that much. But everyone had a copy of it.

JEREMY: It’s difficult to say with all this hindsight, you know… We definitely knew we were making a really good record, and we knew there was a big buzz going on around us… I think obviously the stars did align for that record, but I don’t think we were really that aware of it. I mean, I’ve been asked this quite a few times – not about that record, but about that time in general – and what I thought it was like, looking back on it, it was like you’re in a hurricane that’s going on around you and you’re at the calm centre-point of it, ’cos all you’re thinking is: “Right, we’ve got these gigs to do here, we’ve got these interviews to do here”… and all this mad shit is going on all around you, but by the time the mad shit is happening you’ve usually moved on, so your record is, like, #1 and on Top of the Pops and all that, but you’re in France doing a gig and then you’ve moved on. So I always felt a bit removed and detached from it all.

JON: It was special from the start. The people who formed the band in the first place, the relationship between those people was special then and it is special now. And that’s never changed. And then as you rise up as a band and you play to more and more people and become more popular, you do meet some very interesting people along the way. They just naturally gravitate towards people like us! But you have a strength with a band – and it’s great, because if you’re on your own in a large group of fairly scary people, you’re not quite sure how they’re gonna behave towards you. If you’re in a band and you’re surrounded by these scary people, they all love you, they think you’re great. So you’re instantly accepted by the majority of these big scary people, so it’s great!

In an age before Myspace and the internet, would you say that The Levellers were the first major musical social networking phenomenon?

JEREMY: Quite possibly – I don’t know about that, but we certainly encouraged people to do that. And certainly when the internet became available we were one of the first bands to use it – like, Sony came to us to ask how to do a database for the Manics… we’d been doing it for about two years, and we said “Well, free communication has got to be good, innit”… There you go! [Laughs]

MARK: It was done purely by the people. It was done completely by the people. Our record company weren’t particularly great at that sort of thing, they did the usual marketing – it was done by word of mouth by the people that followed the band, and they spread it real quick.

A lot of bands always say the most exciting time is just before they break through – would you say this was true of that period?

JON: Absolutely. Absolutely brilliant – we had two or three years that were insane. Things happening, getting news in constantly: “Oh, you’ve been asked to go to America, you’ve been asked to go to Japan. You’ve been asked to play this festival, you’re headlining this festival. You’re signed by the record company, you’re going into the studio”. Life is just exciting when it’s like that. It really is, it’s just fantastic. And then you know when you kind of peak and things start to go downhill a little bit. But while you’re going up, it’s absolutely wonderful – best years of my life.

MARK: I think it had happened before then, that initial buzz or rush of excitement – I remember once just getting in the van to get on the road, we stopped at Charlie’s Mum’s house, and I just got an incredible rush of adrenaline because I knew somehow that we’d done it. You know, an innate knowledge that we’d done it and it was gonna be great.

Was that enough for you at that point – was it like you’d already achieved what you wanted to?

MARK: Yeah, it was kind of like – we were young then, I was a twenty-three year-old bloke who was like, “This is fantastic”. I’ve achieved quite quickly what I wanted to achieve, which was a) get a band together who are quite serious in mind and intent, and b) are chiming with the population.

When it got bigger and bigger, did you just find that quite funny then, quite surreal?

MARK: It seemed really, really natural. The whole question of it seemed really, really natural.

From everything I’ve seen, heard and read about that period, it seems like it was a non-stop party as far as the band was concerned. Is that true?

MARK: [Laughs] Yeah, pretty much. You know, we’ve always had a serious way of going about our business, but we have partied very hard. In fact, people… yeah, we’ve partied really hard!

JON: Absolutely, yeah. We were doing – we weren’t necessarily going to lots of festivals, but we were playing lots of festivals, we were going out on the road. We were doing a lot of drugs, but good drugs in the way we saw it - it’s a lot of marijuana, LSD and mushrooms, there was no cocaine. We didn’t do cocaine at all back then, and we saw cocaine as a bad drug - it didn’t bring people together in any way; it was divisive. And so that all went together with being in a band. I remember it acutely because I was a father of two fairly young children, so I had my home-life that had to be kept together for the kids while they were going to school, and so with the band, I remember just thinking: “This is crazy…” But it was this whole, just massive parties that never seemed to end – and touring was about just not really getting very much sleep, and just staying up, doing drugs, going to parties, and that was it. And occasionally playing some music.

CHARLIE: It was and it wasn’t in a lot of ways, for me – I mean, some of it, everything just kind of changed… we met more people and it just became a lot more superficial for me. But doing the gigs, I just knew: this is it. I said to myself earlier, enjoy every moment, because the band was just starting something. Just enjoy every moment, despite the troubles and the shit, just go through the mill, literally, in a big way.

JEREMY: It’s just one of those things – you can’t replicate it, because you have to go into it with a kind of innocence, so it can’t really happen again, I don’t think. Because if you’re aware of what’s happening then you might try and exploit it, or you might be more cynical about it or something, I dunno. I just think that sort of thing only happens once in your lifetime, let alone in a band’s career – it doesn’t happen to most bands.

At Glastonbury 1992, it’s estimated that you played to the biggest stage-front crowd the festival had ever seen – would you say that was a career high-point?

MARK: Well, people say it is our career high-point – I’m often asked, because that’s the answer they want, and that isn’t actually the answer I really want to give. It depends who I’m talking to though, so I say that that’s the answer. But generally speaking, no – our career high-point for me was when we put our own festival on. That’s a career high-point, that’s a real achievement. That’s something special, something really unique, it’s not just doing a gig. But for example, we did that gig – 80,000 people or whatever it was – and two days later we were in San Francisco playing to two people. [Laughs] D’you know what I mean?! We always had our feet on the ground.

JEREMY: That was kind of like the accumulation of all of that that we’ve just been talking about – I meant with the travellers and the student thing coming together, and with the rave thing all kicking off as well. ’Cos we were doing a lot of raves at that point as well – free parties and stuff, and a lot of people didn’t realise that; we were doing all that stuff, you know. And I think we were one of the first rock bands to use rave lighting at our gigs as well – we used to just love all those big old strobe flowers, we had a lighting guy turn them on for, like… the whole gig! [Laughs]

JON: That was unreal. Absolutely unreal. We always used to go to Glastonbury early – you’d go on the Tuesday or Wednesday and hang out for a few days before the festival started, and I remember thinking: “Oh, there’s a few Levellers shirts here, and there’s… there’s a few more Levellers shirts here...” And then thinking, “Christ, did we actually sell that many shirts?!” There were loads of bootleg shirts, and it seemed like every other person was wearing a Levellers t-shirt or sweatshirt – and I remember thinking, this is just crazy, this is insane, there’s something going on here that we have no idea of the magnitude of it. And sure enough, when the played, the crowd was… I’ve never seen anything like it. People as far as the eye could see, all loving it, all dancing, and great core groups of people within that, probably a hundred strong, bouncing up and down and moving their way around the crowd. I haven’t seen anything like it to this day, really.

Listening back to the recording of that gig, what’s funny is that you seem almost baffled that people who otherwise would’ve been at the festival just getting mashed were up onstage playing. Is that how you felt?

MARK: Yeah, absolutely. I’d been going there since I was a young teenager, so to suddenly find myself up on that stage – which I’d never paid any attention to when I was at the festival, I never saw any of the bands… I think I saw Ian Dury once and that was it, because I was too busy enjoying myself at the back! So, to be on that stage was extremely weird. Yes, I d say extremely weird…

I’ve got an academic essay title for you here: “The overriding theme of Levelling the Land is the longing for personal, spiritual and political freedom. Discuss.”

JEREMY: Yeah. That’s pretty much it! [Laughs]

MARK: [Laughs] Absolutely! No, that is it. That’s exactly what that album’s all about – which, as a subject matter, is a fine and broad one. I’d say it probably is still The Levellers’ subject matter, but probably best addressed exclusively on one album at that point.

SIMON: I suppose in our each individual way that’s what we were looking for - we always were and we always will be. I don’t think I’d be able to continue doing what it is I’m doing if I’d found what I was looking for. Having said that, I kind of know what I want in life, but I still haven’t managed to achieve it yet – it’s very simple, it’s just that life hasn’t been that easy.

Is it to be a boatman…?!

SIMON: Yeah, actually, to be honest! Yeah, I’ve been looking at boats again – but finance and money and things is hard, and a boat is a difficult thing to maintain, to keep up. So I’m kind of thinking further afield now as well – I do all the woods stuff, I do a lot of chopping of logs. I don’t have central heating, I have an open fire – it’s the most green way of living and all that, so ideally I’d have a little house in the woods somewhere next to an inlet, with a boat moored up so that I can get out and go. That would be my nirvana, really.

It’s strange to hear you say how tough it’s been – when I was growing up, you were pretty much the biggest band in the country, and I always assumed your lives would be quite glamorous…

SIMON: No, well, we were never glamorous! [Laughs] And we never made that much money, to be honest – I think our principles, certainly in the early years, we turned a lot of corporate stuff down. Which cost us a lot of money in the long-run – I think if we look back now, we were bit naïve really in that respect: we could’ve used that money as easily as abused it, had we taken it. And that’s what people think, the glamour of the rock star world, the glamour of the rock star life – none of us have ever been that type of person anyway, so I think we’d have been useless at it, to be honest! [Laughs] We’d probably be dead very quickly if we’d made the sorts of money people expect you to make. But ultimately, this extravagant lifestyle is only for people like Robbie Williams who’ve sold millions of records – millions worldwide, you know. Gold in England doesn’t actually mean that you’re a millionaire by any stretch of the imagination - unless you’ve written that whole album yourself and take all the rights for it, maybe. But when you’re in a band like us, we share everything, so it’s all split different ways – we’ve built a studio up, we’ve done lots of things with our money that we like to think helps us, but also helps other people too, because that’s always been part and parcel of it.

JON: It is very personal. Particularly with the songwriters we’ve got as well, with Mark and with Simon’s lyrics, it’s very, very personal. Not so much now, but back then it was all written from a real passion and from the heart. And some, you could occasionally accuse it of being naïve, but really there’s no substitute for that. Really deeply passionate, and deeply caring.

Do you still have that, do you think, or has it been eroded over the years?

JON: I’m sure it’s been eroded over the years. I’d like to say it hasn’t, but I’m sure it has. I guess when you’re struggling in life – you don’t have many things, you don’t have very much money, you’re in a band and you’ve got things to say about the world and the way you feel about it; you’re driven, then, far more. And as you get older and perhaps… well, you just get old. It’s rubbish isn’t it, growing old? It really is! You lose that vitality, and you lose that hunger to… to change people’s opinions sometimes, maybe.

CHARLIE: It did. In retrospect from here, yes, between when we started and here, now. It definitely dipped in different ways. You know, it did go to people’s head; it got to mine as well, and we just kind of partied too much instead of what we were meant to be doing. And with our record company’s involvement and with our manager at the time, it really pushed it that way. It’s very easy to be pushed towards the hotel room, isolated, ruled by divide – it’s very easy to do that. They thought it was a really good idea to go to America on tour – you know, I can see why bands have fucked up and been destroyed, but it’s a good strength between us that there is no leader. It’s very much a co-operative feel, or I’d like to think that.

Do you think that everything went downhill from that point? Soon after, festivals got more corporate, the Criminal Justice Bill was introduced, and the next Levellers album was a fairly dark affair. Did this period represent the last hurrah?

SIMON: It depends what party you’re talking about, to be honest, because I think a lot of people… I don’t know if ‘generation’ is the right word, because it was spread over all sorts of generations, but that sort of period – the Stonehenge 80s period – they’re still there, a lot of them, and they’re still doing it, albeit in Spain or wherever, Eastern Europe…and so the more successful people who came out of that whole thing are still doing it. But yeah, I started to feel depressed, I guess, in the mid-90s because I didn’t like the music scene, I didn’t like techno and trance, and I didn’t like ecstasy, and I didn’t like that whole thing that was going on. And I will say a couple of the other guys in the band did get into that, and I think that reflected somewhat in some of the music that we wrote! I think they’d admit it, but I wasn’t particularly keen on it. So I started to clam up a little. But there’s a lot of survivors crawling back out of the woodwork at the moment actually, which I’m pleased about – more and more people are getting back in touch and they’ve sorted themselves out and are doing good things, so I’m quietly confident that this present social upheaval, there are people from the old… the first war! [laughs]… who can help, in some ways. Because I think it’s coming – I think there’s gonna be a lot of upset and disruption and chaos in the next few years. I don’t know why, but I do. Looking at France, you know, what was happening last month and stuff – the whole world’s getting a bit edgy about stuff, and it’s only because we’re expecting too much. We’re taking far too much for granted, whether it’s environmentally or socially, and there’s massive amounts of damage being done by people thinking the wrong way and society acting in inappropriate ways. History for me is really fascinating, and you have to learn from history, not repeat it.

JON: I think that the way the country was going, more and more people were moving out of cities into different types of accommodation – travelling buses, travelling trucks, and it seemed to be a fresh way of looking at life and people. And it gathered momentum, definitely, just around that time. And then even after the Battle of the Beanfield when the convoy was smashed up – it was kind of coupled with the rave scene in the way free parties were starting to be organised, and that whole movement gathered momentum and became something that couldn’t be ignored by mainstream political parties - certainly the police force weren’t happy with it.

JEREMY: It’s difficult for us, you know – we’re all, like, sensitive artistic types, and I found it really hard. We’d made this great record and we did loads of touring, and then for myself personally, I came back and was living in Bristol at the time, on a travellers’ site in Bristol. And it was just getting too mental, and the travellers’ scene was getting so big and we were getting so much attention from the police at the time… and it’s partly The Levellers’ fault for making it so big, you know? I always liked my anonymity, and suddenly everybody knew who I was, or thought they knew who I was or whatever… and suddenly the lifestyle I’d chosen, to be free, I was also less free living that lifestyle than I would’ve been in a flat ’cos of all the Draconian law. And I kind of started just using heroin to just blank everything out – I had really low self-esteem, you know, for years after that with the kind of collapse of… And it happened to the whole band, you know – we all chose a different drug, basically! We all kind of imploded after that Levelling the Land tour, but it lasted two or three years. But like you say, the album after that, the third album – that was kind of like the last hurrah, that was when it was absolutely massive. But it was also very dark for us by that point, for all of us. We were disappearing off the map doing different things, you know… it was a strange, intense time! [Laughs]

Let’s talk about the album ‘now’. Although I think you’ve made more accomplished or perhaps more artistically interesting albums over the years, Levelling the Land remains the band’s defining album in a sense – would you agree with that?

JON: Absolutely, yeah. There are no filler tracks on it, there’s no doubt about that. I’m occasionally a little too damning about some of our other records – but you know, when you’re making a record, you don’t always come up with brilliant songs, and you’ve gotta fill it with something. But yeah, there’s not a duff track on that.

SIMON: Definitely. Because it was very much... I mean, physically it sold more than anything else, people remember the songs a lot more – albeit Beautiful Day is the one that most taxi drivers remember, when asked: “Sing us a song, then!”, you go: “Oh, you might remember, ‘What a beautiful day, hey, hey’…”, and they’re like: “Oh yeah, that one, yeah!”, as opposed to One Way or some of the lesser-known tracks on that album, because that album was very much fan-based, and at the time people bought it because they associated it very much with what was going on. And then it’s continued to sell, which surprised me – which is great. For me, it’s that whole… we’d get couples meeting at our gigs and then twenty years later they’re coming with their kid who’s, like, fifteen! And it’s like: “Fuckin’ hell - Jesus…!” [laughs]

JEREMY: It’s not actually my favourite one, but it is the defining one, yeah. I think it’s probably the best one, but it’s not my favourite. My favourite’s still the first one – I just like the charm of it, you know; there’s something about it.

MARK: It’s the badge album. It’s the one. You can’t deny it, you know, it’s pointless to do so.

Do you think it’s the band’s best work?

JON: [Long pause] Um… lyrically, I would say, yeah. Not necessarily musically – I think we’ve explored music a little more since then. But if I guess you’re gonna say on a balance between that and the other albums, yeah. Lyrically it’s great.

JEREMY: I just think it’s a load of great songs by a band you can tell really means it. It’s honest. I think it’s what we did - it was exactly what we meant to do, which is put intelligent and sometimes weighty lyrics with optimistic, forward-looking tunes that you could just dance to. And you could take the politics or leave it – you could just dance to it, you know; we’d rather you listened to it and took it, but you don’t have to! So yeah, I think it’s definitely in those terms our most artistically successful venture, as artists.

MARK: I don’t, actually, no! Like you say, I think it sums up a moment. It’s the record that allowed the band to be the band - d’you know what I mean? When the music you’re making happens to strike a note with the country, with the listening people… or just the people, you know - some people weren’t even listening to music then, that’s probably the only record they ever listened to, a lot of people. That’s probably the only record they ever bought! And if you get that moment it’s fantastic, and that’s what it was – it was a collision between The Levellers’ music and the mood of the world or the country at that particular time.

SIMON: I don’t know. I’ve always been very cautious of questions like ‘best’, or ‘favourite’, because I think it’s very difficult to answer. It’d be like asking a landscape artist which landscape he preferred that he’d painted, when really he’s trying to paint the landscape and that’s what he loves.

So you see it more as part of your overall career trajectory?

SIMON: Well, yeah – we were there then, that’s what we wrote about and that’s what we did. Whether it’s our best work or not, I don’t know – in some ways I suppose naturally we must be slightly more accomplished musicians now; in some ways we’re a bit more tight on the notes and I can play the banjo now, which I couldn’t really on that one. Well, a bit – actually, I take that one back: I can’t really play the banjo, I dabble in it! But I like to think we’ve got better, if you know what I mean, so to say it was our best work, which for me was my first album, then the last twenty years has been a waste of fucking time! [Laughs]

Has it perhaps cast a bit of a shadow over rest of band’s career? Has it been a difficult album to ‘move beyond’, in a way?

JON: Not at all, no. People still love hearing the songs live, so we mix them up amongst all our other stuff – I don’t think people genuinely expect you to have every album as good as that one, you know… Some people, it’s not their favourite album – some people like the darker stuff, some people like the crazier stuff…

JEREMY: We don’t really think about it like that. I mean, if you do think – and we do when we write albums – that’s always our benchmark, trying to write a cohesive album, something that’s got great songs on it but it’s also a brilliant ensemble piece. And, you know, like I said, I do think it’s still our best record – not my favourite, but I do think it’s the best one. And so it doesn’t really cast a shadow, but it is like a benchmark for us. I’m an artist, you know, and I think our best one’s always the next one – when I stop thinking that, I’ll be in trouble! But it’s far enough away now to see it for what it is, and acknowledge it for what it is – that it is a great record, and fuck it, if we don’t make a record ever as good as that one again then fuck it, at least we did that one! [Laughs]

MARK: I think every band probably has one or two of those in their closet – you might try and break out of it, but you should be grateful if you’ve got even one. So it’s not really cast a shadow – it’s enabled us to do the rest of the stuff that we’ve done without suffering too greatly. Sometimes we’ve done stuff that’s been really left of field of that and people have gone “Is that the same band?” – well it is the same band, we’re just trying a different tack for our own artistic needs, really.

SIMON: It was the album that kind of labelled us, and I suppose that’s defined us to a certain extent, yes. I can only agree with that. I guess in some ways yes, we’ve struggled to kind of get anything like it – I think Letters From the Underground started to get there, definitely, and I’m hoping that the next sort of year or so will throw up some really good stuff. I’m extremely angry at the moment – there’s lots of reasons for it, but then out of hardship usually comes good stuff. As I get older, and as we as a band get older, we begin to realise more how effective we can be, and how ineffective we can be in certain ways, so we’re understanding our place a bit more, I think. I like to think that when the sting comes, it’s gonna hurt – we’re gonna fucking give it some, because I’m pissed off about things at the moment.

What do you think it is about that album that continues to resonate with people and gain you new fans today?

MARK: Well, hopefully because I think it’s quite timeless – the situations we were talking about in those songs haven’t changed, and won’t change in the foreseeable future. So I think if you’re a certain age, you want things to be better, and you aspire for others and you aspire for yourself, then it’s going to work for you. Those songs are timeless in that respect.

JON: I’m absolutely convinced it’s the lyrics. We’re really bad as a band when we try and be like other bands – you know, if we try and write a song that’s a bit like Neil Young, or a bit like any other band. We’re only really good at doing what we do, and that is largely about the lyrical content, I think. Because that’s what we do that other bands don’t do – [assuming pompous voice] - is we ‘talk about stuff that’s important’. And worth talking about!

SIMON: I think we’re like a good old cheese that people can rely on, you know? [Laughs] When they buy it, they know it’s going to be tasty. I used to think of it as: you’d come down to see The Levellers, you’d take your jacket off, put all your worries and woes and problems and shit in the pockets of your jacket, and leave that in the cloakroom. People would come in, fucking kick up the dust and have a right old fucking boogie, and when they came out and put their jacket back on, if all that shit had been nicked out of their jacket, then cool. If they went home with a slightly lighter jacket pocket, brilliant. That used to make me feel happy. If they want to take those problems home with them, that’s up to them – some of those problems will still be there, but they might have a better way of looking at it or feel a bit happier about things, I don’t know.

Obviously 20 years down the line we’ve found ourselves in not entirely dissimilar social circumstances than when the album was released: Conservatives back in power, massive public upheaval, plenty of dissent looming on the horizon…

JON: Absolutely. The final nails in the coffin of the country, is what they’re doing… and it’s so divisive. And I’m determined that the next record we’re gonna put out is gonna be… it’s not gonna be angry, but it’s really gonna nail some of these people and what they’re trying to do.

The last record had a real fire under it – do you think that’s been rejuvenated in the past few years?

JON: Yeah, absolutely. We sat down and we said, “Look: what do we do that people like?” Let’s be blunt about this – people like to hear our lyrics, because they like to think that somebody else cares as much as they do. And then they want to hear some tunes that they can dance to as well, not standing round feeling miserable about it. So, okay: some good lyrics and some danceable tunes. That’s all we need. So hopefully the next one will carry that torch.

I can’t bear the political situation at the moment…

JON: It’s hideous. It’s absolutely hideous. They’re so evil...!

I heard Ian Duncan-Smith say the other day that for the long-term unemployed, they’re going to make them work 30 hours a week of mandatory labour just to get their £65 a week in benefits. That’s less than minimum wage!

JON: Yep, and it’s illegal. And a lot of the things that they’ve done are actually illegal, because they haven’t listened to the studies that have been done on how their budget cuts affect certain sections of society – particularly women, actually. Two-thirds of the people affected by their budget cuts are women being absolutely screwed into the ground – and again, it’s illegal. We’re not allowed to do that shit anymore…

As ‘social commentators’ of a sort, is that quite depressing for you, or does it actually reawaken that initial fire?

JEREMY: It does both, really. I think it is kind of depressing – it does light a fire under me, but I’m a kind of angry man, you know… it doesn’t take much to do that! So that does motivate me. But it makes me even more angry that people fucking allowed it to happen – and so personally I hope things do get really bad, just so something fucking happens! [Laughs] You know, I go for my holidays to this tiny little island in Scotland, and I met this old guy – like this old anarchist guy who was like: “It’s your duty to vote Tory in this election, to make everything so fucked up!” I couldn’t actually bring myself to do it…

SIMON: Strangely enough, I thought it would depress me – I thought I’d be really low about all this, and there’s a lot of things going on that I guess a lot of people probably haven’t sussed yet worldwide, but I think it’s had the opposite effect on me actually: I think it’s got me quite angry again. My daughter is nine next year, and I love her dearly – she’s a real little character, my daughter. And through no real pushing of her Mum or I she’s turned out to be this very independent, but beautiful, lovely person. And I fear for her on the one hand, but on the other hand I know she’s the type of person who’ll be there, like myself, trying to sort it out. Not that I’m putting myself in a position to say I’m helping the world, although I like to think that music does - and I like to think that, certainly with record sales, people like the music, they like the sentiment, so I guess it’s not wrong to feel a little bit kind of chuffed, a little bit like: “Yeah, you, know – people agree with what I’m saying”, which is good. It doesn’t mean that I said it first, or it was my idea or anything, ‘I’m about to lead a social revolution’ – but it’s nice to think you can still make people think. That’s really, I think, all I ever wanted to do is make people think, and also occasionally maybe be aware of situations they might not usually be aware of, or they turn a blind eye to. It’s a strange way to try and get things over, I’ve thought about it often - particularly with playing a mandolin or something, it’s kind of hard to express that feeling of sitting there over the other side of the world watching an absolute human disaster happen, then trying to get that across with something as simply as a mandolin, a fiddle and a banjo. But actually you can, and if, like I say, you can make people think about it a bit more, or be aware of it, or ask you a question about it - brilliant. Why not, you know? It’s better than asking what suit’s he wearing, who he’s going out with, what car he’s driving, like footballers or big rock stars – for me, I’d rather people ask me what I believe in, as opposed to who’s gonna win the World Cup, you know?! To me that’s irrelevant, and the whole sort of glam side of gossip magazines and Yes and all this sort of thing… piss off, you know?! Get real. Go and fucking sort something out and feel good about yourself!

MARK: I don’t know – at the end of the day, it’s quite depressing. [Laughs] It really is! But you know, we’ve struggled on… we got slagged off a lot at the time by certain areas of the world, of the media or whatever, and here we are, twenty years later – we’re still right. [Laughs] D’you what I mean?! We’re still right, that record’s still valid.

Do you feel vindicated?

MARK: That would be wrong. Me personally, no – others in the band might feel vindicated, I don’t know.

JON: Absolutely. Of course. We were right all along, and everyone’s caught up with us.

SIMON: I don’t think I’ll ever feel ‘vindicated’, because we as a band being labelled like that never made the success that we could’ve done, to be honest with you. And though we’ve had success in a lot of ways and I’m very happy – yes, I would like a couple of hundred thousand pounds in the bank, thankyouverymuch, but I don’t have it, you know. None of us have. It’s not the way it happened. Had we got that American tour, had we got that big Lollapalooza thing – had we done all that, yeah, maybe. I’d like to think of myself in dreamworld as being a sort of Neil Young-type character – he’s my hero, you know, he really is, I think everything he does is great generally, and he stands for a lot of things that I believe in. So I’d love to be in the position he’s in, and how he uses his position to help those he knows, loves and likes. And so yeah, there’s a certain amount of resentment for the people who stood in our way, and I’d never forgive it – but then, it never bothered me. But it’s kind of like somebody from another planet having a go at you – I didn’t even know these people. I’d never met these people. And yet they’re casting me socially and all sorts of lies, and you’re thinking… [pulls a face]. You know?

JEREMY: I really don’t care - it doesn’t impact on my life at all what people think.

The band’s undergone a bit of a critical reappraisal over the last few years (particularly this album, which is rightly now accepted as a classic) – is that a surprise to you at all?

MARK: That’s kinda nice. It’s not vindication, but it is kinda nice. You know, a band doesn’t last for twenty years if they’re shit – end of, really.

Well, I don’t know. Bon Jovi…

MARK: Yeah… yeah, true. I take it back… [laughs].

Take That, as well…

MARK: Oh, I like Take That.

- Really…?!

MARK: Oh I do, yeah. I do have a daughter, but she doesn’t like Take That. Well, she does. But she’s nine. She’s allowed.

JEREMY: It’s the inevitable cycle of things, I think – only because I’ve seen it happen with all my favourite bands, you know; most of the bands I used to like when I was a kid got slagged off in the press, and it all eventually comes full-circle and you become ‘acceptable’ and then kind of cool to like you. And then you become shit again, and things go around like that! [Laughs]

JON: Well, I noticed what Andrew Collins said [in the sleevenotes to the Levelling the Land reissue], and well done for saying you were wrong. He’s man enough to hold his hand up and say: “I got it completely wrong”.

Did the hostile reaction in the press or the fundamental misunderstanding of what you do ever bother you? Be honest now…!

MARK: The fundamental misunderstanding really fucked me off. Really fucked me off, and there seemed to be nothing I could do about it. I’d get someone like Stuart Maconie come to do an interview with me at Barrowlands, and I’d explain the whole fucking thing to him, right, an intelligent man like Stuart Maconie… he’d go away and write it all out and go: “Right, yeah, these are bright, brilliant boys, I get it, etc etc” – but he’d still have to end with the ‘crusty’ tag. He’d have to do it – it’s almost that they had an absolute need to do it. It was like: if they don’t do it, then they look really uncool.

JON: You’d like to think that the people who are writing about it know about music, that’s the whole idea. Not just the weekly music papers, but also broadsheet newspapers – there weren’t really many monthly magazines back then. We weren’t reviewed – it wasn’t ’til much later in our career that people stopped reviewing stuff. Which is actually a kind of sigh of relief! [Laughs] Nobody’s even going to look at it and write about it. But at the time of the record, for it to be so brutally savaged by critics… We felt a connection with people who’d come to see us play, and completely misunderstood by anybody else in the music business – apart from certain individuals that might have something to do with running clubs, who thought we were great, you know, a bit of a breath of fresh air. But the mainstream record companies and publishing houses, stuff like that – apart from our own record company, who obviously saw something in us.

CHARLIE: I think that we did make some fuck-ups – we didn’t really take on the press, but we fell out right from the start. And that was the problem: it was like two magnets meeting at the wrong end. We just fell out with them, and it became the rumour mill: ‘Oh, not the fucking Levellers…’ And so clearly over the years it made us strong. But it was like, oh, not a fuckin’ journo, not that particular club – it felt like a school-tie club, the NME and the Melody Maker and all that… it’s almost like they missed a beat. And Andrew Collins who did that article – yeah, he did miss it; he’ll go along with that. So maybe that was the reason – as well as the bondship that I mentioned earlier between us – was the reason why we’re still here. It’s still relevant! I think it’s still very relevant, more so now – it’s gonna be like Mr. Nice, you know, all of a sudden he’s got another career just by the longevity of it! But as long as the passion is there, that’s the key.

SIMON: Misunderstood - yeah, absolutely. Well not heard, anyway. You know - not listened to. It’s not easy sometimes to express yourself the way you want to, which is for me why music’s such a good way – but then you’re always going to be slightly indirect with music, because it’s not as easy as to write or speak something to make it fit into a song without actually being really contemporary and artistic. So the message is more repetitive I suppose, or people grasp it in a different way – the way they want to grasp it, as opposed to you going: “No, this is what I’m saying”. So it’s not as direct as some forms of expression, I suppose. I don’t feel smug – I try not to feel bad, I try not to feel hatred or bitterness or anything like that, because I think it’s destructive, really. I can’t help but feel bemused by the fact that things, you know, they’ve gone [laughs] – they didn’t survive, you know, we did. And so of course, I feel a little bit like: “There you go, I told you so” – but I didn’t tell them so, I never really entertained them that much. A lot of the problems came from Jeremy’s little present, and a couple of things that Mark did with reporters in Paris… it was a record company party or something and he chucked a load of wine over reporters – who were probably being completely fucking obnoxious to him, you know?! So he probably, fucking… rightly so, mate! And instead of taking it as a rock star thing to do, they started slagging him off and never forgave him, so… At the end of the day, I hate fucking freeloaders. I hate people who think that they’ve made someone. And unfortunately I think that the NME particularly back then used to think that they ‘made’ bands, you know? And I thought, well, I’ve never read the NME. I didn’t know who they were, I don’t fucking care what they said – it’s a bit like the football results (I’m not a football fan, obviously!) And it doesn’t bother me, what one paper says about you and what another paper says – at the end of the day, if there are people in front of you having a good time, and bouncing up and down enjoying themselves, then the NME can say they had a shit time as much as they like! But all the people who were there had a great time. That’s what they did, I think, and they tried to stop us from being successful – which only added fuel to our fire and to a lot of our fans’ fire. Because our fans knew it, they were reading the press too and going, “Well, that’s fucking not right…!” It was like, we’re the big state here, and you come through us if you wanna be successful. It’s like: piss off! Who are you?! You’re a newspaper, I can set alight to it! It can go up in flames, you know? [Laughs]

JEREMY: I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother me when we started because, like I said, we were sensitive artistic types, and we were upset when we got our first reviews in and they were just slagging us off because of what we looked like and not any tunes or anything like that. But to be honest, it brought us closer together as a band… but it made us fucking hard! [Laughs]

Tell us about your gift to the NME.

JEREMY: [Laughs] Well, yeah. I sent them a shit. [Laughs] There’s no polite way of putting it! Fuck it, you know, it was the times. I wouldn’t do it now, but… I wouldn’t take it back! [Laughs] But the ironic thing is, the guy I sent it to, he actually wrote the sleevenotes for the reissue of Levelling the Land. We’re quite good mates with him now, and he freely admits as well that in the NME they didn’t bother listening to the record. They were just upset that they had nothing to do with ‘making us’ as a band, with breaking us – they completely missed it. And in his own words they were in their ivory tower, the kingmakers of the bands; they completely missed it, and didn’t get it. It’s interesting reading his autobiography – he talks about the shit incident, and it’s quite interesting, his point of view. Now, he says: “Yeah fuck it, I missed it - it is a great record, I just completely missed it at the time”. He just says, “I still hate The Boatman.” [Laughs] Which is fair enough!

MARK: We did do it without their permission. We did it without anybody’s permission – we didn’t even do it with our own!

JON: I think they just felt that we were deeply unfashionable, and how could anyone possibly like it. I think that looking back of pictures of us, the way we looked – you’d look at the old pictures and say, that lot are in a band. Definitely. Definitely they’re in a band; whether it’s any good or not, you don’t know, it’s kind of: long straggly hair, multicoloured clothing… there’s a lot to poke fun at if you just look at it from the outside. And if you just pick up on the odd lyric, like… ‘Save the whales’, or whatever it might be! ‘Travelling the country playing guitars’, stuff like that – if you just pick out the odd lyric, there’s a lot of stuff there you can just pull apart and go: “Oh, this lot, really they’re a bit of a joke”. So really we felt let down that no-one had really gone into it and looked at it in any depth, or with any impartiality. And there were definitely live reviews that people had done where they clearly hadn’t been to the gig, because they’d list all the songs that we hadn’t actually played – well, you know what it’s like. Journalists very definitely do reviews – well, I don’t know whether they still do, but some journalists did reviews of gigs they hadn’t been to. It wasn’t uncommon back then! [Laughs in bemusement] But really, it did hurt at the time, yeah.

You’ve outlasted not just most bands from that era, but pretty much every major musical movement of the last twenty years – rave, techno, Britpop, garage, trance, nu-metal, nu-rave – has that been odd?

MARK: Yeah it has, it’s been really odd, because you expect things to hang around for some time. The only thing that has hung around is heavy metal.

What do you think your secret is to staying together as a band?

JEREMY: Basically, the total is bigger than the sum of its parts. Any of us on our own are okay musicians, fair songwriters and okay lyric-writers. But when you put us all together, the noise we make is bigger than any of us. And we knew that from the very first rehearsal, you know – we didn’t know what it was, but we knew it was fucking good! [Laughs]

SIMON: That and friendship, really; we’ve had our moments at times, but that’s obviously natural with anything - like family, really. That’s what we are. And definitely this band’s kept me going - many times. It’s kept me on my feet and helped me through some real shit. We’ve done it for each other, it’s great.

MARK: I think we really like each other, that helps. We understand each other, and we really enjoy what we do. That’s got a lot to do with it – and we’ve never split up, either. I think that helps as well.

People always talk about these tours as ‘nostalgia’ tours…

MARK: Well, I won’t know until we do it. I mean, this March tour, it’s selling fucking amazingly well and we’ve added dates onto it, so that’s incredible. Because I think it is people coming to see us who perhaps haven’t been to see a gig since they last saw us. I think there’s quite a lot of that. But I couldn’t really say – I’m not really good at working out the demographics of things.

You’ve teamed up with The Wonder Stuff. How did that come about?

MARK: Well, I mean, it was obvious. We started at pretty much the same time, had success at the same time, and we’ve been mates on and off throughout the years.

JEREMY: We basically asked them – we know ’em, you know, they’ve done Beautiful Days a few times. And when it was put to us, do we want to do this Levelling the Land tour, we thought what would be really good is not just to have kind of any old support band, but to have a band from that era that was also like a fucking good band. The Wonder Stuff was the top of the list and we didn’t actually think they would say yes, and we asked them and they said yes – it was like: “Fucking brilliant!” [Laughs] Job done!

It’s almost like the ultimate student revival tour from 1991, short of having Pop Will Eat Itself on the bill…

MARK: Yeah, well it probably will be! And Ned’s Atomic Dustbin and, fucking, Carter…

- Jesus Jones?

MARK: Jesus Jones. Well they’re a bit before. All of which come to our festival though! They always do.

JEREMY: I think that’s why the tickets have sold like that, you know – it’s nostalgia night for a lot of people! Back to college, like you say…

Tell us about your plans for the tour – it’s the first time you’ve ever played the album chronologically. Is that a refreshing change?

MARK: It will be, because we never did. And there are some songs on that record that have probably only seen the light of day once or twice, so that’s gonna be good. But most of them we have played over the years.

JEREMY: It’s gonna be quite liberating, ’cos we know what the setlist’s gonna be already! [Laughs]

Watching the crowd reaction at the gig tonight, it started out quite subdued, but then when you played One Way it was almost like someone flipped a switch…

CHARLIE: Yeah, I mean, we’ve been purposefully not playing any of Levelling the Land, but over the years it has been like, yeah, that is the album that everyone knows. And a couple of years ago, we thought about doing this back-to-back, just as a celebration, which is the trend that we’ve been seeing for a long time. So we thought, yeah, we’ll just do that, because people would relate to it – and it does amaze me when I meet every now and then, they’re not fans or anything, but they say: “You have no idea how many people’s lives you’ve touched with that album”. And every now and then I just get a little, like: “Oh, shit. God, I have…”, you know? And my own kids, they see it in a completely different way because they’re much younger - they’ve got a Dad who does this other job as a career… fuckin’ whoah! It’s bizarre! So going back to that question, ‘did you think it’d ever happen’? No! You really don’t.

I think Levelling the Land is the only record of yours that I’ve seen every song performed live at some point over the years - obviously given that many of these songs have been mainstays of the live set for so long, how do you keep them fresh for yourselves?

JEREMY: We kind of rest the ones we get bored with – but it’s really hard to get bored of a song when people love it so much. You know, it’s like – we don’t ever rehearse them, because we do find it boring to play them over and over, but when you see people going mental to a song, it’s hard to not fucking love it! [Laughs]

MARK: They always have been [mainstays], because they bloody work. But look at the audience reaction. It’s all about looking at the faces.

Would you say that’s kept you going over the years?

JEREMY: Yeah, that’s the only thing. The only thing. And the only debate we’re having about playing the album live is which arrangements do we do, ’cos some of the songs we’ve changed the arrangements since then – and I think at the minute we’re inclining to play them exactly as they are on the record, ’cos it’ll be a challenge to us to go back to playing stuff like that. So that’s kind of the only thing we’re thinking of at the minute.

MARK: That’s what it’s all about for us, just playing live. And that’s why we’re doing this tour now – you were saying earlier, this is a really small place, but you should see the size of some of the ones we’re going to be doing. It’s just an idea of mine – basically, most people around the world don’t travel to gigs. For example, round here the nearest place you’d go and see a gig is Bournemouth. But some people round here won’t go to Bournemouth. It’s not a particularly good example – some of them are really far-flung places where people can’t afford to or don’t usually travel to gigs. And having done these sort of places with Levellers acoustic or Drunk In Public or just on my own, they ram out, and it’s amazing, and they love it – they really love it. It’s a real treat for them to see somebody come to their town – and that’s kind of always what we’ve been about.

CHARLIE: On the last album that we released, we were very happy with that and we’re still playing it in our set – but traditionally we were like, “Oh, you’ve gotta follow it up, you’ve gotta follow it up, follow it up”… we should have delivered by now. But I’ll tell you what we are delivering: a good next album. It ain’t now, ’cos we’ve got just one song out of our system to an audience – and the best thing backstage tonight was that it was like: “You know that new song we played tonight?” “Yeah, yeah”, “Oh, we’ve got to do this and this to it” – “Ohhhh, yes, I agree”. When you play it to an audience, you know when it’s right and when it’s not quite right. But we placed it in the set just after One Way, and like you say, that was the turnaround of the whole set – because usually in the middle we’d bring it right down, and we did a bit with Hard Fight – but oh, I fucking love playing that…!

What’s favourite song on Levelling the Land, and why?

JON: Ah… tricky one, tricky one. I really love One Way, because it’s such a fantastic thing to say in just a few words: just be yourself. That’s it. It’s just like saying, you know, ‘love’. That’s all you need to say!

MARK: Probably Far From Home. For me, it’s just nicely uplifting in narrative, and it probably sums up everything else on the album quite nicely.

JEREMY: Battle of the Beanfield, because… it’s not the best song we’ve ever written, but it’s definitely the most important. And it’s a piece of British history that was almost completely unreported at the time, put into a banging tune.

SIMON: We just covered this ‘favourite’ business! I don’t really have a favourite song, to be honest with you, I really don’t. But I think really for me, for every reason I can think of - personal reasons, power reasons and message reasons, it’s gotta be Beanfield still. I mean, One Way, great – it sums it up, in a lot of ways, but it’s still more of a thought, you know, it’s an idea. Whereas Beanfield is a story about something that happened that was fucking wrong. And it still gets me going when I sing it. But it’s strange saying it about a song I’ve written; I’ve never been very good at it, that sort of criticism. I mean, I didn’t like The Boatman – I would’ve ditched The Boatman. It’s funny, isn’t it? And yet it’s loved by lots of people.

CHARLIE: Another Man’s Cause. Why? Because I’ve got a particular favourite memory – when we recorded the album, I went away with my girlfriend at the time who still is my wife, we went to Sardinia, and all I had was a cassette. It wasn’t that it hadn’t been mastered, it was just like: done the work, got a couple of weeks’ holiday time before we’re out on tour, and I had this moment. I was in Sardinia, it was Siesta time, and I was like: I really want to listen to this cassette. And so I got to the bar and there was nobody there; it was a beautiful hot sunny day, I was in the shade, so I said: “Excusez… can you play this tape? It’s The Levellers, a new band from England, Angleterre…” So he looked around first and there was only about one other person. He put it on; it was a beautiful soundsystem, and I remember looking over and got this cold chill when we got to the instrumental part; that really just blew me away. It was a real moment of like: “Oh my fuck! Oh my God! This is really fucking good”! And there was nobody around me, it was completely empty – and I got to the end of it, finished my beer, and it was like: “Do you like that that cassette?” “What cassette?” “The cassette that was just in, The Levellers. It’s mine.” And he wound me up and said “Is it really yours? Is that really your music? Can I get a copy of it?” - YES, I’ll send it to you! It was like today’s equivalent of having a memory stick, you’ve got it on your iPod, iPhone, whatever… you’ve got it. It was a fantastic moment. Just a cassette!

That song, I think, above everything else on the album is the one that’s worn the best.

CHARLIE: Where that song is on the album is just the peak. It’s the musical peak. And it’s Jon’s brilliantness and, kind of, me and him with the band between us. That build-up, that’s what it’s about. As a drummer, it’s what I always dreamed of, like: find the best thing I can do, find my best ability for the song - it’s the singer, the instrumentalists, even the bass player. It’s all about that.

It’s certainly the track that continues to have the most resonance – it always astounds me when I hear it because it could be about Iraq, or Afghanistan, or any war…

CHARLIE: And we’ve had letters from soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq, mainly from Afghanistan, which are like: “We’re fucked over here, it’s our favourite song, could you change a few words from, like, Argentina to Afghanistan?” And we wrote back to them and said: we can’t, you know. We’ve tried, and believe me, I really do feel for it because over the years we’ve played to many soldiers and, like, getting these letters from soldiers saying “We’re out here, we’re fucking having it shit, this is our favourite song” – I know why that’s their favourite, because it really is what it’s about. You’ve just gotta look at Mark – he’s a soldier’s son. It could’ve been him. You feel like that all the time.

JEREMY: We get asked to re-release Another Man’s Cause so many times – to update the lyrics for Iraq and Afghanistan and re-release it, but… we have turned it down flat every time it’s been offered to us. I mean, if there were circumstances… I wouldn’t rule it out completely, but at the minute it would have to be not a cynical cash-in, and that’s what we’ve always been worried about. I think actually no, we’ll probably just leave it, leave it as it is.

MARK: That’s had some real resonance recently – I’ve had soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan, who’ve been there, and they listen to that song, they play that song out there, they come to the gigs afterwards and ask for it, or their family does…

Given 20 years of wisdom and life experience, what would the Levellers of 2011 say to the Levellers of 1991?

SIMON: [Snorts] “Good luck…!” [Laughs] God, what would I say to myself? Don’t drink Stella. I haven’t drunk Stella for eight years, and I’m a lot better for it.

MARK: Don’t do cocaine. Stay away from cocaine. [Laughs] That’s the only thing!

JEREMY: [Laughs] Just say no!

CHARLIE: It’s fucking difficult, because I’m now a Dad – so to ask me a question like that is so retrospective… it’s too difficult to answer. I have two sons, a thirteen year-old and an eight year-old, so I’m giving as much as I could give to them as I would say to myself. And so it’s a bit of a blank question - I can’t really answer that, I’m sorry!

JON: Get your hair cut!

What happened to your hat by the way, Jon?

JON: Well, I had more than one hat, but they eventually just got squashed because you leave them lying around and somebody’d put a bag on them. The very first top hat that I had, I got given by a friend of mine actually just before we went onstage. I said to him: “Actually, that looks good” and he said, “Ooh, go on then”… stuck it on my head as I went on, and said, “That’s yours now”. So I wore that for a good couple of years, and then somebody – I think it might’ve been Jeremy’s dad, actually – got me another one. And I think I’ve still got that at home somewhere, actually. I hear there’s a small Facebook group trying to get me to put that back on. A very small Facebook group… [laughs].

Sum up the album Levelling the Land and the experience of 1991-1992 in one word.

SIMON: Memory loss. That’s two words! No, that’s a bit facetious. That whole period, that year? [Long pause] …‘Educational’. For me, it was my first foray into the music industry – I mean yeah, I’d fucked around in folk clubs and followed a couple of bands about, but really it was kind of like, wow. This is how the machine works – although that period wasn’t because we were still in a transit van. But no, I suppose… I dunno, it’s a fucking hard question, that! I would say ‘friendship’ actually, to be honest with you – because we didn’t know each other that well, but we all fucking sat in a van for months on end and got on together.

MARK: ‘Mental’.

JEREMY: ‘Intense’.

CHARLIE: ‘Uplifting’.

JON: ‘Vital’.

With thanks to Mike Eccleshall.

INTERVIEW: Micah P. Hinson (November 2010)

2011-08-31T08:53:00.000-07:00

As befits someone who many assume to be a battered crooner in his forties upon first listen, Micah P. Hinson confounds expectations at every turn. Between his solemn recordings, wild biography, weathered baritone and oddly cartoonish stage persona (a knowing cross between deadpan comedians Steven Wright and Rich Hall), observers might be forgiven for wondering: will the real Micah P. Hinson please stand up?

The Texan journeyman’s most recent album, Micah P. Hinson and the Pioneer Saboteurs, was one of 2010’s finest releases - a huge, sprawling Western Opera drenched in opulent strings which transports his familiar themes of despair, faith and sin to a desolate, windswept landscape akin to that of Ennio Morricone. For all its swirling romanticism, however, it remains the unmistakeable latest step along Hinson’s own twisted path to redemption (“Some people say this song’s really romantic,” he drawls while introducing Take Off That Dress For Me in concert later that evening; “Personally, I think it’s the most miserable shit I’ve ever heard”).

While it’s perhaps impossible to get the true measure of a person from an hour-long conversation, one suspects that with Hinson you’re able to get close. He’s candid, thoughtful and surprisingly unguarded when discussing his own personal trials; an avid smoker, his long drags on an electronic cigarette provide faintly comical punctuation during pauses in his speech. He is down-to-earth, likeable, humble and philosophical - a gent, certainly, but a wary and wounded one which suggests that Hinson is a very definite product of his own life experiences. His wife, Ashley, sits in throughout, and gives the impression of being the still centre in his chaotic world. Together, they make a sweet couple, and are the model of Southern hospitality (my girlfriend and I are welcomed into their dressing-room like friends rather than intruders, and we continue to converse for a good 45 minutes after the interview ends).

Several times throughout our conversation, Hinson accuses himself of “rambling”, but I’m not sure that’s it - oftentimes it feels like he talks to find the point, rather than making it straight off: in the process, he then discovers what he wants to say. Indeed, in many respects, Hinson’s music is the best embodiment of this personal trajectory of evolution and self-improvement, proving definitively that his life and art are inextricably bound.

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[Note: I was unaware when I began the interview that earlier in the year he’d been stung by a piece by NME writer Laura Snapes on The Quietus, which irrelevantly - perhaps even maliciously on the part of the site’s editors - placed his own political leanings front-and-centre, in turn misrepresenting his views. Hopefully publishing our conversation in its entirety will give him a chance to set the record straight.]
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So, Micah P. Hinson and the Pioneer Saboteurs. As far as I’m concerned – album of the year.

That’s awesome!

It’s almost a kind of concept album in terms of its origins. It seems to have been inspired initially by the Walt Whitman poem Pioneers; O Pioneers!, which is reproduced on the album’s sleeve – what was it about that specifically which grabbed your attention or sparked your interest?

I think there’s a connection between the artwork and the poem, but I’m not sure there’s much of a connection between the poem and particularly the songs themselves – A Call to Arms is maybe along that idea, but… I don’t know, I think it’s just the record is generally about relationships, but it seems very much more…I guess a bit more heavy-handed and a bit more pessimistic. I think to get to this record it took me… before the covers record there was The Gospel of Progress, The Baby and the Satellite, The Opera Circuit, another band called The Late Chord on 4AD, and I also had a record called The Red Empire Orchestra. And that’s when the covers record came out. And so I think that if you look at the Pioneer record and with that in mind you go back and listen to The Opera Circuit or to The Baby and the Satellite, it seems like everything I was trying to create was culminating towards being able to make something like the Pioneer record…? So yeah, I guess I… I’m not even sure what the fuck I was answering, so that’s why I ended!

It says in the album sleeve that it was recorded on and off over a period of two and a half years – was the covers record [All Dressed Up and Smelling of Strangers] done concurrently as a kind of ‘necessary outlet’ during that process?

No, no, no, that was just an idea from my record label – I think they wanted some big hit or something, so they asked me to do a covers record. I did what you would generally find on the second disc and they were not happy with that, and so they asked me to record more – I recorded what you would call the first disc, then they tried to get me to drop all the second, all the songs that I originally recorded – I said that’s not going to work, so we have to make a double covers record out of it. So maybe that’s what people thought, as the reviews were a bit up and down about that – but no, no time. I mean, I guess I’m always lost, but there’s no fuckin’ time that I’m just gonna release a covers record because I’m bumbling as to what to do with my life. To do a covers record as something to light a fire under my ass sounds… it just doesn’t sound like the way to go, because cover records can destroy people. So that was an odd thing I did. But my covers album… I guess for me it was more about folk music, and the idea of a folk tradition. A folk tradition, as opposed to how people do covers now.

[An assistant from the venue interrupts briefly, and apologetically informs him that there’s been “no luck”…]

I got a degenerative back disease, which makes me like to smoke – well, I mean, I don’t like to smoke grass all the time, but it helps with the pain a lot. We just came from the Netherlands, and I’m not gonna be making any friends with dogs or anything… that’s a good line to be in! But yeah, you come to places and some people can help you out and some look at you like you’re a fuckin’ retard. But, you know. It is what it is. People are very amusing. But yeah, man, I got really bad back problems. Terrible. But at least I have a left leg. I guess it could be worse…

Apparently your friend caused that – he hit you on Halloween, is that right…?

We were celebrating Robert Burns, and he punched me in the back, and I had a… my disc expanded… and then I went on tour for a long time and it just exploded! And then all the goo from inside pushed against my sciatic nerves and I couldn’t feel anything from the waist down at times. And so I had to have surgery… that surgery didn’t really do anything, so now I’m basically on a whole freakin’ mess of drugs. It’s actually, it’s… fun to take ’em. Like a synthetic, I believe, form of heroin – I’m on that as well. Hey man, a lot of stuff! But I still hurt all the fuckin’ time, so I’m not sure what the drugs are actually doing…

I went through a time on tours where I actually tried to warn people, like “Hey, I’m coming to town, I might need some help”, kind of… hide the words a little bit, but then I found out that the people who were getting these emails weren’t like the local workers, like the sound guy, but they were somebody a bit bigger, so they got really fuckin’ pissed off, like: “Don’t talk about that crap on email, it’s illegal!”, and duh, duh, duh, duh… And so it’s almost a pain in the ass to kind of figure that stuff out, but I’m an obsessive individual, and so I do my best not to obsess about it.

I read you were raised in quite a strict fundamentalist family…

Ah, no, no, no, that isn’t, ah… man, people always like to say stuff that isn’t true!

Well, it’s almost part of the legend really, your background - do you perhaps stoke that a little bit yourself?

No, no… I don’t think so. I don’t… I’ve never said once that, ah… I remember I read in an internet article once about me which said that my parents were snake-handlers, and that I freebased rat poison! And I don’t recall, I might have said those things, but I don’t recall saying either of them. But no, if I was raised in a kind of honest-to-God, fundamentalist Texan household, I wouldn’t be here right now. I wouldn’t look the way I look, I wouldn’t talk the way I talk, I wouldn’t think the way I think. My parents, they raised me in the church, I went to church, I was raised to believe in God and that Jesus died for our sins and all that stuff – whether I believed that in my life, I mean, that was my own struggle. But, um… with my parents they were very, um… a fundamentalist household would definitely not buy a kid a guitar, and definitely not push an artistic view or try to… you know, my parents used to buy me skateboards and skateboard shoes every two fuckin’ months because I was always destroying myself, you know. And so no, my parents were firm believers in a Christian God, and through that they taught me… shit, love, compassion, honesty, honour… and so, if you want to call those things crackers… I don’t know, I just felt I was raised by a pretty good family! But see, that does go against the legend, so yeah, my parents were snake-handlers. I got bit all the fuckin’ time…!

The album seems innately political (with a small ‘p’) in its overall project and theme – I was wondering where you sit politically, and how does what you’re trying to do with the album fit with the current climate in America?

[Long pause] …Huh. Well, I mean, the current climate in America is… I know that about 60% of individuals don’t like where the country is heading. And so I don’t have to speak… I guess particularly on my own political views, because I think my countrymen speak for themselves, and I think they can speak in a way for me too. Um… my political views… I don’t know man, it’s kind of what the record’s called. I believe in a pioneering spirit; I believe in working hard, and just doing your fuckin’ best… and life can knock you down, it’s gonna build you up and do all these things … I think it’s important to be a man, and I think it’s important to be a woman, if you understand really what that means, or what I think that means. And with certain political things that I see happening, I’ve seen men perpetually having to act like boys, and not being forced to, um… to pick themselves up by their own bootstraps. But the more I speak, the bigger a ditch I’m gonna dig! So let’s just erase all that I’ve said…

- That’s all it is, I believe in a pioneering spirit, I believe in… shit, I don’t know, that’s it! I believe in being a pioneer. And you know, the Darwinian… you know, the shark ethic prevails, so… I don’t know, it’s interesting. I think Darwin had it right. We try to pick up so many people and pull them along, and a lot of people don’t want to be picked up and pulled along. And I feel that I’ve lived on, to a certain degree, maybe both sides of a couple of things – when I had my bout with homelessness and my parents didn’t really dig what I was doing, my friends didn’t really dig what I was doing, the first thing you wouldn’t find me doing was going down to the church shelter and finding a free place to stay, or trying to find free food. I just got along with whatever I could, and if it meant starving, it meant starving. It just depends on what I was willing and able to do myself. And so I find that very important, and I’m not sure how political that is.

I talked to one English lady one time, and she was really funny. Her name was Laura Snapes, and she totally threw me under the bus – quoted me on some pretty funny things, got me to say some funny things… and so I think she’s a cunt. And so a lot of politics, she kind of… the funny thing, with regards to interviews, is that having that interview with that certain individual, I am not able to speak to you in the same manner that I would have been able to speak to you a year ago. With everything that I say to you, I have to sit and think about what the fuck I’m saying – not that I kind of didn’t before, but I thought that people that have the interest to interview me for this bleak crap that I do, if they wanted to talk to me about it, they were somewhat on my side. But then I realised that like most things in life, people aren’t on your side, and that particular woman wanted something to big herself up. And I actually called her the day the interview came out and asked her what the fuck her problem was… she lied and said her phone was dying, but ended up calling her boss and was, like, pissing herself. I called her back and we had a long conversation. But the people at the left side of the magazine that she worked with was very upset at me that I had the audacity to go and try to ask her why she threw me under the bus - I thought that was beautiful.

But it’s really bothersome, because I want to share with people exactly who I am, but I’m afraid that if I do, somebody might hold it against me. And I notice so much in the world we live in that being a Texan, being an American, I can’t understand what it feels like to be somebody from England. And you don’t understand, you can’t understand what it’s like particularly to be an American. And so we have different definitions of words, we have different definitions of ideals and all these things, and so if I say something with compassion and love inside of it, you might take it, somebody might take it, like I’m being a total fuckin’ prick. So it’s very very interesting. We can all thank Laura Snapes forever changing Micah P. Hinson’s interview process. Man, she can freakin’ burn…!

There’s one thing that I found that was called… not Pitchfork, but ‘Ripfork’…? And it’s a guy who has a blog online, and all he does is tear apart people’s reviews.

Oh, I’ve seen that.

Oh, dude, he is amazing! He’s an amazing guy, and I wrote him a couple of emails – he had ripped a new asshole for this Ms. Snapes woman, and so we contacted him and said “Hey, look at this interview, this might be interesting”. And he wrote me back some questions that I never had the balls to answer, ’cos they were just so… I mean, it was just really some intense stuff, and you never know how people are going to take it or what your words can do. Because up until that interview – and I’ll stop talking about it! – nobody had a reason with my musical career to call me a cunt, or to call me a teabagger, and I do this interview and all of a sudden everybody has reasons to comment on who I am, that I’m some kind of… you know, Bush dick-sucking, fuckin’ Laura Palin tit-licking, you know, fuckin’ Republican… whatever, you know? And I am not one of those things, man.

[At this point, Ashley corrects him on the Sarah Palin reference.]

- Oh! [Laughs] Laura Palin, Laura Snapes…

Bit of a Freudian slip there…

Yeah, it was a fuckin’ Freudian slip, you’re right! So yeah, it’s very very interesting, but that wasn’t your question, so…

You’re right though, in that as people outside of America we can’t gain an understanding of the American heartland in particular – there are a lot of people from that area for whom stereotypes are constantly perpetuated. This is especially true when Sarah Palin talks about “the two Americas” - she talks about the coastal America and the American heartland, and basically suggests that America is polarised in terms of the liberals on either coast and the conservatives in the middle, when it’s obviously not as black and white as that.

That’s interesting, definitely. But there’s absolutely nothing wrong for me as an American not to understand how things in this country work, and it’s perfectly fine for you not to understand how things might work in my country. That seems to be just a known, a given, and there’s nothing wrong with it - there’s nothing bad or anything about it, it just is what it is. But we live in such a world society where we can just always kind of look over each other’s shoulders into thinking what we think we know about the different countries and about their laws and stuff. You know, a lot of people think that America doesn’t have welfare, and we do – we have a lot of it, man. One in every six receives over six hundred dollars a month just to buy groceries for their family. And so if you’re going to tell me that we don’t live in a welfarish type of country, then we certainly do. We certainly do. You know, I could go back home and I could get disability for my back because I can’t work – but, you know, I choose not to do that. I choose to come out here and torture my ass! You know, to try and do something with myself. So… that’s all I have to say!

Fair enough! Following on from that, the new record seems to sit in a particularly American cinematic realm – 2s and 3s I described as sounding like a song that might appear in a late John Ford Western, and The Striking Before the Storm has a ‘drums along the Mohawk’-type vibe to it. Coming from Texas and the heartland, is the Western an area of American mythology that you draw inspiration from?

[Laughs] Oh, shit yeah, man! Oh, man, probably more than I should. For a long time I’ve lived in Abilene, and we still – me and my wife Ashley over there – we live in the middle of Texas. We are three hours from any big city.

[Ashley: “It’s not myth to us!”]

No, it isn’t - it’s true. You will see people on horses, you can carry guns. We can have rifles in our trucks, you know, we can do that kind of stuff.

[Ashley: “We can wear cowboy hats and boots…”]

Yeah, we do wear cowboy hats and boots! I mean, it’s not like people think, you know, you walk down the streets and everyone’s wearing spurs – it isn’t like that. But for me personally, for the longest time on television, I mean, the longest-running show on American television is Gunsmoke, and I watched that all time. I watched Bonanza all the time. And they recently took that off the air. I’m fuckin’ mad… but I found a couple of discs on DVD. The strange thing was is that, like everything, when I wasn’t looking for it, I found some discs, and so I was able to watch that. So yeah, man, the whole sense of being a cowboy, and the plains - and even beyond that, less of cowboys: my fourth great-grandfather was the chief of the Chickasaw nation, and his son, Levi Colvert, was the first representative from our nation to the US government. And so, though I look really white, I’m actually an Indian, or Native American, or ‘first people’, whatever the fuck they call us now… And so I think my obsession with the West that was ‘the West before the West’… you know, before the west was won or whatever!

[Ashley: “And our city’s named after your family, because they were pioneers.”]

Basically, all of Southeastern Oklahoma’s named after my family. My Dad works for the Indian Nation, he started a family and drug rehabilitation help centre, my brother – our language is almost dead, and he started the language back. He has, like, full immersion schools where they only learn in Chickasaw. So yes, I really like that idea, and I think it’s fascinating what was happening in Europe, what was happening in England and what was happening in China and all over the world, but then you have these people in America… I finally voted in my first Indian election – we’re a completely different government.

Interestingly, that’s not a part of the ‘accepted’ biography – it almost confirms your point that people try to paint you in a certain way, but actually that puts a whole new perspective on it. There are some people who think that the Western is that last great American artform – Clint Eastwood and Tommy Lee Jones have certainly both said that, and I think Kevin Costner has as well (I don’t know if you trust his opinion, but still…) Would you agree with them?

No, I wouldn’t say so – I think there’s… I mean, fuck, Deadwood – I think that show… we got robbed in London and my friend Gary showed up with his wife and gave us… too much stuff, it was awesome! So I watched all of Deadwood, and I thought that was a truly brilliant Western – I thought that it could probably feasibly be truer to the West than what Gunsmoke would’ve been, or what Bonanza would’ve been, or even what Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid would’ve been. Because you had these people that were true Westerners, but they were out there in California, and they’re doing what they do, and then all of a sudden they start to hear about the Pinkertons coming in and all this stuff, and they didn’t feel like Americans. They didn’t feel Americans in the sense of… like, on the East there was Indian territory in the middle (that was supposed to still be Indian territory), and there was people that had made it to the West, and they felt secluded and they felt alone. And so then when manifest destiny really truly happened and everything started coming across, I think a lot of those people over there totally got caught up into a nation and a country that they might not initially have wanted to be involved in. Dude, I mean, shit… people left this country and a lot of countries just to go to America to be a pioneer, to do what they wanted to do, to burn their own paths, and so it only makes sense that people would do that as far as they can. I guess the problem is now that we’ve run out of land!

[Ashley: “They call Alaska the final frontier…”]

– Yeah, I guess we’ve gotta start heading up a bit further North! But no, I don’t think that Westerns will ever die. I think there’s a certain sense of nostalgia that’ll always be there, and I think that’s a beautiful thing. And I’m not sure why I find that beautiful, and I’m sure some living over here would look at Gunsmoke and think, like, “What the fuck is that?!”, but I might watch Blackadder and think, “What the fuck is that?!”

To be fair, that’s what we think…

[Laughs] Like, what happened there?! So that’s really fascinating, but yeah, I totally dig the whole Western thing, and I guess you can see that from the cover. And from the music – I mean, I guess we’ve fallen away not talking about the record. You know, I didn’t set out to make a full-on kind of Western record – I mean, God, it’s a like a Western on LSD or something! Because, you know, like you were saying, when 2s and 3s come in and when that songs ends, it’s so strange – drums don’t sound the way they should, guitars don’t sound the way they should, and everything sounds completely obscured and odd. And that’s what I was trying to do – you begin the record with A Call To Arms, and you expect strings to sound like that, but then you have Take Off That Dress For Me where we used some old analogue delay and stuff… but then you gradually go further and further and you’re all the way to The Returning and you almost don’t even recognise modern music anymore! That’s how I kind of see it – and then it leads you out at the end of The Returning and it’s strings like A Call To Arms, but you still have all the fucked-up reverbs and delays so it kind of leads you out of this strange world that it tried to bring you into. And that’s a concept in the sense that it’s a record that’s to be sat and listened to from beginning to end, though I clearly think you can break it up however the fuck you want to.

I describe it as a kind of Western Opera, in the sense that it’s very much like Ennio Morricone’s work – it has that sort swirling opulence about it.

Hey, that’s fuckin’ awesome, I’ll take that as a compliment!

Did you plan the sound of it, or just go into the studio with the bare bones of the songs and that’s the way it emerged?

Yeah, exactly. I had recorded all of the instruments in Austin or Abilene, and then when it got time to finish it I went to the studio out in the woods with a guy named Matt Pence from a band called Centro-Matic from Denver who’ve been my heroes for years now. And so we just kind of went out there, we talked about what we wanted to do, realised that we can’t really talk about that kind of shit, then just kind of got to work. In the end, we mixed that record in… God, was it a week? I know that we had several sixteen-to-eighteen-hour days, and it was a fuckin’ nightmare. Haha! But no, I never go in to my records with a particular plan. I just know that I have to make an album to make people happy, to keep money on my fuckin’ table… ‘Money’! I mean, ‘food on my table’. Food’s much more important than money. I could give a shit! But clearly, that’s not the reason I make music, just to make money – that would be a silly thing to say.

There are several running themes throughout the record – particularly in regard to the string arrangements, which provide motifs that come and go. How involved were the string players or the arrangers in the process?

What would’ve been done is that I would’ve done all the backbones for everything – some of the strings were done by Mr Eric Bachman, namely The Striking Before The Storm, and the strings on The Returning… and then you have another guy that helped me, I call him Manatee, but actually his real name is Manuel. I don’t know why I call him ‘Manatee’…

Well, everyone loves a manatee – they’re like God’s little joke.

Sea-clowns, man! So I talked to Eric Bachman to see if he wanted to work more heavily on this record, but some bad shit had happened to him… that shit always happens to the best of us – not that I’m putting me in that category! But he moved to Japan to work at a recording studio, so he didn’t have much time. So I found the string player, Manatee, who was working over in Spain with a band I worked with over there called Pachinko – and yeah, he just did some work and sent it over. Like, A Call To Arms, that’s the string section from Letter At Twin Wrecks – I just took the strings and thought, “Oh, I’ll put it at the beginning”. And so that song – I suppose I’d seen him following my chord progressions, and following things that I do, that’s how I see Manatee’s parts. But I see Eric Bachman’s parts as really just, like, forging a new path. You know, when I ask him to do work, he really just fuckin’ does work. And he’s just insane, he really is. I think the work that he does puts him up there with Chelsea Girl, probably a lot of Beatles stuff, or Beach Boys string arrangements. Not to say my records are in any form or fashion anywhere close to any of the things that I’ve mentioned, but I think the way he writes is up there with them, and he’s just astounding. So I guess as far as the string kind of stuff goes, I really don’t have a lot of say in that – but I don’t want a say in that.

I invite people to be part of my different bands so they can bring to the table what they can bring to the table. Because I’ve got different guitar players on all of my records – if I want a certain guitar part then fuck, I’ll just play it myself. If I want a different person’s take – for a song I did called You’re Only Lonely, I got another guy called Chris to come in and do some amazing guitar-work. But I wanted his input, so I think that’s the purpose of having all the ‘…And The Gospel’, ‘…And The Opera’ - it’s all the folks that I try to bring together to give me that different sound. And somehow it ends up strangely giving all the records a different feeling, but at the same time it ends up all being along the same scope. I feel like I’m one of these musicians who needs to reinvent my sound every so often, I feel like it’s a culmination to try and become the best at what I can do. And I think you can also probably see that just with the artwork that I do, and the way I title my records – it all has to be part of the same thing, it all has to make fuckin’ sense. And if I were to name everything different, like The Strokes - if I were to name a record Is This It?... well, what the fuck does that mean?! I’d rather be like Led Zeppelin and name a record IV – see, that makes more sense because at least there’s some continuity, and the only times you will find ‘uncontinuity’ in my records would be for my EPs – so, like, The Baby and the Satellite, and I guess the cover record is an EP that’s not something I’ve created like a full-length LP. And so I’ve kind of made all the rules and regulations for myself as far as the artwork goes, or how I’ll release things, and so it makes it very interesting and a lot easier. So people can expect another covers record in four years!

I wanted to ask about the artwork – you have a recurring image of a sexy lady which seems to crop up on each one. Is that the type of image you wanted to put on the first album, and then just decided you wanted to stick to that?

Man, I had an interview with a huge newspaper called Liberation in France – they have about 500,000 readers a day, and one of their questions was: based on my art, was I into S&M? And it really kind of offended me – I didn’t answer that question. Well, I did answer it, but I said there’s no room for pain inside something so joyous as lovemaking or sex or whatever. But my record covers – why do I do it like that? Why…

You don’t necessarily have to have an answer, of course…

Well, see, I guess what it comes down to is that I’ve always loved the concept of Vargas and pin-up girls, and that whole movement of drawing before there was this, uh… you know, I’ve always thought that pin-up art was so interesting, because at the time… like, why the fuck are you painting this stuff when you have a camera? And I guess that goes against my records because clearly I don’t get somebody to paint my albums, but I’ve always found just a beauty and an interestingness in that. With the women on my records, you might call it sexy or whatnot, I’ve no idea – but it’s definitely no means to try and sell albums. I think there’s more of an innocence in it that I try to use, and maybe more than a lot of people expect. I don’t know how to explain that, but that’s the answer. And I guess you can see that – like with The Opera Circuit, if you go back to that record it’s just like legs and feet, but then somebody said it kind of looks like a woman hanging on the cover! So, I’m not really one to make a lot of that stuff, but everything I try to do other than the covers record feels like something I’m supposed to do. The artwork for some reason is supposed to look like that. The music that I make is for some reason supposed to be like this. And I guess it comes back to Woody Guthrie, who I know that Neil Young ripped off the concept of… I guess just being a speaker inside of a radio. Not being the radio itself, but just the speaker. I don’t feel I have much control as to what’s going to come in or what’s going to go out of me. All I know is that if I just ride it out, something will come - I finish albums and I don’t know how they got there. The Pioneer Saboteurs record, the label said “Oh, it’s time to make a record” and I was like, I don’t have any songs. But then I started looking around and I had all these songs and I started writing a whole shitload more, and then next thing you know – like you said, some people might call it a masterpiece, I don’t know! I think Mojo said it was my best record yet and so you listen to people, but it’s all very contradictory because on the other hand it’s my lowest-selling record to date.

That means that time’s going to be kind to it, though – it means in fifteen years or so it’ll be reissued as a deluxe 2-disc remaster featuring a load of demos you recorded in the toilet.

Damn right, man! Hopefully so – I’m doing a lot of work, just this week I received all my masters back, so now like Ray Charles I own all my work.

Obviously your biography makes for fairly interesting reading – you’ve had a famously chequered past, but you’re now married and there’s even a song on the new album addressed directly to your wife. Do you feel more settled now? Have you made peace with everything that went on in your life before?

- Fuck. Um… oh, God. ‘Make peace’? Those are a heavy couple of words right there. Um, no I don’t think so. I don’t think I’ve found peace with that, and I’m fairly sure my wife does know that. Maybe the one thing that I have found peace in is the fact that I know I’ve found the woman that I feel and I know that I can love for the rest of my days, and I know that she’s gonna love me no matter what – whether it’s a chequered past or a chequered present, you know. As long as I don’t wound her fuckin’ soul, everything’s gonna be fine. And I’ve been bad enough to do that to her, and so she’s just really an amazing woman. And ’cos she’s known me for a long time, she’s probably always seen me as maybe who I could be, and not who I was. I’m sure the person who’s sitting here right now isn’t the person I’m supposed to be, but I’m still working on it. It’s always a constant process. If you want to find some sort of happiness in life, you have to push yourself, and you have to try to make yourself better – whatever better is for you, that’s gonna be a completely different definition. But for me, being better is not treading in those old paths of being with worthless strippers, and – well, I would say being addicted to drugs, but the doctors got me addicted to all sorts of drugs! I forgot to change my medication with that patch that’s synthetic heroin like I said, and when I woke up this morning I forgot to change it and my body was beginning to shut down. It’s fucking horrific. And so yes, she takes me for who I am, and that’s the only way I think we can work. And it’s a funny thing, because she is no way, form or fashion… we are complete opposites. We are complete opposites. And it’s a good thing to have such complete opposites – I guess like Paula Abdul said, opposites attract. But I’m not a cartoon cat.

You know, thinking about love when you grow up and stuff, I guess it’s an odd thing – you always thought you’d find somebody who’s similar, and it’s… fuckin’ A, it’s an odd thing because I’m saying that we’re opposites but I think that in some… it’s as simple as this. We were dating, and we’re driving down the road, and in fucking Texas, they like to put up billboards that are from God. Fuck! And so on this billboard, we’re driving, and Ashley looks over and it says: “Do you think it’s hot here? God”.

- Nice.

Yes. And she made a remark, like “Oh, blah blah blah” – she probably didn’t cuss, but she made a comment negatively towards that, and it was a really good example about why we can be together, and why we are together: because we’re both looking at the same things, but we’re both looking at it in different directions. And that’s probably the best way to put that. I’ve never thought about it like that, but that’s the best way to put it.

I think we just had a breakthrough.

Yeah, I think we did!

Listening back to your first couple of albums, particularly in relation to this one, The Pioneer Saboteurs feels a lot more ‘romantic’ to me (in sound if not content). Do you think that some of the negative feeling of the early material has been neutralised to a degree?

Maybe you could hear a little bit of that in the actual music – maybe you could hear it in a couple of songs in the lyrics, but especially with my new record I think it’s one of the most miserable things that I’ve ever made! And I think it’s the one time that with these songs I’ve really tried to stand outside myself – that song Stuck On The Job, you know, I know to a certain degree what it’s like to be somewhere you shouldn’t be, doing things you shouldn’t, while someone is somewhere doing something they probably shouldn’t based on your actions. That’s what that song is about to me, about a man – or a woman, whatever – doing all these things in life and not paying attention to their mate back home, you know, literally doing themselves in. And here they are, alone, but together – it’s such an odd concept. I’m kind of rambling. But there’s just a lot of negative shit on this record - I don’t know how romantic the words are, but there can completely be a separation between the two, and I think that’s a fun thing to poke around with: like I have a song that sounds happy but it’s miserable, and I have a song that’s miserable – for example, The Cross That Stole This Heart Away, I find those lyrics to be very moving but the song is so fuckin’ slow that it takes forever to go anywhere and it’s just crippling. And so I like that, I like that juxtaposition of all those things, because life is everything all at once, so why not treat it as such?

Given everything that’s happened to you over the years, do you feel like a bit of an old soul?

Hmm. Hmm! Calling yourself an old soul is like calling yourself ‘emo’ It’s not something you should probably do! You probably should not call yourself that, it’s kind of a funny thing to do… an old soul, man. I feel like I’ve made a lot of really questionable and bad, rough decisions throughout my life that have maybe taken me places and made me do things that other people haven’t done – and so maybe with that, maybe I’m an old soul, because I’ve experienced some shit…? But Jesus, man, my experiences, compared to other people – mine can just be finite. You know, all I had was a self-induced drug problem, I slept with too many studid fuckin’ people, and what – other people are born without legs, born with fuckin’… minimal brain stem – awful, awful, awful fuckin’ things happen to people. And so it’s strange to sit and talk about how bad things are: “Oh, I was homeless” – hey man, I was just in London and I saw a lot of fuckin’ people worse off than I ever was. But that’s not what your question was.

…Um… ‘an old soul’. One thing I remember was one of my first shows in the UK, I went out onstage and I put my pedals together and I tuned the guitar, and this old guy in the front asked me when my Dad was gonna come out. And I think he was really serious, I don’t think he was joking – I said “My father’s not here” and he’s like, “Well… when’s Micah supposed to come out?” Oh, that’s me! And he was very surprised. Man… if I were to give you a tape of some of my first recordings I ever did, I sounded like a goddamn British version of Alvin and the Chipmunks. I listened to too much Cure, you know, I was raised on tons and tons of British music, so it took me a while to get away from that, it was very strange. And so I don’t know where my voice comes from, I’m not sure why it sounds like this. But I guess maybe its main purpose it serves is that people who maybe don’t understand the words that I say are somehow able to understand the emotions that I’m speaking of. And that’s why I’ve been so big, or reasonably big, in places like Spain or Italy. It’s amazing, I got my last numbers and one of my last records, The Red Empire, sold more than the last Modest Mouse album in Italy. I was like, “What the fuck? That seems weird – I thought Modest Mouse was huge”. But there again, I’m rambling…

That’s a good boast, though…

I thought was just hilarious when I learned that, that I sold more records than Modest Mouse and The Futureheads, like “Whaaaat…?!” But the voice, let’s get back to it. It’s deceiving. I think that’s when I like it the most, when people come, if they’ve heard my records, they come maybe expecting a certain person. I guess now with the internet maybe now they’ve been able to see me a bit more, because I keep my face off all my records. But in the sense that people have never heard me before, I stand up onstage and they think I’m gonna sound like fuckin’ Ben Gibbard or something, then all of a sudden this “Rrrroar”, this thing starts coming out of me – I like the surprise of that. Like today with the sound lady when we started doing it she was like, “Oh I didn’t expect that at all, that was really nice and I like the way your voice sounds”. It’s like, “Well, thanks I guess - it’s what I was given, I suppose”. But I like that – I guess deceitful’s not a good word, but I like that, the surprise attack that I’m able to give people.

I’ve been told that you’re not at all what I might expect live.

Man, if my drummer hadn’t decided to knock up his girlfriend and get a medical degree, it would still be me and my wife and Nick playing - I still got a library recording of us playing Tell Me It Ain’t So off The Red Empire Orchestra and it sounded like really early Pixies stuff. It sounds like a man with a fuckin’ demon inside of him, so yes, what you will hear on the record is not what you’re going to get live. And maybe sometimes you will, maybe sometimes you won’t, but I think that’s another thing – that’s another way of me surprise-attacking fuckers, if they think I’m gonna go up there and be nice, be this sweet little thing and then next thing you know I’m screaming fuckin’ cuss words at you. Well again, I like that – maybe I just like being deceitful to people. I dunno. Maybe I just find it amusing!

Nah, I think in the end maybe I don’t like living by rules. I think a lot of people in life, maybe they feel like they should sound a certain way or be a certain way, or maybe they should do this or that, but I like the whole concept of not being any of those things. And maybe that’s why I find my wife so attractive – not physically but inside, because I thought she was just this beautiful Christian girl who’d been really well-raised and really well-kept and all this stuff, but then I found out that she has the same problems with religion and this kind of stuff that I did. And so there you go again, another juxtaposition – I’m just obsessed! But I guess in the end, maybe I’m just trying to keep myself from being bored. I think if I went on the road and played the songs the same way every night… the only reason the songs sound like they do on my record is because that’s how they sound on one particular day. Or that particular month, or year that I was working on that song. It doesn’t mean it always has to stay that way. I learn things from my music and the music changes – I’m playing with a string quartet, I played with one in Paris and I’m playing with one in London, and I had to physically go back and relearn all my songs because I had changed them so much that when we went back to the sheet music I wasn’t playing them the same, so I had to particularly play along with them. I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing! So yeah, I always like changing process and always moving forward – and maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t.

Micah P. Hinson and the Pioneer Saboteurs is available now on Full Time Hobby.

INTERVIEW: Mark Chadwick (July 2010)

2011-08-31T08:31:00.000-07:00

Mark Chadwick - the irreverent, good-time libertarian best known for fronting Britain’s premier folk-punk outfit, The Levellers - released his debut solo album last year during a brief lull in band activity. Written over the course of a decade, All The Pieces is a psychedelic pop record rooted in the tail-end of the 1960s. It’s also, perhaps most crucially, directly autobiographical, using Chadwick’s own spiritual awakening at the infamous Elephant Fayre gatherings of the mid-1980s as a springboard for charting the highs, lows and personal fallout of being part of what was, for a brief period, one of the UK’s biggest bands.

It’s been an odd ride for The Levellers and me – followers of this page may already be familiar with the review which prompted my journalistic association with the band over the last few years. I’ve encountered Mark several times since first meeting him as a fan back in 2000, and have found him by far the most difficult member of the band to engage with – an absolute riot when you catch him in the right mood, but with a tendency towards sardonicism and surliness when not. That’s just who he is, of course – and, like they say, there’s only one way of life. Nevertheless, to the uninitiated, it can be a disarming experience - as one of his fellow bandmates has remarked on more than one occasion: “He really can be an absolute cunt…!”

Our paths have crossed several times over the last decade, and we’ve since made our peace for that heartbreaking initial encounter – in fact, he once confessed in a moment of drunken candour that he kept a copy of the article in question next to his computer to remind himself of the aforesaid cuntishness. However, whenever I chat to him, I’m not entirely sure if he remembers me or is just playing coy. Either way, only a fool would deny that he’s on top form today indeed – in fact, even in the earliest days of the Con-Dem coalition’s formation, he seems to have a fairly accurate idea what lies in store for the country…

So, here it is - the lost-promised, long-threatened solo album…

[Laughs]

My first question is more contextual than anything: coming off the back of a rejuvenation in the band’s form and what was acclaimed as the strongest Levellers record in over a decade [2008’s Letters From the Underground], why have you decided to put this album together now?

Ah… basic timing – the timing fell together really nicely. And the fact that there were songs that I’d written for the next Levellers record which essentially didn’t really work because they’re very, very personal – very micro as macro to macro, which is what a lot of Levellers material is. And they’re pretty much describing my life, as I’ve been through quite a bit recently, and so it was like: okay, this is a good time to be a songwriter, a singer-songwriter, instead of just a member of The Levellers. Which is a great thing to be, don’t get me wrong, but it’s a chance to express myself in that time, and that way.

It’s been kind of a running joke in The Levellers every time a song like Before the End rears its head – I remember you saying when the last album came out that when you first played that song to the rest of the band, their initial reaction was: “Yeah, solo record…” – do you ever feel a bit pigeonholed by what you can and can’t do within the band?

Within The Levellers I’d say so, but I think all bands are, to be honest. Bands stand for one particular way of looking at the world, generally – not in all cases, but over a period of time, bands are of one voice. To stick to that as a songwriter can be quite restricting.

The album spans over quarter of a century - how long have you been working on this material and plotting this project?

Probably about ten years… yeah, about ten years, on and off. The opportunity and speed to do it was actually very brief; it didn’t take very long to make it and record it and enjoy doing it – at all, actually. It took about two months.

Anyone with a long-term interest in The Levellers has probably been able to get a pretty good idea over the years what you stand for a person, but this is perhaps the first chance that people might have had to really get to know you: some of your history and, in some cases, even your own feelings. Did you have any qualms about laying yourself open on record like this?

…No. Not as a songwriter, no, or I think as an artist - any artist or creative person. I’ve done it in the past, in The Levellers, and I’ve hidden it quite well and no-one’s noticed, that’s been fine – but at this particular juncture I really wanted to let people know what it’s like to be in a band for twenty years, and the actual hardships that are suffered. It sounds really wet, right - and it is! - but it goes on in the background and you don’t see it: you see them onstage and you think, “Oh brilliant, great, life’s fantastic!”, and I’m not saying it isn’t because, generally speaking, I would say it is. It’s a great life. But it’s kind of the background story of what happens to people who’ve been in bands for so long – how they can exist; how they feel, really. And it’s quite open, quite honest - sometimes dark, to be honest, at points…

It seems to chart a shift in your own perspective over the years - the optimism and idealism of the album’s early songs eventually gives way to the cynicism and more jaded outlook of the second half. It seems to suggest that the journey’s taken quite a heavy personal toll on you over the years – is this a fair assessment?

Yes, I think that’s a very fair assessment – I think it’s a fair assessment of anyone who’s been in a band for a period of time. You’re kind of public property to a degree, depending on how successful you are – and I don’t mind that, it’s not a problem, that’s what comes with the territory. But it makes you creative too, all of the sad parts, which I don’t get to write about in The Levellers. And it’s what I wanted to write about.

There was an obvious sense of momentum quite early on in the band where it seemed like you felt you really could change the world in some way, but in more recent years I think the Levellers songs which have been most powerful and interesting are the more reflective tracks like Confess and Wake the World where you seem to really step back and take stock of the situation. At one point here you utter the line “Peace and love, and all of that” – looking at the trajectory of this album and your own life as a whole, do you still consider yourself as much of an idealist as in the early days?

I don’t think that I’ve changed - I think that the world around me has altered massively, and I think the same, actually, of the rest of The Levellers. Our idealism is the same; it’s just that rest of the world, political situations, everything else changes so quickly now - almost to the point where I find myself in another recession, after literally leaving school in the first one I remember, forming a band in the second one, surviving a third one, and here we are again in the fourth! It’s ridiculous. Nothing really changes in the band - I haven’t changed as a person, and nor does my ethics or principles. They don’t alter at all, it’s just that the world around us changes, so it’s how you reflect that back to a different audience every time. That’s quite tricky.

As a child of the Thatcher years and someone who’s expressed such a strong political outlook over the years, what’s your take on the state of the nation at the moment? Do you think things are looking up or, to quote one of your own songs, do you think the Indians show any signs of abating?

Ah, no. They never will! They’re just changing their tack, and they’re asking us questions. Which is an old ploy – a cynical ploy, actually, by anyone in government - “Oh, let’s pretend that we actually care what people think!” And they try it for a bit, but then ultimately they have to compromise, because they have a bank balance they have to work out, ultimately they’ll fuck anybody – and the people they’ll fuck, particularly this party, this coalition, will fuck the poor. They always have. And yeah, it’s all sitting pretty now, it’s all summery, it’s all nice, everyone’s going, “Oh yeah, great, our right to freedom, I’ll type in what my freedom thoughts are, I wanna… yeah, fuck it, I wanna ban this, I wanna ban that, I wanna repeal this law”… nonsense. Nonsense. UTTER – FUCKING – NONSENSE. I know it, and anybody with half a mind knows that.

- Ah! That’s the Mark Chadwick we all know and love…

Yeah. That’s fixed! And you know, that’s what I’ve tried to get across on this album, “Peace and love, and all of that” – I am deeply cynical, yes, but ultimately there’s a lot of optimism on that record. A lot of optimism. There’s a lot of like, “Come on. We can be better people. The world is a better place”.

The song Indians specifically targets politicians – do you actually vote?

Of course I do.

You do? That’s surprising.

Well, yeah… I shouldn’t do, in principle, as an anarchist, no, but I do because people died for it. Simple as that. A lot of people died for me to have my stake in democracy - which is up for question anyway. Democracy’s an interesting subject! We could write a whole new newspaper about what democracy really means. We really could, d’you know what I mean?! And it’s up for grabs at the moment. What’s democracy and capitalism – how do they connect? I’m finding that they don’t connect at all – in China, they don’t connect at all! You’ve got capitalism and communism connecting! What’s that all about?! Explain that one to me! How are we supposed to compete against that? And how are we supposed to compete against India, which is a true democracy, but it’s actually based on a hereditary system of families, so it’s weird. It’s more like ancient Rome than it is anything else…

I don’t know if you’ve seen Michael Moore’s latest film Capitalism: A Love Story, but he seems to suggest that maybe its time has come, and it’s run its course. Do you still possess that kind of hippy-ish – or maybe even more of a punk mentality – of just, “Break it down, start again”?

Well, I can certainly tell you this. I’m not a capitalist; I don’t give a flying fuck about money. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. What happens in your local society, your community, where you live, how you choose to live with other people, how you share… whatever… how you spread the work and spread the money around. You can’t avoid money; it’s been around much longer than capitalism. It’s there. Right? So it’s how you spread the work, how you spread the responsibility for those that cannot, and those that can. The ultimate point is to avoid greed. So anyone that’s greedy, and wants all the toys, is ultimately evil! D’you know what I mean?! Otherwise, I can see it working - it can work! It can work in any society.

The Levellers have almost created their own mini-industry over years with the formation of the Metway – did you foresee the collapse of the record industry in any way, or did it just seem like a cool idea you wanted to explore at the time?

No, what we foresaw was our own futures. We thought, why give your future to somebody else to look after? Why give it to a record company; why give it to a publisher; why give it to a management agency when, in actual fact, if you look at it, they take ‘x’ amount of your money and they can turn around to you one day - and I saw this, it was awful – I can’t remember the name of the band, but I was on their tour bus, and they got a phone call from their major record label’s accountant saying: “It’s all over, boys. You’re dropped, and that money that goes into your account every week? That stopped a month ago”. They were on tour, and they had to do a gig that night, and they knew that they were broke. It was awful. And that’s what The Levellers always made sure would never happen to us. Basically, at the end of the day, we’re not stupid people. We’re clever people. We like to get things done. But we also like to do things that are inclusive for other people, like when we do our festival and so forth. It’s for the people. It’s not a massive amount of money for them to come in to be corn-fed ideas and nonsense – it’s for them to enjoy, and know that they haven’t been ripped off.

In the album’s press release you talk about music being “transformative” for you – has that been tainted in any way by your experience of the industry and business you work in, or has it been the one constant over the years?

No. I’ve never paid any heed to the industry, it’s of no interest to me. It’s boring, it’s dull, it’s essentially greedy. What I’m interested is, for example, if you go on Spotify and look up Stephen Stills’ Roll Tape, Suite: Judy Blue Eyes – it’s him going in, and recording, when he could, on the back of someone else’s session, practically begging outside the door, going in and recording a three-song suite… that’s what music’s about for me. It’s amazing. And it can be amazing.

Where do you think you’d be if The Levellers had never materialised – do you think you’d just be busking?

Probably. If I hadn’t got together with the characters I’m with, I think I’d have carried on doing pretty much what I do as a songwriter and yeah, probably busked and got picked up somewhere along the line. You can’t avoid your art, you know - it is my art, and it is what I love to do. You can’t avoid it. And I’ve loved being in The Levellers for years, and I’ll continue to love being in The Levellers until the day we all die – it’s a simple fact. But, as an artist, yeah… I’d have done something to have got picked up somewhere along the line.

Back to the album, musically it’s perhaps quite different from what people might expect from you – the artwork has a late-60s psychedelic folk-pop vibe to it, and quite a few of the tracks on here wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Hello Pig. Is this an area that you’ve wanted to explore for a while now in your music?

Yes, it is. It’s much more expansive, much more tempo changes and key changes, stuff that’s more experimental. It might appear to be more challenging to a live audience at a Levellers gig - and you can’t beat that, d’you know what I mean? They want what they want, and they get what they get. They get given what they like and we deliver it, and we love to do so. But… yeah, basically, I want to be Stephen Stills. Simple as that! [Laughs] You like to emulate your heroes, don’t you? I want to make music that’s like… the music that first captured my ear as a child was that sort of music.

As a member of a band that’s always been very much out of step with popular culture, what sort of contemporary music do you listen to?

Well, I actually listen to a lot of contemporary music, you might be surprised… MGMT are my favourites, because they’re genius.

What about Lady GaGa?

Yes! I’ve got a daughter, you see, you can’t escape it! Yeah, I like Lady GaGa, I like Black Eyed Peas, I like all sorts… but, you know, Mumford & Sons fascinate me, because I really like their sound – and really hate their lyrics. Are they really saying anything, have you noticed?

Oh, I dunno… I rather like them!

What are their lyrics saying, then? Go on, then, tell me.

Er… well, off the top of my head, you might have a point…

Exactly. If you analyse them, they don’t say bloody anything. But it doesn’t matter, because it’s a nice sound.

The bands involved don’t like to call it this, but there’s been a bit of a folk revival over the last couple of years.

Yeah. And I’m just going to tag along with it!

Obviously there are now commercially successful acts like Mumford & Sons, Stornoway and Laura Marling – do you see yourself as a sort of godfather to that scene at this stage?

D’you know what, until I meet Stornoway, which is going to be at Beautiful Days, and Mumford & Sons, who I’m going to meet somewhere quite soon – I’ve no idea, ’cos they’ll have to tell me that. It’s not my decision, is it? I can’t go, “Oh, ha ha ha! Siblings, siblings!” if they’re gonna go, “Levellers? Never heard of you. Never listened to you, actually, funnily…”

A couple of slightly more probing questions now - the last few tracks on the album in particular are very solemn and reflective. You talk about loving the entire experience, but do you think there’s anything you would change if you could do it all over again?

…Ah… [thinks] …that’s a good question. [Pause] But no. I don’t think so. No. I don’t think so. There’s nothing you can change – people are people, situations are situations, and at the end of the day, so far so good, as it goes, with the band that I’m in and the life that I lead.

I asked this question of Simon about ten years ago and I got an answer that I imagine was quite different from that which I might’ve got from you at the time, so I’m going to ask you now. I heard a rumour that out of all the people in the band, you’re the person who’s always felt perhaps a little disappointed by the way things turned out, or that you maybe didn’t have as much of a social impact as you would’ve liked. After 25 years of doing this though, you’re still releasing albums, still selling out big venues, you have your own festival… So my question is this: are you happy with your niche?

[Cautiously] …Yeah. Yeah. But… [laughs] …but, I want it to be bigger. It could be a bigger niche. You know, I want people to like really good music. It might be arrogant of me to think that the music I make is really good, right - it might be impossibly arrogant. But I want more people to hear it. At the end of the day, I think it’s great – that isn’t arrogance. So no, I’m not happy with my niche, nor should anybody who’s creative, because if you’re creative you want as many people as possible to experience your changing seasons.

Are you happy in general?

[Emphatically] Oh, God, yes.

Yes?

Oh yeah, brilliantly.

Oh, good. Because I do worry.

[Laughs]

Finally, then – I always find this an interesting exercise when interviewing musicians with a substantial back catalogue. Of all the songs you’ve written over the years, which five would you like to be best remembered for? Which are your five favourites?

Five songs I’ve written that I’d love to be remembered by? Okay, Gold and Silver on Hello Pig… Galahad, which doesn’t appear on any album… One Way… Beautiful Day, and… Christ, last one… oh! One from this new album, Satellite.

And conversely, which five songs of yours would you be quite happy to never hear again?

Oh, right, okay. Belaruse…

Oh, really?

Yep, yep, yeah. Never want to hear that one again… er… oh, God, there’s loads! [Laughs] There is loads! There’s bloody loads… Er… the thing is, right, I so hate them that I’ve expunged them from my memory.

What about The Weed That Killed Elvis?

[Mischievously] I love that song.

I thought you might…

I fucking LOVE that song! The thing is, right, it’s great. But you have to smoke the weed that killed Elvis while listening to it – that’s the only trick! But no, I wouldn’t assassinate any of our work. It’s pointless, because when we were doing it we wouldn’t have made it, otherwise. Like, what’s the point of working on something shit, then later going… it’s not like John Lennon and Paul McCartney went, “Oh yeah, Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, that’s a work of genius, and we worked on it separately!” Everything I’ve worked on with The Levellers we’ve worked on together, so we’ve kind of come to a cohesion there. Generally speaking, someone’s going to like something about it, so it’s foolish to assassinate your past.

I love Belaruse. Why do you hate that song so much?

The thing is, when we play it live, I don’t have to do much! I just stand round looking like a bit of a lemon.

I heard that the entire Levellers album wasn’t a popular one…

Not really, no… I’ll tell you what, though, it’s a bloody good record due to the adversity it was made in. But it was really hard work. It took me a long time, probably about ten years to listen to it, and then I actually liked it. But it took ten years. It was… oh, it was hideous!

Well, that’s it, then, I suppose…

Anything else? I’m wearing red panties and a green bra, and I’m off to an art exhibition in East Sussex.

Thanks for that lovely image. Cheers.

Ta ta…

All the Pieces is available now on Stay By Records.

INTERVIEW: Wild Beasts (March 2010)

2011-08-31T07:57:00.001-07:00

I think it’s fair to say that no single band in memory has caused me to perform such a violent about-turn as Kendal’s weird and wonderful Wild Beasts. Upon first listen, they met with such flat-out abhorrence that I immediately deemed them one of the most humourless, ugly-sounding, pompous and downright appalling bands I’d ever heard. Central to their unrepentant Marmite status is Hayden Thorpe’s whooping, swooping falsetto – a wildly unrestrained display of vocal embellishment so strident that it threatens to scupper any chance of unsuspecting newcomers delving past their immediate surface.

Genuinely baffled by the heaps of critical praise being lavished upon their sophomore album Two Dancers, I forced myself to keep going to back to them in an attempt to fathom just what it was that seemed to be getting reviewers so hot under the collar. Sure enough, as time wore on, I found myself being gradually seduced by their liquid, percussive instrumentation, intricate arrangements and melting vocals, eventually conceding that Two Dancers was, in fact, a serious contender for best album of 2009.

It was only then that I was able to see just how wrong I’d been: the band’s inspired transformations of musical whimsy into delirious flights of fancy are alternately hilarious, sombre, outlandish, subtle, introverted and flamboyant - sometimes all at once. To quote part of their debut album’s title, in many respects they’re pure panto – yet, beneath all the hooting and howling there exists real depth, soul and art, most fully revealed in tracks like the magnificent Two Dancers (i) and All the King’s Men, two of the finest pieces of songwriting to emerge in recent years.

I chatted with Hayden and Benny from the band when they played at Warwick Students’ Union in March 2010, just prior to Two Dancers being nominated for (and, in any other year, robbed of) last year’s Mercury Music Prize. Suffice to say, I think an apology and an explanation is in order…

Well, first of all, congratulations on being the only band to have ever done a 360-degree turnaround on me…

HAYDEN: [Laughs] Thank you!

So my first question is probably one you’ve been asked dozens of times before – how did you arrive at the overall sound of the band, particularly with regard to your vocals?

HAYDEN: I think the vocals are pretty much representative of our whole philosophy in a sense, in that we try to be as uninhibited and expressive as we can be, you know, and the vocals are one of the more immediately obvious features of that. I think in general we try and be as loose, in a sense… without doing ourselves down, we’re most excited when we’re unhinged, in a way. And in that sense, we don’t quite know what constitutes our sound – we don’t really quite want to know ourselves, and therein lies the magic.

Did you ever say to yourself, “This is how I want to sing”, or was that just the way it ended up emerging against the rest of the band?

HAYDEN: Well, I was talking in an interview earlier about Kendal, where we grew up and me and Benny started the band, and I think maybe Kendal has a very suppressive atmosphere – I think at that age, everyone feels oppressed, and I think the band, certainly for us when we first started, was a way of sort of ‘freeing’ ourselves and being as crazy as we could be. You know, not crazy in a stupid way, but in a sort of expressive way, in a very life-affirming way – and I think the vocals maybe stem from that. The words and our collective songwriting developed at the same time as the singing.

So everything was kind of ‘built around’ that fixed point.

BENNY: Yeah, absolutely. The first record kind of slowly built, and we’re still slowly building, you know? We’ve taken the long way round and taken that professional route – we’ve learned and learned and learned.

What’s your musical background, Hayden – have you had any vocal training?

HAYDEN: No – it’s quite split in a sense, in that Tom and Chris both have had musical upbringings, professionally, as in both their parents are music teachers, and for me and Benny it’s a sort of different matter, we’re more… instinctive in a sense. I don’t know how much to say about it, but there is that element of ‘the learned versus the instinctive’. I don’t know, maybe as a balance that works for us.

The last record [Limbo, Panto] seemed to be just a straightforward collection of songs, whereas this one seems to be more ‘built from the ground up’ – the percussion in particular is not so much part of the arrangement but more the structural basis of the track.

BENNY: Yeah, it’s the central point, almost.

Was the writing process quite different for this album?

HAYDEN: Yeah - I think, in inverted commas, ‘a groove’ was a discovery for us. It was like, it’s almost like a dirty thing for a band when you discover you can groove - you know, in a weird way, it’s almost like a bit wrong! But we discovered that if you can sort of win the body, you can win the mind; I think before that we’d always been winning the mind and then the body.

BENNY: It’s kind of moving away from the shame that’s attached to that.

I definitely got that feel from this record, that it is very instinctive – it just kind of slides around…

HAYDEN: Well, Chris as a drummer, we allowed him more space – when he first came to the band we allowed him a floor tom as a bass, and a snare, and he had to work with that. Now he’s got bongos and he’s got woodblocks, cowbells… all sorts of shit!

BENNY: When you see his drum kit you think, “Oh…” – a lot of drummers think he’s going to be terrible, and then what he does is that!

I was watching him in soundcheck earlier, and I was genuinely intrigued as to how it was going to be performed live – whether he’d be using synthesised drum patterns or not. But he was doing it all!

HAYDEN: Yeah! Well, we call him the octopus drummer – you don’t know where the arms are coming from to hit the things…

The record itself has a much greater ‘album’ feel than its predecessor, and features recurring motifs all the way through. Did that come out of the recording process, or was it written as one complete body of work?

HAYDEN: Our idea initially was to have a complete running album that didn’t stop – but that was too much of an undertaking in the end, too restrictive. But we definitely wanted recurring themes; we wanted it to run more like a novel where things come and go, and you can reference things. I think to achieve that we needed a locatable start and end, whereas the first record, we don’t know where we started it – we know where we ended it, but we sort of started it before we ‘knew’ it, you know. So we needed to start with an agenda. But also, the more we learned, the more we realised we don’t have to use our knowledge, in a sense – we allowed chance and accidental things to guide us. And that was a big leap of faith when you realise actually, okay, we’re comfortable enough now to not be in control, and we sort of liked that.

On the first album – particularly on a track like The Club of Fathomless Love – it’s all very ‘upfront’, but on Two Dancers (i) there’s a lot more audible space, almost creating a subconscious, dreamy feel. Was that something you designed, or did the producer guide you that way in the studio?

HAYDEN: Well, I think the first record, particularly songs like Club, we were actually making pop – and that’s the crazy thing looking back now, even ourselves, we think “That’s not pop – that’s avant-garde pop”, you know?!

BENNY: The thing is with the first album that we played the songs over and over when we were rehearsing them, and even when we were recording them we were playing them, like, fifty times, and it was more about getting the right take. Whereas the second album it was more like – yeah, like Hayden said, left to chance and more spontaneous; we let things come out in the studio a bit more rather than being so restricted and formulaic.

To that end, has it been difficult to translate those arrangements into your live set?

HAYDEN: Um, no, because the foundations for all the songs on Two Dancers were done live – you know, that was a big thing for us, because with the first record… We talk about the first record a lot when we talk about the second record, because the first record taught us everything we knew, and that translates to the second record. It’s like when a carpenter makes a chair – all the jagged mistakes that he made on the first chair are sort of eradicated on the second chair, and it’s more smooth, and the wood’s less splintery – and that’s the way I see it on the second record. You know, we were less… angry, we were more composed. Like a lot of bands, your first record, you expect to be this all-conquering manifesto that explains you in half an hour, but I think we found too much to say to quite get it out. And the second record is the sound of us being a lot more able to ‘speak’.

In many of the reviews I’ve read, there seems to be quite an element of surprise – this is not what people expected to emerge from the band based on the sound of your first album. In that respect, you seem to have taken the opposite route and just now made an album that says, “This is the direction we really want to go in”.

HAYDEN: Well, the second record is what it was at the time, and the third record will be – I think all the best art, all my favourite albums and all our favourite albums in general, are a snapshot of that time. That’s the only thing you can do; you can’t... It’s like, a great picture captures that moment, and that’s what the album is for us - I think we were in a good place when we made the album, mentally… Well! [Laughs] You could argue that was a bad place, but maybe that’s what makes good art, I don’t know…!

I wanted to ask you about your sense of humour – my first mistake when I heard the band was to think it was all very serious, but actually there’s far more to it than that. This album in particular is very wry, whereas with the first album the clue is in the title – it’s panto. Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants always gives me the impression of a pantomime dame wobbling about going, “Oooof!”

BOTH: [Laughs]

It seems very literary-influenced, is that fair to say?

HAYDEN: Yes.

What sort of stuff feeds into your work?

HAYDEN: I think humour and the English language are amazing tools, you know – they’re something that you should empower you, rather than… you shouldn’t dumb it down. And I think humour is also essential in that it works as speed-dating in a sense – if you find someone funny, you’re far more likely to get along with them, you know? And you know, it’s a healthy thing we maybe turn to more because of our characters.

Are you happy with the split reaction from people? Everyone I play the band to seems to go one of two ways – half of them say, “This is genius” and the other half immediately goes: “Hell, no!”

BENNY: [Laughs]

HAYDEN: Which is fine! There’s this fear factor that, like, art or music in general isn’t supposed to confront people – it’s supposed to always be very user-friendly, very ‘easy’ and automatic. But we don’t want to be automatic – like, for you, it wasn’t automatic at all, really, it was like: “Wow”… And, you know, if people come to meet you and come to you, then you can give them so much more than if you’re just desperately trying to go to them, you know?

I think it’s fair to say you’re not really a band that Fearne Cotton is ever going to ‘get’…

HAYDEN: Actually, Fearne Cotton played our single on Radio 1 and read out that it was “gorgeous”, which was very nice of her…!

BENNY: [Laughs]

HAYDEN: But you know, I think we were idealists and we thought our music was going to take over Radio 1… [Laughs] But I think as we get older we realise that the beauty of our music is that it never will. We learn to draw strength from our greatest weakness, in a way.

Your label, Domino, had a terrific year in 2009 with bands like yourselves, Animal Collective and Dirty Projectors – how far do they influence the direction you’re allowed to take? Presumably they just ‘sign the artist’ and allow you to get on with things?

BENNY: Yeah, they’re in it for the long haul, you know.

Do you think that sort of relationship is key to where you want to go as a band?

BENNY: Sure, you know… they let us get on with it, they don’t call the shots. They’re not like other labels, with the micro-management that goes on.

Were you ever linked to a major at any point?

HAYDEN: I mean, it’s all bravado, isn’t it? We could say yes, we could say no! [Laughs] I dunno, like… the label didn’t matter to us when we signed to Domino. We got lucky; we could’ve signed to anyone – we really could have. For us, it was like when you buy a chocolate bar – you don’t look at the wrapper so much, you rip it open and you eat it; that’s how we sort of regarded albums. But we’ve never, ever been told what to do, never been told to tone anything down, always been egged on; so the fact that Animal Collective and Dirty Projectors had these proud, leftfield, strong American records last year helped endlessly when we went over to the States last month. Suddenly, it wasn’t this Anglophile underground thing in the States, it was this proud American contingent.

How did they take you over there?

BENNY: We were really shocked – the shows were all full, like most places in the UK.

Do you think they saw you more as a novelty, or an art band?

HAYDEN: Mmm… just an art band, I suppose.

I mean, presumably there’s no-one out there really doing what you’re doing…

HAYDEN: That was definitely a strength, that we’re not another English export – we’re not another ‘English band doing an American band’ sent back over to America. That was a strength. But like Benny said, the shows were full; actions speak louder than words. There were places very close to home - we’d go to places like Detroit and Minneapolis… It’s been really helpful going over there: I think it was slowly forging over here, and I think we’re out of the Dark Ages here more than personally I think we were a couple of years back. But out there, the more leftfield and the more outrageous we got, the more people wanted it, and that was something new to us! We’ve always had to figure out a strategy to tone it down and to be more user-friendly…

Finally then, where do you go from here? Have you written anything since this album came out, or started exploring where you want to go next?

HAYDEN: To be honest, no – I think for us, the writing process is our special thing, you know… it’s something we have to protect and look after and cherish, and I think for that reason we’ve kept it away from this ugly side of things. Because touring is brutal, on the mind and the body. And you have to be careful with writing - we have to keep it special and keep it protected, as opposed to… we’ve actually ring-fenced some time now which we’re working towards.

Sound-wise, is it shaping up to be Kid A? Is it going in that direction…?!

HAYDEN: Well, we haven’t made OK Computer yet!

BOTH: [Laughs]

HAYDEN: But no, I think we’re really excited. We know what we’re here for, and that’s a good thing.

Two Dancers is available now on Domino.

FILM: Heckler (Michael Addis, 2007)

2011-08-02T08:08:00.000-07:00

Michael Addis’s Heckler – an investigation into the increasingly critical culture we live in - might just be the most fascinatingly flawed documentary of recent years. Attempting to write about the film initially seems an inherently pointless task, since it appears by its very nature to establish itself as the first critic-proof movie in history. Much like Kirby Dick’s equally provocative This Film Is Not Yet Rated – ultimately released with no MPAA certificate after featuring scenes from films previously granted an NC-17 rating - it seems to exist in its own meta-bubble, offering little-to-no way in for subjects or agitants alike.

Our guide and narrator, Jamie Kennedy, doesn’t like critics – mostly, it seems, because critics don’t like him. Kennedy, the actor/comedian best-known for the Scream franchise and Punk’d-style sketch show The Jamie Kennedy Experiment, has just received a pasting for his turn in Son of the Mask. Fuelled by the equal lack of respect afforded to his own stand-up by various members of the audience, he decides to fight back by taking on the hecklers at their own game.

Aside from his turn in the original Scream, I’m not particularly familiar with the bulk of Kennedy’s work, so I won’t be able to mount the kind of personal character assassination he seems to take such umbrage with. The clips we are shown of his stand-up, however, suggest that he is a likeable, personable performer peddling what seems to be fairly uninspiring and unoriginal material (but that’s just, like, my opinion, man). Equally, I haven’t seen Son of the Mask - as a massive fan of the first film, I took one look at the trailer and decided that it wouldn’t be for me. That’s my prerogative: I choose not to watch films which I am unlikely to enjoy, hence why I’ve never watched any of the various Scream sequels. I also wouldn’t pay money to watch Kennedy’s own stand-up - if I did, however, I certainly wouldn’t hurl abuse during the performance to the detriment of others’ enjoyment; I would simply leave. It seems like the fair, democratic and sensible thing to do - as it’s stated repeatedly throughout Heckler by comedians and filmmakers alike, if you don’t like it, pipe down and switch off.

The documentary’s initial section on hecklers is hilarious. Invariably drunk and attempting to carve out some indeterminate niche for themselves, we are treated to an array of blistering put-downs from seasoned comics whose distaste and vitriol have been sharpened by years of upward struggle against this most gratuitous of irritants. Partway through, however, Addis and Kennedy shift focus from hecklers to critics, and it’s here that the perspective of the film becomes problematic.

Kennedy seems to take the view that, with a couple of notable exceptions, all critics are either, sad, overweight virgins tapping away in their parents’ basement in Buttfuck, Idaho, or bitter, failed creatives pouring bile on those of greater fortune. While there’s an obvious case to be made for both in certain instances - particularly in the come-one, come-all level playing field of the internet and its endless ‘Have Your Say’ culture - it does offer a rather blinkered and reductive view of the function of criticism. Bad criticism, of course, often consists of little more than ill-reasoned opinions fired off in unsophisticated phrasing designed to reduce its subject to a series of bullet-points: “crap”, “sucks”, “rubbish”, “boring”, “slow”, “annoying”. By contrast, good criticism (whether positive or negative) seeks to illuminate, discuss, inform and in some cases even enrich its subjects; ultimately, it is up to the consumer to ascertain which set of notices they choose to adhere to. Taking the recent reports of varying audience reaction to Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life as an example, I’m far more likely to attribute credence to the opinions of someone who’s familiar with Malick’s previous work and offers a reasoned negative review than those of some clueless muppet who’s gone to see the film “cos it’s got Brad Pitt in” and walked out after half an hour “cos nothing happens”.

All reviews of cultural products are, by their very nature, subjective – this is an inescapable fact when one person is asked to appraise a given piece, since their individual take on it will inevitably be informed by their own tastes, reference points and life experiences. I would suggest, though, that there is a degree of objectivity which can be employed when assessing any cultural work: is it, when measured against that which has come before, original? As a stand-alone piece, does it challenge your perception of what comparable works have achieved? Is it, when assessed against these previous works, accomplished within its own field, regardless of the two previous criteria? I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say that what ultimately emerges is an overall consensus point around which the bulk of criticism tends to convalesce: it’s a fair bet, for example, that when your film is met with universal hostility from press and public alike, it’s probably not that great a film. (Richard Roeper seems utterly baffled when confronted by Kennedy and asked whether he should apologise for hurting his feelings by slating Son of the Mask; no, he says, it’s just a bad movie).

Taking it one step further, should we even be allowed an opinion on Heckler itself, given that the very nature of its existence posits criticism as inherently pointless? Like many of the internet reviewers interviewed in the film, I have own my little corner of the web where I’m able to write about subjects which pique my interest – it’s even so named to flag up the fact. But does the fact that I’m writing about films and music rather than making them invalidate my own critical viewpoint? Like many movie-site reviewers, I watch films constantly; it’s my greatest passion. As noted above, I generally avoid those which are unlikely to be to my own taste, which unfortunately wipes out a fairly high proportion of those produced and released nowadays. On the whole, though – and this is the overwhelming impression one gets from reading the work of someone like Harry Knowles, the figurehead of independent movie writing - I just want films to be better. I want things to improve. I want the standard to rise. How on earth can this ever happen if bad art isn’t called to task?

Let’s assume, as Heckler suggests, that the equation functions on a level as simple as ‘ordinary people’ who work ‘regular’ jobs, and ‘entertainers’, whose function it is to amuse them at the end of a long, hard day. Should we, the public who are ultimately expected to pay for their endeavours, simply part with our money and time without question, and blithely consume what is served up to us, regardless of its merit? The answer is, quite clearly, no.

Indeed, several sequences in the film seem to actively work against Kennedy’s thesis. We later meet the director of one of his long-forgotten early movies. Again, I haven’t seen it, so I’m unable to pass judgment on the film as a whole, but we are shown a brief clip; it does, in fact, look dreadful, and at the very least deserving of the claim by one reviewer that, on a basic visual level, it is badly-shot and visually incoherent. Following its universal panning, the director, we are mournfully informed, has resorted to teaching film at an American University and hasn’t made another movie since. Are we, though, supposed to feel sorry for what appears to be the deserved removal of a poor craftsman from the film industry? Or should we applaud the fact that no more man-hours, finance and resources have since been wasted on something which contributes little but clutter to the artistic landscape?

To this end, many of the talking heads featured in Heckler – blockbuster producers, ‘low’ comics, B-grade directors - make for difficult ideologues. In one supposedly empowering sequence, German schlock purveyor Uwe Boll challenges a series of internet critics to a boxing match. As a comic scene, it’s unbeatable, gaining huge laughs as Boll clatters his challengers to the ground in a triumph of creative rights over individual nitpicking. Nevertheless, many of the critics, hecklers and reviewers interviewed by Kennedy seem down-to-earth, reasoned, knowledgeable and passionate about their chosen subjects: far from the bile-spitting, masturbating loners Kennedy considers them to be. By contrast, Kennedy’s constant desire to confront those who question his abilities comes across as petulant and, as one of his detractors astutely notes, “needy”. When interrogating one particularly geeky-looking internet reviewer, his response is to simply hold up the Vulcan symbol at him, as if to suggest that the writer’s opinion should be invalidated by the fact that he might go to Comic Con once every couple of years. The bemusement on the young man’s face says it all – in fact, it simply affirms his opinion that the default mode of Kennedy’s work is bland immaturity.

One of the key focuses of the film – voiced succinctly by that most revered and loathed of contemporary directors, George Lucas – is the separation between those who choose to create, and those who choose to destroy. It’s a neat dichotomy, but a flawed one which offers a rather rose-tinted view of the former and nihilistic take on the latter. I create; I write. You can read it here. Here’s the thing, though: if you don’t like it, I honestly couldn’t care less. I do it primarily for myself, with the added bonus that there might be others out there who get as much out of the finished product as I do. Ultimately, if you’re happy with what you’re doing, and other people like it, so what if it gets mauled? Indeed, as it’s suggested innumerable times throughout Heckler, doesn’t the fact that someone enjoys what you do wholly invalidate any suggestions of its lack of worth?

The “nasty comments hurt my feelings” rhetoric of the likes of otherwise commercially-successful figures such as Carrot Top and Kennedy himself therefore ring hollow, since ultimately they are the people who choose to put themselves out there for scrutiny. Are they so naïve as to think that they won’t be judged on the merit of their efforts, or that their every endeavour should be greeted with unquestioning worship? Kennedy’s closing gambit is to burn all his negative reviews before walking off with his arms around two obese women dressed in their underwear. Is this supposed to be funny, a provocation, a validation of his armouring against all those negative barbs, or all three? The closing image of another internet critic ripping the shot to shreds suggests so, but it’s a muddled and flatly ambiguous conclusion to a documentary whose scattershot approach perhaps inevitably means that it ends up shooting itself in the foot.

The bottom line is that we need to have a filter. Kennedy’s ideal world is one in which we simply accept what is presented to us, and shouldn’t bother to voice an opinion if we can’t say anything nice. However, followed through to its logical conclusion, what we’re left with is the music pages of Myspace: a million different bands of every imaginable grade, all gabbling for our attention, the vast majority of which are without notable artistic merit or unworthy of serious consideration. There's no way through the fog. If the value of a society can be measured by the quality of the art it produces, in Kennedy’s utopia, we’re all fucked.

INTERVIEW: The Decemberists (February 2009)

2011-06-19T06:26:00.000-07:00

In a genre characterised by its relentless pursuit of the latest musical fad, oddball indie favourites The Decemberists have always stuck out like a herd of cattle during rush-hour. While many of their contemporaries were busy cribbing Joy Division’s best moves and busting out punk-funk anachronisms, the Portland quintet instead studiously applied itself to a litany of old-fashioned ballads, shuffles and shanties, all dusted with a playful sprinkle of theatrical melodrama.

Following on from the early Irish mythology of The Tain EP and their 2006 breakthrough The Crane Wife (loosely based on an ancient Japanese folk tale), his band’s latest offering The Hazards Of Love is the third Decemberists release to fall into the difficult category of ‘concept album’. A sprawling, 17-track suite woven around a fantastical tale of damsels and lovers, beasts and rakes, the record is fast-becoming one of the year’s most talked-about LPs.

While in recent years The Decemberists have nestled comfortably alongside close friends Death Cab For Cutie, Modest Mouse and The Shins at the forefront of the US indie scene, refreshingly you won’t find a hint of affectation anywhere in sight - when I phone the singer’s Portland home on a Saturday morning, he’s actually putting up a shelf.

Morning, sir. Can you give us a brief overview of what the project’s about, how it came to be and what it was that particularly sparked your imagination?

The idea came from a couple of different directions – one, I think I reached a sort of zenith in my obsession with the folk revival in England in the 60s and 70s, and for probably five years I’ve been steadily digging deeper collecting records and just obsessing over the different approaches that different musicians were taking in arranging these old songs. One of those people was Anne Briggs, who lives in Scotland now but was sort of a touchstone for a lot of the folk revivalists – her first EP was called The Hazards of Love and I managed to track down a copy as a 45 on eBay. It has 4 songs, but none of them are called ‘The Hazards of Love’ – it’s such an amazing title and it provides an over-arching theme for the four songs, but I also think think ‘The Hazards of Love’ could be an apt title for most of the selections that a lot of the folk revival were choosing. A lot of them were dealing with the dangerous romantic notion of what it was to be a young person in the 16^th and 17^th century, and we’re also uncovering a lot of the darker roots of that music: a lot of the female folk artists like Anne Briggs and June Tabor and Sandy Denny were selecting these songs which were dealing with a lot of the darker aspects of medieval life – a lot of the violence and misogyny which went along with living back then.

Then I got to thinking about these common concurring elements of these folk songs and tying them together into whatever narrative it could create – if you made them co-mingle, they’re basically archetypes in folk songs which create their own narrative. That was the experiment, to create a sort of narrative, albeit one that’s a little abstract.

‘Progressive’ is no doubt going to be a term bandied around a lot in relation to this album – how do you feel about being described as ‘progressive folk’, and do you think it can actually be applied to a folk context?

I don’t think we’re a ‘progressive’ folk band – if anything we’re regressive. I think that prog had its heyday in the 70s and it sputtered out as it should have… punk rock came and wiped it out, and I think it’s good that that happened! There’s certainly an element of prog music that became very exclusive – you had to be classically trained with a sweeping knowledge of classical music to play rock music, which is sort of a silly notion. What we’re doing I feel is toying with that genre through a lens of 30 years – it’s not only interesting to play that kind of music, but it’s also kind of funny, and it immediately evokes something for people as it takes you out of your own time a little bit: it’s a very ‘classic’ rock sound, which is sort of a fun thing to toy with.

Your style of orchestration and the way that you write about characters in a specific historical context has always reminded me a little of The Band (in fact, quite a lot of the new album seems to continue this tradition of folk music which is modern in sound but draws heavily on imagery and language from the past). Do you see yourself as a ‘postmodern’ band in that respect?

I definitely think that we’re poaching, but I wouldn’t characterise us as simply a folk band – I think of this record if anything as being a folk narrative or folk opera. I don’t know – I guess we are sort of ‘post-folk’ in that way. In my mind at least, having grown up listening to American and English alternative college rock – The Replacements, Hüsker Dü, R.E.M. and The Smiths – they’re all really keen on writing these terse and well-worked pop songs, even if at their heart they’re doing all different kinds of music. That’s my bones, that’s where I feel like I got my head around music was with these little pop songs, and I think that for whatever reasons having that base it’s interesting for me to explore these other longer or more experimental approaches to pop songwriting or songwriting structure.

Do you even class yourself as a folk band? An indie band? A rock band?

We have lots of friends in that scene, and I definitely consider them my peers – certainly Death Cab For Cutie are good friends of ours, as are The Shins and Modest Mouse – but how we got into the ‘indie’ scene is sort of inexplicable to me… I guess to a certain degree we share some of the arrangements and instrumentation and approaches, but I don’t know that we’ve entirely fit in – perhaps it’s more of a spirit or an ethos.

You’ve mentioned the link between the British folk revival and early heavy metal as something that’s been a source of inspiration on this album. Won’t Want for Love, Repaid and The Crossing in particular are quite reminiscent of Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and even Deep Purple in places. What is it specifically about this style of writing that informed your own direction on these tracks?

It’s a similar vibe to what the folk revival was doing – whereas that was taking legitimate source material and giving them traditional or contemporary arrangements, the Sabbaths and the Zeppelins and the Deep Purples were kind of appropriating that tone and creating their own world - they started to develop a sort of fantasy world. So those two scenes were then working symbiotically – it’s well-known that Zeppelin were huge Fairport Convention fans, and Sandy Denny sang on The Battle of Evermore. There’s definitely a separation in people’s heads, but I think they’re more akin than people give them credit for. To take it even farther, there’s even a definite connection between 80s alternative music and heavy metal – I read a review of this record recently and someone said we had traded The Smiths for Black Sabbath, but we were still going to get stuffed in a locker for it! I think there’s a certain amount of truth to that – what I’ve always been interested in, certainly growing up, was that sense of feeling marginalised or alienated. I’ve definitely been attracted to the margins.

Obviously you’re the principal songwriter and author in the group. How did the band react when you presented the themes, ideas and songs to them for this record? Are they just ‘used to this sort of thing’ from you by now?!

They’ve definitely been desensitised to these ideas – it actually wasn’t that hard of a sell, as we’re all big record collector and fans of music across the board. Jenny is the hugest Jethro Tull fan, Funk dips in and out of goblins and giants and is always touting these bizarre prog bands, Nate’s an avowed jazz guy and John and I share a love for the folk revival, so everyone really dug into it. I think the narrative line was a hard thing to get your head around, but I was even having a hard time, so I can’t blame them for that!

You’ve almost created the ultimate antithesis of a modern commercial album in the sense that it’s a comprehensive piece of work that demands to be listened to from start to finish in one go, it doesn’t work on an iPod Shuffle, and you can’t really pull any singles off it. What on earth did you record label, Capitol, think?

I was worried about the same thing – I knew that fusing the songs together and the lack of any kind of saleable singles was going to be an issue, but we didn’t tell them what we were doing! We got so far into it that they couldn’t have stopped us – that was the advice from our management when I told them what it was, and after a long pause they said: “Let’s just not say anything…”

We brought [the label] in about three-quarters of the way through the recording, told them what it was and sat them down – and everybody was super into it. Blow me down, I didn’t see that coming at all! I don’t know, I think that in this time for major labels, it’s like there are no formulas, all formulas are out the window, nothing seems to be really saving anything and I feel like we’re benefiting from being in the major-label system when it’s in its death-throes, because I think there’s a lot of people who just don’t give a fuck! We aren’t constrained by a lot of things that made major-labels so evil in the past – their concern for creating bottom-line, their concern for commerce.

So are you just ‘left to it’ at this stage?

I’ve been told by people that almost those exact words have been used by the bigwigs – even our old A&R guy (who’s thankfully not working there anymore) said to our manager: “I don’t get them, I don’t get what they do, let ’em do whatever they want”.

I imagine that must be quite a good position to be in.

Yeah, it’s great – there’s no expectations, they know that we’re not gonna be breaking the bank for them; we’re not going to be shovelling piles of money on their heads, but we bring enough in, I think. Maybe there’s also a little caché there to have us on the roster for whatever reason - for the music nerds. I don’t know, it’s kind of inexplicable! Rough Trade has been awesome, so I guess this is only really in reference to the Capitol side of things, Rough Trade been amazing and hands-off and very nurturing in its way. But with Capitol, we bring enough money in, there’s not huge expectations to make their fourth-quarter earnings swell up, so I think we’re in good stead.

The Wanting Comes in Waves seems to be the song on the album which might make for an unlikely hit.

That’s so funny – that’s getting such a good response from people, so much so that the radio department has marked that down as a single – and I’m like “…WHAT?!” I thought of it as a song on the record as the glue that pieces things together – I like it, but I never felt there was quite enough there to warrant a song. But it’s always that way – you never really know what a song is about or how good it is ’til it’s in front of people… especially on this record, since it existed so much in my head that I completely lost any kind of objective view of it, and it will be interesting to put it out into the world to see what people make of it, as I have no clue really if it’s good or bad. There’s parts of it that I like and that I think work well, but for the most part - I dunno, we’ll just see what people make of it, I guess.

How did the recording process of this album differ from previous releases? On the Practical Handbook DVD there’s footage of you recording Picaresque which seemed to suggest that the approach was quite improvisational. With the wealth of ideas that you needed to get across, was everything more ‘mapped out’ when you came to record this album, or was it a similar kind of ‘free-for-all’ approach?

I think out of necessity it had to be more mapped out – our old approach would be for me to bring the songs into rehearsal bare-bones, just guitar chord progression and the lyrics, the basic outline of the song and everyone would work on their own parts. But this one being a piece from start to finish it had to be engineered a little bit from the beginning, so a lot was falling on my shoulders just tying everything together, bringing certain musical elements in and out. So over about an 8-month period my wife and I went to the South of France in a little house and I had a room in there that was dedicated to being a little recording room. So I just focused in provincial isolation and I made a rough demo from start to finish and handed it round to everybody.

Apparently the intention is to perform the album in its entirety on tour. Given its scope, mood swings and the sheer range of instruments – not to mention the cast of characters buried in there - are you at all daunted by the prospect of performing this material live, or do you relish the challenge?

I think we’re all excited by it, I think we’re all up for the challenge – we’ve done similar things before that involve frantic instrument-switching mid-song, and I think it’s part of the fun of performing these things onstage. This one is obviously a little more daunting – we have a little Excel sheet that tells us exactly who’ll be playing what during each song in an effort just to make sense of it all!

After such an ambitious creative gambit, what’s next? Is the constant expansion of the band’s ideas and sound something that you want to keep pursuing, or is this project just something that you needed to get off your chest?

It’s definitely something I don’t think I’ll be attempting to follow… I think it was a slippery slope to this considering that we kept on piling on these longer suites – in some ways, just doing a whole record was an inevitable eventuality, so we did it. I definitely think it’s the apotheosis of my obsession with British folk revival music, and I think I can try moving on now and exploring different aspects of music. I have no idea where that will lead us, but we’ll see! I love that band Alphabeat – there’s something about, like, wow, bringing back that late-80s New Order sound, like Technique – make a record like Technique again, that would be kind of interesting.

“Forever standing in the gutter gazing at the stars, beneath Colin Meloy’s oddball tales of Victorian peasants and doomed Civil War romances beats a yearning heart capable of turning even the lowliest street-rat into a king amongst men” – do you think this is a fair representation of the band’s ethos?

Oh, I think that kind of nails it, that’s probably true. I think a lot of the songs are sheathed in a lot of glossy narrative, but hopefully what’s underneath is some sort of universal gesture that people can relate to.

Paupers, urchins, star-crossed lovers, trench-bound soldiers, downtrodden actors… these are the band’s stock-in-trade as far as narrative viewpoints go. Yet the songs are often so plaintive, heartfelt and so emotionally rich that I’ve often got the impression that there’s something else going on beyond merely empathising with a certain character. The Engine Driver, Eli the Barrow Boy, I Was Meant for the Stage - without wanting to get too psychoanalytic, my question is: which of these personas represents the real Colin Meloy?

[Laughs] Oh… I don’t know how to answer that question; I think it’s a little bit of both. Eli the Barrow Boy is being a little more cryptic than the other ones, but I think The Engine Driver and I Was Meant for the Stage are two of the closest to autobiographical that I could possibly get in my current mode. The Engine Driver is really just about loneliness – regardless of what you do and where you go, there’s a certain amount of isolation that you just kind of have to deal with. Similarly, I guess I Was Meant for the Stage is kind of a tragic tale of someone who is forever trying to do this thing because it’s the only thing they know or want to do, and in that monomaniacal approach there’s a certain amount of isolation involved that goes along with that. I don’t want to spell it out as I’m lonely and sad all the time, but I think those are the most fascinating aspects to me about the creative life.

So do you see yourself reflected in the “poor and wretched boy”?!

Definitely, though I think that might be farther of a throw - there is some of me in that, but it is meant to be kind of a ghost story.

Do you feel a natural affinity with the underdog? It strikes me that The Decemberists are just about as far away from conventional definitions of ‘cool’ as it’s possible to be…

[Laughs] Uh-huh! Yeah, definitely. Sometimes it feels like a badge of honour, sometimes it feels like what it shouldn’t feel like – like you’re on the outside a bit looking in. I feel like it’s like a rollercoaster throughout – sometimes it’s perceived to be cool, sometimes it’s not. I always take comfort in revelling in the margins, like I said before. That’s where I sort of exist; I never felt comfortable as being touted as being cool – and I think that coolness is so artificial and insulting. I think that going after your own… it sounds so cheesy, but staying true to your own aesthetic is the right approach.

The Decemberists have always been defined by an overt sense of melodrama. Where did the band’s theatricality come from? Was this aesthetic of vaudevillian pantomime ever something that you particularly thought about, or did it evolve naturally with the music?

I think some of the other band members wouldn’t choose to be roped into that, as it’s probably a fascination of mine - I don’t know if I would go so far as to call it vaudeville or pantomime… I have a lot of community theatre in me having grown up doing theatre, and a certain love for that ideal. I think there’s something really cool about that, it’s about people in an earnest, irony-free way getting together as a community and creating funny and accessible theatre on a really low-budget, and there’s something really sweet and moving about that.

Regarding Jenny’s comments about being surprised at the band “having fans” on the Practical Handbook DVD – from my understanding of the Portland music scene, it seems like a lot of musicians just played around in different bands for the fun of it, and in that respect The Decemberists almost came together by accident. Has the band’s success come as a shock to you at all?

Yeah, definitely. There’s a wonderment about it constantly, and I mean that with an honest humility, but I really am amazed and surprised because there are certain things that you kind of understand as a basic truth or an inevitable thing. And for the longest time, I just knew that this project, this band and my approach to songwriting was forever going to suffer and be totally anonymous, totally obscure. And I really believed that, and it was a huge shock to me to find that people enjoyed it – I think a lot of the stuff that I was writing early on was almost an attempt to push people away. I felt like: ‘Okay, so nobody’s listening, well then fuck you – I’m just going to totally write stuff that nobody in their right mind would write’. You’d have to be crazy to write these songs and think that they would garner some sort of audience. I think that’s also because I was around a lot of people who were really trying to make it, and tailoring their aesthetic, their songwriting and their own approach to making music to what they thought people would like. And I think that not only was nobody listening to me, and to our band, that I found that to be just so… disgusting, that it pushed me farther into a corner - and then I think when you do that, inevitably you’re going to get people listening to you!

It feels like the songs serve as a vehicle for the emotions, then, rather than embodying them directly - yet they still have a strong emotional core. Do you think this idea of them being one thing on the surface and something else much deeper underneath is what attracts the indie crowd? Do you think people see it as a more ‘intelligent’ form of songwriting?

Um… [thinks]. Yeah, I’ll take that…!

The Hazards of Love is available now on Rough Trade.

FILM: Ferris Bueller's Day Off (John Hughes, 1986)

2009-08-08T05:13:00.000-07:00

I found myself oddly affected by the passing of 80s teen-flick guru John Hughes the other day. Discounting the likes of National Lampoon’s European Vacation and Home Alone (which he wrote and produced, but didn’t direct), at the time of writing I’ve actually only seen four John Hughes movies all the way through – The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Planes, Trains and Automobiles and Uncle Buck. I generally try to resist referring to films as ‘classics’ due to the term’s over-saturation amongst people who haven’t the faintest clue what they’re talking about (“What do you mean, you’ve never seen Pretty Woman? It’s a classic!”). John Hughes’s films are universally acknowledged as pop-culture classics, in the sense that they came to define an era and went on to influence countless film-makers whose work, for better or worse, would characterise a particular mode of delivery in the years that followed. However, amongst the critical establishment, Hughes’s films are considered just that, and little more. Perhaps what’s been nagging at me, then, is the thought that there’s one movie of his in particular which I believe transcends these narrow parameters, a film worthy of serious consideration as not just one of the very best of its genre, but as a consummate example of a specific film style honed to perfection.

I have seen thousands of films in my life. I’ve consumed those considered to be the ‘true’ classics; I’ve mulled over the masterpieces; I’ve studied the theory. I’ve devoted way too much time to the art of cinema over the years, and wouldn’t have it any other way. Of all those thousands, I honestly consider Ferris Bueller’s Day Off to be one of the 50 greatest. I’d like to state this point again, however, so there’s not any misunderstanding: not one of my 50 favourites. One of the 50 greatest.

As Hot Fuzz director Edgar Wright astutely noted in his recent tribute to Hughes, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is one of the best-directed comedy films of all time. Watching it back last night, I was once again struck by the attention to detail exhibited in Hughes’ construction of the piece: each frame is thoughtfully, often artfully composed for maximum comic impact, and the film as a whole is edited with a pitch-perfect feel for the rhythm of character, pace and timing. Its tone is alternately wry, droll, silly and laconic – often all at once. Each minute facial expression, line delivery or incidental gesture is perfectly rendered by a cast who have rarely improved on their performances here. The numerous set-pieces – most notably the climactic dash home - are staged with an almost arrogant flair, and the director’s use of both pop music and an original score to enhance the beats and comedic dynamics of the film is virtually flawless. More so than any other movie I can think of, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off has its own unique, airtight comic rhythm which is beautifully sustained even past the final credit roll (“You’re still here?! It’s over! Go home!”).

Oftentimes with film comedies, the humour tends to date to a specific era: watching a movie like Harvey now, for example, it’s difficult to not find it ultimately rather tame, harmless or quaint – brilliant in its way, but stunted by the comic limitations and trends of the time. Don’t get me wrong, Harvey is still funny – very funny, in fact. But Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is hilarious. There are so many great moments in this film – be they sly, throwaway details or laugh-out-loud antics - that it’s near-impossible to single any particular one out: between the eminently-quotable likes of “Bueller… Bueller…” and the life-affirming Twist & Shout routine, the movie is pure joy from start to finish.

But there’s more. Watching the film hot on the heels of a Marx Brothers retrospective, I was struck by the same strain of gleeful anti-establishment destruction being wrought throughout. In Jeffrey Jones’s beleaguered principal Rooney, we have the ultimate stooge, a man whose physical and mental degradation at the hands of his nemesis are satisfying precisely because they serve only to skewer his foolish pride and misplaced sense of moral authority. With charm, guile and a touch of serendipity, Ferris Bueller – the ultimate libertarian - outsmarts everyone, and wins. Indeed, the reason this film continues to resonate with audiences beyond its original demographic is because the adults in the movie – be they clueless parents, misguided officials or rambling teachers - stand for the crushing confines of society at large: its rules, its restraints, its self-imposed etiquettes and the hypocrisy of its moral imperatives. As Ferris so pointedly puts it to the hoity Maitre D’ when thanked for his understanding: “It’s understanding which makes it possible for people like us to tolerate a person like yourself”.

Furthermore, the film’s breezy, carefree irreverence is consistently tempered by a more profound and serious undercurrent: an uneasy recognition of the fragility of the moment. Casting aside the film’s lone bum note (the cheesy 80s soft-rock tune that soundtracks Cameron’s final revelation), Ferris Bueller’s melancholy foundation speaks volumes without ever resorting to overt sermonising. The moment when Cameron falls into the swimming-pool is a heart-stopper each and every time: not one of the principal characters has any discernible clue where they’re heading in life, and seems to be struggling to find a tangible reason why they should even care. Faced with an uncertain future and the knowledge that what they’re doing right now is probably as good as it’s ever going to get, the only maxim worth following is one that’s alarmingly stark: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it”.

Those acknowledged as the ‘great’ filmmakers – the directors bigger than the sum of their constituent parts, the auteurs – weave a sense of their own personality, outlook and ethos throughout their work. Taking his canon as a whole – and, regardless of whether you consider it a run worthy of serious study or merely a frivolous product of the times, his 1980s output nevertheless constituted a prolific and consistent body of work - it’s all there for John Hughes in that final shot of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

There’s a wonderful scene in Oliver Stone’s Nixon where Anthony Hopkins’ beleaguered President stares balefully at a portrait of Kennedy and laments: “When people look at you, they see who they want to be. When they look at me, they see who they are”. So it goes, in a weird way, with Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. When we look at Ferris, we see who we want to be. When we look at Cameron, however, we see who we are. Taken one step further, John Hughes’ legacy comes more sharply into focus: when the world’s young adults looked at him, they saw a man who viewed us all with equal affection, regardless of our flaws or foibles. We saw someone who viewed people as most of us only wish we were able to: not as jocks, brains, criminals, princesses or kooks, but as human beings. Truly, a righteous dude indeed.

INTERVIEW: Lewis Garland & The Kett Rebellion

2009-07-22T05:54:00.000-07:00

“Everywhere I go, The Final Countdown seems to follow me”, Lewis Garland mutters perplexedly as we debate the merits of 80s power-rock in an Earlsdon charity shop. “I’m not a believer in divine messages, but still…”

I first met Lewis five years ago at Warwick University, where we quickly struck up a mutual rapport after sharing several stages as fledgling singer-songwriters. He’s recently released his debut album, Places We Neglect, to great acclaim in the local press. Perhaps the most striking feature of this remarkably accomplished LP is its consummate lyricism: from the sneaky one-liners and excoriating broadsides dished out to Tate-dwelling catharcissists on Art to the brutal, hilarious self-skewering of album closer Moi, the record positively brims with wit, zest and literary flair. Musically, however, he pulls his weight equally well: while Someday tugs unapologetically at the heartstrings, Moi’s cheerful self-mockery is scored to a sprightly klezmer jig.

Under any normal circumstances, the sight of two pasty middle-class boys communing in the shade on Hearsall Common would be enough to raise suspicion among Coventry’s less-enlightened inhabitants. Thankfully, the ongoing distraction of the summer heat seems to be proving an adequate deterrent from the anticipated drubbing, leaving us free to shoot the breeze on a range of topics from songwriting, label-shopping and the sheer bloody awfulness of James Blunt.

First up, then, a bit of general biog – where are you from originally?

I’m from Norfolk - a little village in the middle of Norfolk called Kenninghall. It’s where the first-ever movement against Elizabeth I started in her first week in power. That’s the most exciting thing about the village… apart from – and I realise this is irrelevant, but it’s interesting to me – they have a go-karting competition each year, made out of anything in the village, like a bath-tub or whatever, and they close down the main road. Which is nice – they don’t have brakes or wheels, so you end up with accidents quite a lot. Also, they kind of don’t tell the police they’re closing it off, but the police found out one year, so they decided to just paint lines on the road. So they had, like, fake lines on the road, so the police didn’t find out because cars just didn’t think they were allowed to go that way!

My hometown’s notable for having a racist Tory MP. She’s also now a corrupt MP who recently got embroiled in the Expenses scandal…

Racist and corrupt? Well, you might as well go the whole hog…

So, you’ve been based in Coventry for 5 years now…?

Well, since the end of Uni. I did History and Politics, then a Masters in Human Rights a few years later, but that was in Birmingham. But I’ve been based here the whole time, because it’s so beautiful you can’t escape it...

It seemed to me like there was a very specific point a few years ago when you switched from a kind of I Am Kloot/Damien Rice mould to incorporating more folky, political elements in your music. Was there a certain point where you switched - for example, was there a specific artist you came across who got you into that type of music?

You know what’s a bit weird, I always find, is that people seem to be able to listen to something and they’ll be influenced by it and write something in that mould, and it seems like a direct influence – whereas I find that kind of thing… I was into I Am Kloot, Billy Bragg kind of stuff when I was 16. But then the real folk, and specifically klezmer, Jewish traditional music, eastern European thing I got into, I then got into [during] my last years at Uni, but it didn’t seem to come out until a couple of years later. So I usually find that if I’m genuinely influenced rather than trying to copy something, then it’ll come out naturally about three years later. I guess what I was listening to at the end of Uni is what then influenced me in my writing.

I was trying to figure out the best way to describe your style on songs like Moi – ‘gypsy folk’ was the best I could come up with.

Well, it’s klezmer – in the song I think it says something like “faux cod-klezmer tracks”, and that’s what it is: it’s a faux cod-klezmer track! It’s kind of a play on my obsession with eastern European and traditional Jewish music which I went through about 3 years ago – I was only listening to that.

How come?

I don’t know! I found out my Nan was Jewish, but I don’t think that related to it because that was after I got into it. It’s just that I’m naturally chosen and it just came through at some point! [Laughs] I dunno, I just got really into violin and followed that through, and I found the place I loved violin most was in traditional Jewish music. I’m not sure what scale it is exactly that’s used, but it doesn’t seem to be quite the same as Arabic, and it’s not the same as eastern European. I guess the music I’m into is klezmer, which is still eastern European – it’s German, although it’s Jewish… I don’t know, I can’t justify it!

In terms of the lyrics - the thing that’s most striking about the album is that there’s not a word out of place. Is that your main focus, first of all - is that where your songs come from and you then build the music around them, or is it more of a symbiotic process?

I find that they’re almost completely separate things, in that I write them as separate entities – melodies will come to me and I’ll generally put lyrics to melody, but lyrics come to me completely separately. So I don’t so much write lyrics and then write music to it, or write music and write lyrics to it, but rather I’ll constantly be writing lyrics. And then if a melody comes and seems to fit an idea that I’ve come up with in my lyrics, I’ll then place that idea into the song and work it around that.

The difficulty with lyric-writing is that there’s a certain amount of basic human emotions you can get through, and then it’s just a matter of working out different ways of talking about those things. I don’t know how people can sit down and write pure relationship songs all of their lives and not think, ‘I’ve written this one before, in exactly the same way’. And so I’ve got to the stage when I have a fair few melodies, and I have ideas for nice little couplets for lyrics, but it terms of getting whole songs, having a consistent theme that works without me thinking “What’s the point in me saying this again?”

It’s strange - I mean, my main obsession has become lyrics now. I think it’s because – certainly with the political side of things – I have so much I want to say, and people kind of get annoyed when you just rant at them. And so then I got into writing ridiculously earnest political lyrics for a while – but again, really, people don’t like to feel like they’re being judged, or that you’re lecturing them in any way, and so even in a song it kind of irritates people. I think that’s why the whole ‘don’t mix pop and politics’ thing comes about, really.

Do you see yourself as fitting into the ‘protest singer-songwriter’ mode, or do you try and distance yourself from that completely?

No, I mean, I don’t do that – when I was first getting into political writing I was a Billy Bragg obsessive. But I do find you have to be so absolute about your beliefs if you’re going to write a political song which is a protest song. So if it’s an anti-slavery song, it’s fair to say most people can be pretty absolute about that view. But a lot of the political songs on that album end up being almost like an attack on myself. And that’s what I was going into before – on the EP there was very much a kind of straightforward “look at the world, look at how bad it is, here’s what’s happening” kind of song. Whereas this album seems to have moved into a thing where I’ll… like, the first track, Run to Ground, is very much looking at my thoughts as an individual in that I kind of look at other people all the time and get irritated by their failings, but then I realise that I’m just as bad and all I really do is moan about them!

If I had to pick out a theme on the record, it would be ‘the failure of idealism’ – and that runs through not just from the political songs, but also into relationships as well.

Yeah, I think that’s a really fair description of the album as a whole, though I hadn’t thought myself to tie the number of different types of song together in that way – in terms of the love songs, very few of them are straight love-songs! But yeah, I think that’s a pretty perfect description.

Looking at the package as a whole – when you talk about writing lyrics constantly, do you see the album as a kind of sketchbook? I notice you’ve done your own artwork as well.

It was initially going to be called something along the lines of a sketchbook, but we went through various phases. It was going to be called Life Drawing initially, and then the artwork naturally came from that – but I felt that was maybe a bit too obvious, a little bit too clichéd for the title, so it ended up being a lyric from [the song] Life Drawing instead.

Going back to the lyrics, you mentioned the cynicism already – the opening line of the first song states that you’re “just another champagne anarchist”. It seems like a very self-effacing album all the way through - it’s almost like the most personal songs contain the most violent attacks on your own character. Do you see yourself as mocking the idea of the self-indulgent singer-songwriter, or is it just that you feel like you have to have that sense of distance to keep your lyrics in check?

It’s fair to say I’m very much aware of the singer-songwriter stereotype, and I’m always very aware to try and avoid it as much as I can. I don’t always manage it, obviously, no-one does – because in order to be honest, you have to maintain a degree of raw emotion in there. But it’s difficult, because if you do just have that raw emotion, you can come across very much like… well, the type of singer-songwriter who tends to be bludgeoned by the media as much as he possibly can!

Such as…?

Well, it’s obvious to go for James Blunt, but I kind of feel like James Blunt isn’t a fair description as he’s almost like a false version of that. And so I think maybe Damien Rice is a fairer version of that, as I do think Damien Rice is honest in what he does – it’s just maybe slightly one-dimensional.

I absolutely adored the first Damien Rice album, and I remember seeing you play a few tracks from it live once – I met him, too, and he was great: refreshingly upfront about the honesty in his music. But then that second album, 9… it was almost like it was too honest, it was just too much. You came into it in the middle of this horrific break-up, and from thereon the next five tracks were just relentless. Particularly towards the end, there was some excruciating stuff on there.

It’s strange – for me that album just lacks pure melody more than anything else, which is a pretty nasty thing to say about someone based entirely on that! But no, I do love that first album – I realise it’s not necessarily a very cool thing to say these days, but I think Damien Rice’s first album will probably go down as a kind of underground classic in that sense. But yeah, in terms of avoiding the perception of what Damien Rice is, as opposed to what Damien Rice may actually be, I think is what I always try and do. Avoiding James Blunt is a difficult one, because I don’t think he’s honest at all in what he does – I think it’s purely a pop version of that style of music. As a lyricist who’s as obsessive as I am, I just get annoyed with the contradictions of a song like You’re Beautiful than anything else – you can’t “have a plan” and “not know what to do”, come on!

The way I look at it is that if you want to be a popular singer-songwriter, you’ve got to appeal to as many people as you can, and unfortunately most people aren’t that interested in subtlety…

No, and something I always notice is that being a complete lyric obsessive, there’s one member of my band who knows my lyrics, and that’s because he has to sing them! And these are a bunch of musicians – they’re not lyric-lovers, and it’s just strange when you can’t get your own band to listen to them! It’s quite amusing after gigs, because you’ll find there’ll be a couple of people in the crowd who really get it and come up and start raving on about certain lyrics they’ve heard, and then Drew will just sit there going: “Oh yeah, that says that…!”. It’s like, cheers, Drew – well done there. We’ve only played it about a hundred times…

So who do you rate, then, in terms of the current crop of singer-songwriters?

I went through a bit of a Decemberists stage. I was a bit obsessive about The Decemberists for about a year, I bought everything they did during that period of time – all the little EPs they brought out. I guess you could say it influenced the album, but I kind of got into The Decemberists after having gone in a folk direction, so I think I maybe found them as something that made think there was actually hope in doing this music, more than just copying what they do. I just like the storytelling; it’s pure cabaret in some ways.

I’m getting really into Andrew Bird at the moment - he’s an American singer-songwriter, violinist and ‘whistler’, according to him… it’s perhaps at times too pretentious in that I do have to sit there and read the lyrics to actually even know what he’s saying, on occasion! So it’s not very raw, but he’s got some good stuff in there.

Other stuff I’m getting into… I don’t know. I’m kind of going through a phase where I’m just out of my big klezmer stage and I’m just finding the real world again… Iron & Wine I’m into, but not for lyrical reasons. I was a bit obsessed with Neutral Milk Hotel last year for about six months, in that I hadn’t really noticed them – I was aware of A Hawk and a Hacksaw, but I kind of followed it back and I didn’t realise what an underground, cultish band they were at that point.

I really struggle with that guy’s voice. He can’t fucking sing! The guy can’t sing!

- No. And however much people say he can… I can listen to it now, not listening to his vocals, as yeah, they’re appalling. They are appalling, I think it’s fair to say! And I get the feeling they’re probably auto-tuned, and still appalling!

I’ve never ‘got’ Bob Dylan either – the deal-breaker was always his voice. A friend of mine once put it to me like this: she said that he knows he can’t hit the notes – but the fact that he’s trying is enough. I was like: “That’s not gonna cut it. HIT THE FUCKING NOTES!”

- Couldn’t you say that to anyone, then?

Well, exactly. Look at The Libertines. They couldn’t play!

- “They are trying, but there are lots of people who are talented, and haven’t made it!” No, I think the reason I liked Neutral Milk Hotel was because In an Aeroplane Over the Sea had a couple of lines on it I got really into. I really got him as a lyricist, and I don’t think he necessarily thinks through his lyrics that carefully – there are a lot of really shit lyrics on there! – but when he gets it right, the imagery he uses is just stunning.

One of the most notable things about your album is that it’s self-financed, self-released… pretty much everything about it is done by you. First of all, how did you fund it?

[Smiles coyly] Hm! Well… luck. In terms of recording, Drew has a home studio that his Mum has paid for. We did some of it in Nizlopi’s studio, and then we did some of it at the Royal College of Music, because our percussionist works there. So, pulling in favours all round. It’s always a blag – I mean, at our stage, to get a decent recording you’re either paying a lot of money or you’re having to work through favours.

If a label came knocking though, would you want to take the plunge? Would you rather go with a major or an independent?

I think the ideal is to do it independently, for a few reasons. Firstly, I’m trying to do music as the thing I do in life because it’s the thing I love doing, and so if I were to be signing a deal that would change that fundamentally in some way, then there’d be no point in me doing it. I don’t want to do music as a job in the sense that it would change it so much that I didn’t love doing it anymore. There’d be no point in doing it – I may as well go and do something useful for the world. And so I don’t think that I could sign to a major because I don’t think there’s a chance that they could get that, because their business is purely to make money. And that’s fine – it just doesn’t suit what I do.

I’m not anti-major in the sense that I don’t have great disdain for everything they do, ever – I think there are artists who make sense on majors, and I’ve grown out of hating pop, you know? I think that it’s got its place in the world, and it’s probably on majors. But I don’t think it’s an industry which makes sense for an artist who’s an ‘artist’, rather than an artist who’s a product. I guess if you’re signing to a major at the point when you’ve got a big fanbase, you’re in a stronger position than when you’re signing as an artist who’s a no-one. So if I were signed now, I don’t think I’d have a very strong leverage! But also I suppose it depends what the label is signing you for – I guess if they see the whole product as worth selling, you’re not going to be changed that much.

But if they just like your hat…

Exactly. If that’s the product…! I lost that hat, incidentally. I was very sad.

In terms of your own aspirations, is a deal something you’re pursuing? Have you sent the album round to labels, or are you just trying to build your own reputation and see what happens in future?

Well, we’ve got a 1000-run on this, and I’m kind of looking at the idea of getting publishing deals and a good agent with it, really. Because if you can do it independently then that’s the idea – signing to a smaller label’s fine, but I think you can have the same problems… different problems. Whereas a major label is essentially a corporation and will work as a business, that’s fine, because in some ways they’re more transparent in what they do because they have to work as a major business: they have to follow certain guidelines. Whereas smaller labels, I find – the ones I’ve had experiences with – tend to work in a more dishonest way even than majors. My knowledge really is of a couple of smaller labels, locally-based – first of all, they have favourite acts, and the other acts based on those labels don’t really get a look-in unless it’s in some way benefiting the major acts, or the major act’s on tour and they’re supporting them and happen to be dragged along. And also smaller labels don’t have as much money, and so everything’s going to be put into an artist that’s going to sell – so they can actually be more money-orientated as well, in that they can’t take risks. And so I think signing to a small label is absolutely fine, and would be in our benefit, so long as they were interested in actually pushing us.

So basically, as long as you’re the main priority, and fuck everyone else!

Well, I don’t really mean it as that - as long as we were an equal priority, it’d be fine! But if we were just going to be put aside, there’d be very little point, to be honest. I mean, I say “from an artistic point-of-view, you don’t want to sign to a major” – you can probably get away with that on a smaller label: artistically they won’t bother having control most of the time – they usually don’t have the time to, if nothing else! But then with a smaller label you’ve got to look at whether there’s any point to doing that financially – I know it’s not really artistic reasons, but if the smaller label isn’t going to sell double the amount but they’re taking 50%, what’s the point?

In a review I wrote of the album, I described you as a peripheral member of the Nizlopi family – you have two members of their touring group in your backing band.

Yeah, I mean, I don’t really have that much to do with Nizlopi, to be honest – personally, I have no real connection to them. Bradley is an extended member of the Nizlopi family, definitely – he was their guitar technician for two tours, and he’s been taught double-bass by John, and so he has strong connections to Nizlopi and we’ve been able to work on those links quite a lot. But my connection to Nizlopi is a couple of support gigs really, and I know them as individuals.

Do you feel that you’ve benefited in any way from the exposure they’ve had? From my point-of-view, it seemed like you very quickly went from being some guy I knew at University to having a bit more of a local profile – is that a result of the light that was shone on them (no matter how briefly), or more to do with your own hard work?

I think it’s actually more to do with a change in my attitude towards it, in that I was always an obsessive songwriter in that I’d sit down in my room and spend hours over every single word – which I still do – and make sure that the song was exactly the way I wanted, and it was very honest, and very much a raw description of what I was feeling at the time. But when it came to performance, I was really shy and found it very difficult, and would look down at my feet and have nothing, really. And I went travelling for a little while and came back and thought “This is what I want to do”, honestly, and I think that’s what made a difference – I know it’s a bit of a cliché, saying you found yourself. I didn’t ‘find myself’ in that sense, but it gave me enough time away from things to think, “What do I actually want to do with my life?”

So then I decided to pretend to be confident for a while, and then after pretending to be confident onstage you kind of become confident – once you’ve acted the part for two or three gigs, you think: “Yeah… it’s not that bad, really, is it?!” So I think the change actually was largely psychological, in that I became a performer rather than just a songwriter.

I’ve seen you a few times where you’ve been happy to just abandon the stage and go out into the crowd – where did that come from? I know Nizlopi do it regularly, and I saw you do it once because the sound failed onstage – did it spring from that?

I did a gig just like that when I got back from travelling on my own – the PA was terrible, to be honest, it was awful, and I thought: I’m loud enough that there’s not really a reason for this PA, there are 15 people here, and I’m just distancing myself for no reason. So I just performed like that, and actually really enjoyed it And it also gives you a lot more freedom – I’m not very good at keeping still onstage these days, and so I find that if I’m in front of a mic, it kind of restricts what you can be, or the performance you can put on. So it was an accident, but whether I’d have had the confidence without having seen other artists do it, I guess is a different thing. Because everyone knows you go up and you sing into a microphone, and so without having seen Men Diamler, Nizlopi and Ozomatli do it and thinking that I’m not copying from any individual here.

Well, that’s pretty much all the questions I’ve got. Have you enjoyed talking about yourself today?

[Smiling] Yeah. Love it. All the time. It’s excellent…

Places We Neglect is available now via Amazon MP3 and Myspace.

ALBUM: "Journal for Plague Lovers" - Manic Street Preachers (Sony, 2009)

2009-05-24T07:04:00.000-07:00

To this day, the Manic Street Preachers’ third album, The Holy Bible, stands as one of the greatest anomalies in the history of popular music. Previously, the Manics had been known as third-rate Guns’n’Roses wannabes churning out god-awful, meaningless ‘anthems’ like Motorcycle Emptiness under the banner of some undefined revolution. For all the band’s radical posturing, however, to all but the most devoted fans they came across as all style and precious little substance: only the singles La Tristesse Durera and From Despair to Where hinted that there was anything going on behind the eyeliner. When it quietly emerged in the wake of Kurt Cobain’s suicide and against the upcoming backdrop of Britpop, The Holy Bible sounded like the work of a completely different band: no-one expected an artistic vision so focused from such an unlikely source, and even fewer were prepared for the savage, grubby, misanthropic brilliance of an album which is rightly regarded as their finest hour. Imagine if King Adora suddenly came out with In Utero three albums in: that’s the kind of U-turn we’re talking about. Witty, lacerating, dark, compulsive, horrifying: The Holy Bible is all these things and more. “He’s a boy; you want a girl, so cut off his cock / Tie his hair in bunches, fuck him, call him Rita if you want”. Nothing the Manics did before or since has ever come close to topping it; it was, as journalist Keith Cameron so aptly put it, “A triumph of art over logic”.

Nevertheless, it was an album born of circumstance rather than any kind of sustained inspiration or artistic rebirth - namely the increasingly troubled mindset of iconic guitarist/lyricist Richey Edwards, who disappeared shortly after the album’s release and hasn’t been seen since. Following 1996’s transitional epic Everything Must Go, the remaining trio has soldiered on manfully to become a tired, puffy behemoth churning out album after album of catatonic snooze-rock. If Richey’s still knocking about beneath the floorboards somewhere, even he would be hard-pushed to raise a smirk at the fact that the band’s biggest-seller– the stadium-conquering This is My Truth, Tell Me Yours - was also its most crushingly uninspired, spawning two of the biggest yawn-inducers in recent memory in the form of The Everlasting and If You Tolerate This, Your Children Will Be Next (oh, stop it). Even the much-vaunted ‘return to form’ of 2007’s Send Away the Tigers doesn’t really withstand sustained scrutiny: if its breezy summertime romping sounded vaguely… well, good, one suspects that’s only because the records that preceded it were so spectacularly flatulent that even the sound of Nicky Wire farting in a jar would’ve sounded promising by comparison. “I live to fall asleep”, James Dean Bradfield cooed on one particularly emblematic track from the ironically-named Lifeblood. You and us both, mate.

Make no mistake, Journal for Plague Lovers is the band’s shot at artistic redemption. While it’s perhaps unfair to rate their latest efforts alongside one of the greatest albums of the last 20 years, it’s difficult to mistake the band’s intentions this time around. The adverts for the album loudly proclaim “Lyrics: Edwards; Music: Bradfield/Wire/Moore”. Same cover artist (Jenny Saville), same font and typeface; it’s even produced by Steve Albini in a bid to replicate the low-down, grizzly feel of its predecessor. Completists have the option of shelling out for a deluxe edition featuring Richey’s lyrics and artwork laid out for slavish analysis. Clearly, this is IMPORTANT STUFF. It’s the band revisiting history, delving back into the darkest hour that produced a masterpiece. While evidently not quite an attempt to replicate The Holy Bible’s hermetic breeding-ground of self-disgust, it’s an official sequel of sorts, filtering the rage, satire and anguish through a decade and a half of embattled life experience.

And therein lies the rub. Last time around, the airtight synthesis of music and lyrics formed a perfect union: chief musical architect Bradfield was at the very top of his game, winding a series of suffocating motifs around dense, claustrophobic verses whose payoff invariably came at the point of most resistance, triggering a chorus that detonated from within to unleash a burst of melody so colourful that it sounded like rapture erupting from the bowels of Hell. It was invigorating precisely because no-one expected it from a band with just three good songs and a load of hot air to their name. In the years that followed, however, the Manics’ gradual metamorphosis into the lumbering rock dinosaurs one suspects they always were underneath appears to have nullified much of that source of initial inspiration. Consequently, Journal for Plague Lovers is an album packing heat but largely firing blanks, its scuzzy underlying intentions consistently undermined by a creative consciousness unable to cast off the shackles of mediocrity.

It all starts so promisingly with the opening minute of Peeled Apples. The ominous quotes from various media sources – such a distinctive, unnerving distinguishing feature of The Holy Bible - are back. Wire’s bass rumbles in like the bastard son of Archives of Pain; Bradfield and Moore spar restlessly as the riffs spike, slice and rip accordingly. It’s all going so well until… oh, god. They reference Chomsky. Chomsky! Before we go any further, let’s just clear up this matter once and for all: there are certain things that should never appear in any song. The word ‘juxtaposed’ is one (take note, Super Furry Animals). Name-checking Noam Chomsky is another - save it for the 6^th Form Sociology essay, lads. It’s an incidental moment, admittedly, but one which ties the song’s laces in knots so that it stumbles to the finish-line rather than sprints.

Indeed, the band’s overly reverent approach to its source text is Journal’s Achilles heel throughout, as demonstrated further in its lead single, Jackie Collins Existential Question Time. A great title in desperate need of a song, on the page it’s a terse antisocial screed hinging on the killer tag-line “Oh mummy, what’s a sex pistol?” On record, it becomes little more than a stand-alone one-liner which deserves so much more than the lifeless, uninspired plod of a hook that accompanies it. By the time the visceral rage of the chorus erupts from the song’s grimy underbelly (the closest we get to a true Holy Bible moment throughout), it’s too little, too late – you want more of that and much, much less of everything that came before. Fittingly, it’s all over within two-and-a-half minutes, at precisely the point when it was becoming interesting.

Indeed, if The Holy Bible had a weakness, it’s that the lyrics – apparently written independently from the music, and thus prescriptive rather than responsive – often put a stranglehold on Bradfield’s ability to weave conventional melodic structures around them. This time around, the verbiage positively spills off the page. For every great bit of off-the-cuff sloganeering (“It’s the facts of life, sunshine!” being one particularly choice soundbite), there’s a dozen examples of Edwards’ words blazing a trail that the band simply can’t keep up with. Facing Page: Top Left is by far the worst offender, undercut throughout by a meter that’s just plain ridiculous. “This beauty here dipping neophobia”, Bradfield croons, apparently oblivious to the fact that what might look effective on the page often has no place in linear melodic form. ‘This beauty here dipping neophobia’?! For the love of Richard Nixon!

Musically, Sean Moore does his part by contributing some rattling 16-beats, but Bradfield’s inability to conquer his worst vice – a penchant for lounge-tinged, easy-listening chord sequences that even The Walker Brothers would’ve balked at – often renders the melodies inert, drab and lifeless where they should seethe and scythe. As Send Away the Tigers suggested, the band are most effective nowadays when they jettison their artier aspirations in favour of a more conventional approach, and the best tracks here are often the most straightforward: Pretension//Repulsion and Me and Stephen Hawking are curiously chirpy larks whose rolling verses shed a ray of melodic sunlight on the proceedings, whereas the Cure-esque Marlon J.D. is a real standout - clearly the song Motorcycle Emptiness wishes it was, both in content and execution.

For the most part though the album offers moments of inspiration bobbing desperately in a tide of mediocrity. This Joke Sport Severed is fairly pretty for about thirty seconds before completely losing focus and then piling on the strings in a belated attempt to add a sense of depth and grandeur. Doors Closing Slowly is drab to the point of abject misery. The title track sounds unnervingly like the Foo Fighters’ Learn to Fly. Generally speaking (and god knows, I’ve wasted hours of my life debating the ‘merits’ of lumpen tripe like Little Baby Nothing to have ample experience in this matter), Manic Street Preachers fans are among the most blinkered, humourless devotees going, but you’d have to be either stone deaf or a complete idiot to consider the album’s closing track, the Nicky Wire-sung William’s Last Words, anything other than an appalling, tuneless dirge. If Edwards saw it as a shot at an unofficial suicide note, it’s ill-served by a man who manages to make lines like “Isn’t it lovely when the dawn brings the dew?” sound like the ramblings of a cheap greeting-card rather than the dignified exit Edwards intended. Atmosphere, it ain’t.

Wire, the perpetually smackable faux-controversy merchant, is no doubt very pleased with himself for putting out an album which, in his mind at least, will re-affirm the Manics’ position as the most revolutionary and vital band Britain has ever produced. Their fans will be all-too-quick to proclaim it a masterpiece. The simple fact remains, however, that only once in their 20-year history were the Manics ever half as clever as they thought they were. The fanaticism of their fanbase has built up an ill-deserved mystique around the band - in terms of influence, significance and overall musical achievement, the Manics just aren't all that important. In spite of its creators’ pretensions, in spite of their empty rhetoric – indeed, in spite of everything - The Holy Bible remains not just a modern classic, but one of the greatest records ever made. I wanted to love their new offering so desperately; more than any release in recent memory, it was something I was eager to get wrapped up in, pore over, digest and savour. As it stands, Journal for Plague Lovers is occasionally good, mostly average, but rarely great. And that’s just not going to cut it for your big redemptive gambit.

FILM: Be Kind Rewind (Michel Gondry, 2008)

2009-05-17T08:03:00.001-07:00

There was a fascinating news item recently about a group of kids who began making a shot-for-shot camcorder remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark back in 1981 using whatever limited means were at their disposal. They finally completed their masterpiece after eight years of painstaking work and, following a high-profile magazine scoop, eventually got to present it to Steven Spielberg himself. The ensuing hoopla secured them not just a limited release in selected art theatres, but also an upcoming Hollywood biopic after a producer bought the rights to their story.

I’ve watched the first ten minutes of their efforts online - given the circumstances of its creation (no effects budget, non-professional actors, sets created in their garage), it’s absolutely astonishing. The exercise in itself though raises numerous teasing questions: at what point does an amateur labour of love assume the mantle of being a work of art unto itself? Why is their experiment, conducted outside of the realm of commercial interests and apparently fuelled solely by an intense love of the original film, more legitimate than, say, Gus Van Sant’s much-lambasted shot-for-shot ‘revisioning’ of Psycho?

Michel Gondry, a director who dwells in abstracts more than most, is someone I’ve always had a fairly ambivalent relationship with. His undeniable imagination and knack for innovative flights of visual fancy (anointing him as a not-too-distant cousin of the equally divisive Terry Gilliam) forever seem to detract from the emotional substance at the core of his subject matter. Working from an achingly melancholic script by Being John Malkovich scribe Charlie Kaufman, I always felt that Gondry somehow managed to derail the guttural impact of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind by filling it with the kind of exhausting, overblown subconscious comic interludes which would later reach an excruciating nadir in David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees. Indeed, the director’s last effort - the execrable Science of Sleep - is one of the few movies I’ve ever felt compelled to turn off, such was the numbing experience of what felt like being bashed around the head with a child’s squeaky toy for 90 minutes.

His latest, though, represents something of an about-turn which might just prove to be the smartest meditation on audiences’ relationship with screen images to emerge from Hollywood since The Truman Show. A hyperactive, postmodern update of themes and ideas showcased in François Truffaut’s ‘let’s-make-a-movie’ classic Day for Night, Be Kind Rewind presents an investigation into the very nature of filmmaking itself: its motivations, its processes, its rewards. Cloaked in the auspices of anarchic surrealism, Gondry’s film operates around a philosophical, metacinematic conceit which works on so many levels that it’s often difficult to try and keep up.

Jack Black and Mos Def play a pair of small-town losers inhabiting Be Kind Rewind, a derelict video rental store in a crumbling neighbourhood which offers the simple pleasure of ‘1 Tape, 1 Dollar, 1 Night’. Its owner (Danny Glover) is a mild-mannered relic apparently oblivious to the threat of DVD and reluctant to take steps to modernise his business on the grounds that it supposedly sits in the historical birthplace of jazz legend Fats Waller, and thus ought to be preserved in its current state. Threatened with closure within 60 days unless extensive repair work is completed, the beleaguered owner undergoes a pilgrimage to Waller’s final resting-place in a bid to drum up fresh inspiration; in his absence, Black’s attempts to sabotage the local power-plant (don’t ask) lead to him becoming magnetised and inadvertently erasing the entire store’s contents. Rather than admitting defeat, the pair begins to shoot its own amateur remakes of the damaged films using a handheld camera. Far from infuriating the rental community, their efforts – including uproarious renditions of Ghostbusters, 2001, Carrie, The Lion King and Robocop - prove a massive hit.

Like Gondry’s previous cinematic outings, Be Kind Rewind contains its fair share of scrabbling for wacky laughs (in particular a gratingly superfluous scene in which Black’s magnetised piss attracts fragments of scrap metal), but the ultimate strength of the film rests in its deployment of a multifaceted conceit capable of withstanding numerous interpretations. Aside from presenting a simple but effective metaphor for the twin worlds of independent DIY filmmaking and the lumbering corporate juggernaut which sanctions ‘legitimate’ (i.e. commercially-motivated) forms of cinema, Be Kind Rewind can be read as a treatise on art and commerce, together with the conflicting market forces driving a wedge between them. Indeed, it contains perhaps the best swipe at corporate rental chains since the clueless store clerk in Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World mistook 8 ½ for 9 ½ Weeks, when Glover’s character creates a checklist of action-points while perusing the local rental behemoth: more copies, less choice, crushing market dominance and no specific knowledge of the product being offered.

The thin line between pastiche, parody, homage and all-out theft in creative endeavours comes in for passing analysis when, in a hugely enjoyable cameo, Sigourney Weaver pops up as the head of an anti-copyright organisation to threaten the pair with a multi-billion dollar fine or a total of 65,000 years in jail for their sins (the irony being that had the movies been recorded onto blank tapes rather than existing copies which remain “the property of the studio”, they probably could’ve gotten away with it under a legal technicality). Weaver, both key-master and gatekeeper to the store’s fortunes, ultimately orders the destruction of their labour under the auspices of protecting the studios’ commercial interests; “Oh, somehow we’re the bad guys now…”, she sighs wearily as her cronies literally steamroller the Be Kind Rewind team’s efforts beneath the wheels of corporate justice.

Turning in another aggressive comic performance guaranteed to amuse and irritate in equal measure, Jack Black’s character acts as a sort of Shakespearean Fool throughout, commenting on the process from the sidelines with numerous asides and symbolic interjections (in one particularly enjoyable episode which I will admit had me screaming with laughter, he blacks up to audition for the part of Fats Waller and seems baffled to discover that the townsfolk find it even partway inappropriate). To this end, Be Kind Rewind reveals a Brechtian artifice at every turn, from Mos Def’s blank performance in the lead to the fact that even its basic emotional foundations (the fabricated tale of the store’s origins) are a lie.

Be Kind Rewind is a veritable prism of ideas. It can be taken as a critique of Hollywood remakes, which are inevitably sloppier and inferior to the original but invariably more popular. It can be seen as an insight into the authorship process of movies’ conception and execution, specifically the extent to which audiences’ own individual hopes, dreams, ambitions and aspirations are reflected through our relationship with (and investment in) the material onscreen. Through the group’s creation of a fictional Fats Waller biopic, it also offers a window onto the ways in which we’re willing to allow cinema to reconfigure our own history for posterity, even if that means sentimentalising, fictionalising or ultimately constructing it from scratch.

Those who’d prefer to gloss over such conjecture can revel in some deliciously absurd parodies of Hollywood excess through Black’s growing megalomania and conviction that he’s more than just a star - he’s an artist (one fleeting, hilarious gag sees him photocopying his mugshot numerous times with the words ‘For Your Consideration’ scrawled underneath). Mia Farrow has an enjoyable bit-part as a daffy middle-aged sap blithely consuming the manufactured sentiments of films like Driving Miss Daisy as proof of her own compassion and humanity. Indeed, by parodying the inanity of both prestige and throwaway mainstream projects with such razor-sharp precision, Gondry breaks down the mystique of Hollywood lore - the oft-stated myth of “movie magic” - by demonstrating the extent to which apparent feats of technical brilliance can be replicated using primitive means, and meticulously deconstructs Hollywood conventions throughout (most notably when he sabotages a romantic moment beyond Mos Def and Melonie Diaz by reducing it to an awkward discussion of her lip hair).

Ultimately though the galvanising power of the medium is affirmed in the film’s closing shot, in which the town unites behind the group’s efforts at the premiere of their own fictional history. Beyond the final frames of the movie, the world progresses with its grim agenda of destruction regardless: the store is still going to be demolished, rendering its inhabitants homeless and customers destitute. Yet for one glorious moment they become heroes of the community, capable of uniting all races, genders, ages and classes in a moment of shared experience. Perhaps this is why the protagonists’ bumbling remakes ultimately fail to bring about the necessary financial turnaround to save their store: when their endeavours become part of a cynical upward trajectory and just another means to generate capital, they lose the element of creative spark which ignited them in the first instance. The triumph of Fats Waller: Our History – and, indeed, Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation – can thus be seen in simple terms: by virtue of their inherently hopeless acknowledgement that art and its potential affects can perhaps never be fully reconciled in any commercial system, they are invested with more heart, love and personality than a comparable big-budget enterprise could ever hope to be.

INTERVIEW: Flobots

2009-05-03T05:15:00.001-07:00

With the apparently arbitrary exception of Metallica and Queens of the Stone Age, the British commercial press seems to have had a real problem with American rock bands ever since nu-metal reared its blustering noggin. In their stubborn refusal to give the time of day to emerging alternative acts from across the pond (particularly any incorporating a hip-hop element), Flobots’ debut album Fight With Tools - one of the boldest, most outspoken records to emerge from the U.S. in years - seems to have been largely passed over.

A free-flowing, twelve-legged groove machine channelling the spirit of Public Enemy and Pete Seeger through the kind of snapping funk licks the Chili Peppers once made their own, in the run-up to last year’s U.S. Presidential election it seemed near-impossible to escape the chorus of Handlebars, Flobots’ incendiary signature tune. A chillingly lucid delineation of humanity’s conflict between creation and destruction, its duality seemed all-too pertinent to a nation battling to reassert its own political identity. Backed by a powerful video charting the progression of its narrator from freewheeling innocent to tyrannical plunderer, the song cut a disarmingly profound and even faintly subversive dash in the otherwise depthless wash of the mainstream.

While cynics continue to bicker that you can’t rage against any machine that you’re an inherent part of, the band has focused its efforts on pushing an agenda emblematic of a liberal conscience we’ve seen far more of from the States this last year: an ethos of peace, tolerance, progressive social policies and a desire to effect change through active engagement. Oftentimes political bands are accused of reckless sloganeering – of lacking direction beyond a given set of platitudes, and highlighting problems without proposing any tangible solutions. Flobots take the opposite tack. They know exactly what they stand for – it’s right there in Same Thing, in which they lay out the band’s own manifesto point-by point. Crucially, the band’s commitment to empowering their audience through political communion has led them to establish a network of Street Teams around their own non-profit organisation, www.fightwithtools.org. It’s a process that not only gives the sextet a chance to come good on its promise of continued engagement with grass-roots issues in the light of Obama’s election, but also informs their own creative vision. Indeed, though lead MC Jamie Laurie (a.k.a. Jonny 5) claims to be the only member of the band not to have seen it, in many ways Flobots’ message is The Wire in musical form: a call-to-arms sparked by a Molotov cocktail of incisive social commentary and barely-contained outrage (it even bounces to the same beat).

Having negotiated the Spinal Tap-esque labyrinth of backstage corridors at Birmingham Academy, I caught up with a cold-stricken, bleary-eyed but still strikingly articulate Laurie on their recent UK trek with politico-punks Anti-Flag and Rise Against. The following is a full transcript of the interview scheduled to appear in the May/June 09 issue of Rock’n’Reel magazine.

Politics and music have always proven a rather an uneasy mix for a lot of people – there are some who think the two strands shouldn’t be placed together at all, and some who think the link doesn’t go far enough. Your music strikes me as being an inextricable mix of two – it’s almost like the music is a vehicle for a particular form of political activism. Do you see yourselves as musicians first and foremost, or is it the activism that takes precedence?

Well, I think it was Boots from The Coup who said that if he really just wanted to be political, he would just write a speech. That would be his primary thing - he wouldn’t be a musician. So I think first and foremost, for every one of this is how we express ourselves. I’ve been writing raps since I was 16 or 17; it feels right. If I’m upset, and I can put those emotions into something that has a rhythm and a rhyme to it, and has a structure that sounds good, then no matter how bad the thing is, it has now been made into something beautiful, pretty, attractive or pleasing to the ear. So I think on a very basic level, all of us are musicians first. But at the same time, when it’s done right, political music is something that should express something that is genuine, and I think the reason we had success last year is because so many people in the United States, after eight years of living through a Bush presidency and the Iraq war were just kind of fed up, and so it was kind of like the whole country got politicised together. So I do think there’s something delicate about the balance, but if you check yourself and make sure it’s coming from a genuine place then I think you’re alright.

The message of the band seems to be encapsulated in Handlebars, and it’s something Brer Rabbit touched on tonight: you can either destroy or you can create. There seems to be a real drive in the band to inspire people and ‘give something back’ – is that something that’s come from your own relationship with music and your favourite artists, or is it your natural political conscience coming through?

Yeah, you know what, I can say on a personal level that when I first started getting into hip-hop, it was between Vanilla Ice and Eminem – there weren’t really white rappers that were well-known. So I had a set of questions I was dealing with around ‘What does it mean to be a responsible white MC?’ This is not the culture I grew up in, it was a culture that came to me through mass media, and yet it felt intensely personal to me, I really felt a genuine connection to it. So, what’s the solution – do I say “Okay, forget it, I can’t do this”, or do I say “Okay, I’ll do it, but I’m just going to ignore all the problems that people are dealing with, all the oppression that led to this art-form in the South Bronx and all the oppression of people of colour” – no, I can’t ignore that. So the answer for me comes with the activism being involved in the music – even just being a fan, if you’re hearing about something that’s happening across town, or in a different borough, or in a different city, I think you have a responsibility to not just say “Oh hey, that’s just a nice beat”, but to say, “How am I linked to the systemic problems that created this oppression, which led to some beautiful music”. And so for me that’s been guiding me from the very beginning as a white rapper, and that’s my portion of feeling why music has to be connected to activism.

I think if you look historically, every social movement has had music as a backbone – in the Civil Rights movement they were reworking black gospel songs, and using them to be able to withstand hoses, and withstand dogs. We just did a protest march recently with Rage Against the Machine, and Zack De La Rocha’s at the front with this banner singing “We’re not gonna take it / No! We ain’t gonna take it…” – you know, you need something to talk about when you’re on the frontline of the protest march. So music provides the language, the vocabulary and the guidance for all of these social movements.

The thought of Zack De La Rocha singing Twisted Sister songs warms my heart. I meant to ask, just for my own amusement - do you know Rage?

We played with them, but we don’t know them – this past summer, the Democratic National Convention was held in Denver, our hometown, and so a lot of people were excited: excited because it was going to be Barack Obama, but also there was all these people organising these protests around any major political convention, to protest corporate involvement in the political system and everything else. So we were involved in both the official DNC process and the political protestors. So we arranged with a group called Ten State Music Festival to end the war, and we helped set up this festival that Rage Against the Machine ended up headlining.

Did you meet them?

I met them, yeah, I was standing right next to Tom and Zack in the front row of marchers – we were all standing behind the Iraq Veterans Against the War, there was about a hundred veterans marching in front of us. So, we held the concert – it was state radio, The Coup, us and Rage Against the Machine.

The DNC was incredible, because it was not a permitted march. We had 10,000 people in the Denver House, and we said we’re all going to go out there and march peaceably but forcefully – and the city ended up providing police escorts because we were so orderly and clear about our intentions.

I remember in 2000, Rage played the DNC and there was a load of trouble afterwards…

Yeah, actually I was there for that – in the beginning part of that show I was in LA as a protestor.

At the time there was a big outcry in the media and they painted it as “Look at these rowdy liberals misbehaving” – was there no repeat of that this time round?

No, not at all – Rage invested a lot of time and money into making sure that the whole event went well, and that it was peaceful and clear… this was a day where music and activism was truly one thing. Everyone played their role. There were trained activists who flew in that day and made sure that the IVAW folks knew their role – there was a walk-through session that we did with the 10,000 people in the audience, saying “This is how we’re going to march; if you’re willing to risk arrest, this is where you stand; if you’re not willing to risk arrest, stand here; we’re not willing to be violent under any circumstances”… So every single person played a role, and it just felt like this is what music and activism is supposed to be like.

The Democratic Party, and particularly the Liberal movement in America, seems to have become incredibly disciplined over the last four years. I remember in 2004, there was a feeling that no-one could unite behind John Kerry - it seemed like they were trying to get him elected just so it wasn’t George Bush. Is it the case that everyone’s suddenly thought “This is the mission we’ve got to get behind”, and that was what then happened?

I don’t think it was that people couldn’t unite behind Kerry – it was that people couldn’t get excited about Kerry. You weren’t bringing in people who weren’t already Democratic voters. You weren’t bringing in young people who were disillusioned with the system. Michael Moore talked about the fact that the largest political party is the non-voters. I think Obama appealed to the non-voters, and inspired them to become voters. So it’s an interesting time.

It struck me while watching the elections that as soon as Bush wandered out of office and Obama was in, it felt like a whole new dawn had come. But I often think that outsiders’ perception of America seem to differ very strongly from what life is actually like in America itself. Has there been a sense that the country has changed?

It’s hard to say definitively. For me, living in a city that’s mostly a liberal area, and interacting with lots of folks who probably voted for Obama, it really does feel like we’ve gone from being the silent majority to actually being in power. It feels like a whole lot of things were rejected on that election day. The amount of dirt they flung at him, saying things like “Oh, he knows this Palestinian professor, he has a Muslim middle name” – the amount of shit they threw at him, every single time I thought it would stick, and was thinking “Now he’s done, because he’s been tied to William Ayres”. And the fact that all that happened and he was still able to be elected, to me that means that we’ve arrived in a new place. I’ve heard people sending around these snippets of him reading his book - in his book he has dialogue from when he was sixteen that has people cussing all over the place. And that’s the kind of thing you would’ve thought with all the puritanical American politics, that would’ve been brought out somehow – but all that ridiculous stuff, it feels like it’s over. And now there’s this new very real set of challenges – I mean, what the hell’s gonna happen in Afghanistan, he’s sending more troops and as a peace activist there’s a lot to be concerned about. But at least we’ve left behind the people who don’t believe in Global Warming! The question’s no longer ‘How do we deal with climate change?’ – that’s still hard, but that’s monumental. At least we’re not stuck in this retrograde mode.

There’s been a sense over the past eight years that there’s been a very small group of awful people doing exactly what they want to do, and ruining the world for everyone else. And the rest of the world is sat there thinking “Hang on, we don’t really want this…!” It seems like the government has been unrepresentative, which I think is why Obama got in – it’s the public saying “No, this is not what we’re like”.

Exactly. It really does feel like what we’re trying to do with our music is say “Let’s be as loud and vocal and forceful about who we believe we really are”. We really believe that we are people who do not want war. And that’s why that line [in Same Thing] is a little more than just politics – it’s more like a catharsis. It’s like if you were to take the American psyche into a therapy session, those are some of the things it would need to say. It would probably say “We don’t do this, we didn’t want this war, I never wanted this!” And you have people who are at various stages. I’ve been demonstrating since the very beginning, and there were millions of people demonstrating against the war before it happened, but there are a lot of people that went through this change – they voted were Bush, were pro-war, and now are in a new place. And so I think what we’re trying to do with the music is say that even though we’re casting a wide net, let’s look at what we’re seeing and feeling and sensing from everyone around us – not just the people who agree with us, but the people who were really in a different place four years ago. And let’s try to put that emotional content into some simple phrases.

I was listening to the album again recently and it seems to be an almost utopian ideal that the band stands for. I noticed on the Fight With Tools site that it says “Flobots do not endorse or oppose any political candidate, party or specific legislation”. Do you class yourself as Liberals? Libertarians? Humanists? Hippies?

[Laughs] Well, I mean, there’s six of us and not everyone voted for Obama in the band. I think because last year was such a rollercoaster for us – we went from being a small local Denver band to suddenly touring Europe – we really had to think through: what do you do when you get a gigantic microphone? Because when you’re small and you have some cause, you say “Oh, I wish I had a gigantic microphone – I would tell everyone what to do”. And then you get it and you think “I have 14-year-old kids just waiting to do whatever I say” – should I really just say what to do, or should I say, “You have a good mind, you have a better knowledge of your neighbourhood than I do – use your mind, look around you, get active”. And that’s the direction we’ve gone.

Talking to other folks on this tour, that’s the process that everyone’s gone through when they’ve realised, like, “Wait – I can just tell this entire mob to go that way”, or: “Help each other out – if you see someone fall down, pick ’em up”. And that’s why I think punk culture really is inspiring, because I’ve been watching these shows and punk rock culture involves everyone looking out for each other. If someone was to collapse and have a seizure at one of these shows, there’s no doubt in my mind that there’d be several groups of people helping out – and I don’t think that’s gonna happen at every type of show. But it’s something happening with these audiences where they feel empowered. So I think that’s the approach that we take.

Going back to what you were talking about a moment ago regarding the band’s progression from a small state act to having a national profile - has there ever any tension between the saleability of the band and its politics?

No, because what happened was that we released the album ourselves – we released it independently in Denver in September 2007, and it was because of the sales locally that Universal was attracted to us. And so when they signed us they knew what they were getting, and we were very upfront about the fact that we’re clearly not going to bend politically or stylistically against our wishes. And they didn’t really want that - the reason we were comfortable with signing with them is that they said “Look, we’re here to break new acts – you guys are already doing a good thing”. So what it did was to give us a bigger microphone, it gave us a wider audience, allowed us to do more touring, get on the radio and stuff like that. But it’s the exact same album that we released on our own. Right now we’re writing a new album, and we were very clear, like – “We’ll let you know! We’ll let you know when our album’s done”.

Upon first hearing the song Iraq in particular I remember thinking “God, I can’t believe a major label has put this out!”

I mean, here’s the thing. By last year, everybody was against the war. When Starbucks is writing ‘Yes We Did’ with Obama beans, people are on a different page! Even if they were [disputing the band’s political content], it’s a niche market and they know they can make money on anti-war bands. So I have no illusions about why labels sign bands, but I also think that for a lot of people at the labels, they themselves are opposed to the war, they’re Democrats or they’re… whatever they are, they I think feel some vicarious involvement in the messaging as well. If it were 2002-2003, I’d be very curious whether an anti-war message would’ve gotten through.

I saw that documentary about The Dixie Chicks a while back, Shut Up and Sing – have you seen that?

Yeah, I have.

- Terrifying. My friends and I were watching it thinking, “What sort of a fucked-up country would ever allow that to happen?” [The band was roundly vilified during the opening weeks of the Iraq conflict when singer Natalie Maines made a relatively harmless comment denouncing President Bush.]

Yeah, and I think that people forget. I was in DC for the inauguration week and there was this activist named Van Jones who was saying “Let’s not rewrite history” – we’re in danger of rewriting history since the Barack Obama movement. Let’s not forget, 2002-2003, we didn’t have any leaders - all we had was each other. We had these uncomfortable Thanksgiving dinners with relatives who did not agree with us; we didn’t have anybody but each other at that point, and that’s really important to remember. Because there’s things right now, like Palestine – that’s something that I really hope the United States this year will shift, that conversation will get more open. Or immigration – these are conversations that are not necessarily comfortable to have. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat or Republican, there’s an ideological monolith of opinion in those areas that I’m hoping we can start to broach a little more this year.

Michael Moore always talks about the ‘gap in the system’ which allows artists to say inflammatory things from within the confines of a certain corporate platform, provided there’s profit to be made. Have you ever felt like the label has thought “We need one anti-war band to satisfy our certain quota”, or felt exploited in that way?

No, maybe because I’ve never thought of it! [Laughs] But even if I was, I wouldn’t have a problem with it - if the market for anti-war or human rights bands is increasing then I’m still happy. I like it when the market happens to go my way! I like Fair Trade chic – I think we should take our victories where we can get ’em. If suddenly it’s cool and trendy to be anti-war, let’s go with that, and then let’s go deeper and say “Okay, you got your anti-war shirt at Urban Outfitters, now let’s look at how your living habits intersect with forces that lead to war”. There’s always a step deeper you can go, but hey, if it’s cool to be anti-war and marketers tap into that, great. I’ll take it, you know?! Thanks for doing our work for us! There are vodka adverts that are like, ‘Make vodka, not war’ – I was like, “Alright! I guess we’re moving along!”

Going into the musical anatomy of Flobots, there’s a real sense of the band being a proper cross-genre musical collective. The influences which immediately seem to spring up are Rage Against the Machine and Red Hot Chili Peppers, but I also spotted a bit of 311 and Cake in there.

I don’t know 311 or Cake’s stuff very well - Cake we get a lot because of the trumpet on Handlebars, and maybe my vocals on that song a little more so. But it is true that the rhythm section are very into Rage and the Chili Peppers – maybe 311 also.

So what do you consider the band’s roots? Is it more Public Enemy, Jurassic 5…?

All over - I mean, our bass player: Tool, Rage, Chili Peppers, but also we’re all into The Roots and a lot of different stuff. It’s very difficult, because all six of us would have a completely different set of influences. Lyrically I’m into West Coast underground 90s hip-hop – Project Load, Quantum Spectrum, Lyrics Born, Common, Outkast – Outkast’s maybe a universal influence in the band.

How do you feel about the current state of hip-hop? It strikes me that that there’s always this perpetual divide between the Gangster side – 50 Cent, The Game etc – and what I call the ‘musical’ or lyrical side of people like Immortal Technique, Jurassic 5 and KRS-One. Does it frustrate you that the more interesting voices always seem to get pushed to the sidelines?

I wouldn’t divide it quite so starkly – I mean, I think that gangster rap can be a lot of other things too, sometimes the cinematic aspect is like gangster movies, you know? But it’s a little less upfront about “Hey, I’m just portraying a character”. But a lot of gangsta rap can be really lyrical too, or a lot of times it’s reflecting an actual reality people are dealing with. But I guess I would flip it the other way – there are a lot of really talented underground groups like Immortal Technique who I wish could break through more, but he’s pretty well-known and he’s independent so he’s getting all that money himself! He has some lines about the fact that he’s sold 80,000 but it’s all straight to him, you know, so he’s made more money than if he went gold. I think he’s making waves and pretty well-known as well, so I guess what I would say is pretty frustrating is that especially younger artists are feeling like “If I want to do the art-form, I have to do this content”. People get content confused with form. If you want to be a battle rapper, that’s great, but I hope more and more people are aware that you don’t just have to be a battle rapper. To be a rapper doesn’t automatically mean to be a gangster rapper – maybe that’s what texture you want to play with, but look at all these other textures out there. But by and large I really think that hip-hop has expanded so much, particularly in the iPod generation who are not strictly looking at one genre, that people looking at all these different cross-pollinations.

The record has a very improvisational feel – does the band jam together and just let the songs evolve naturally?

Yeah. This is our first full-length album together and we really did have to relearn and rediscover the process of songwriting for every single song. All those songs came from a different place – some of the songs start with a viola hook, some would start with a concept, some started with a bass-line, some would start with lyrics – so if they feel that way it’s because they were written so differently. Now with the new album we’ve discovered our process a little bit more, but it’s still coming from all six of us, and each one of them generates some momentum.

I read somewhere that this started as a side-project…?

Yeah, I’ve always wondered why we put that on there! I don’t know how you’d define ‘side-project’ – the way it started was that it was first myself and Brer Rabbit and Mackenzie, just the three of us with DJs. And then Andy, who played in another band, said “Hey, why don’t we try putting a live band behind that”. And so this other band backed us up for a test-show and we said “Yeah, we like that”, and then shopped around a bit to get the current line-up. So basically the idea was, “Let’s combine these two MCs and viola player with a live band”, and Flobots was born.

I was thinking earlier: what a ballsy move to have a room full of punks cheering a viola solo…

That was our biggest cheer tonight, I’d say!

Which leads me to the question I really want to ask – Handlebars. An incredibly subversive record, and it’s not every day that you hear a song with such a strong message get in the charts. Obviously it’s been the band’s calling-card over the past year and is responsible for bringing you to people’s attention – are you sick of it yet?

No… I mean, it’s hard to conjure up the same emotional source that I originally was coming from when I wrote the lyrics for it, but I’m not sick of it. I’ll get waves of resurgent energy around that song – I’ll look out and see a different audience, a new audience, a new set of faces really into it and it suddenly hits me, like: this is how we got here, this song struck a nerve.

I read somewhere that it was [L.A. rock station] KROQ’s most requested record for three months straight. Were you ever worried that when a song reaches that level of ubiquity that it’s going to be misinterpreted and lose meaning or - worse still – idly consumed?

I think things were moving so fast at that point that we didn’t even have time to worry about that. There was a station in Florida that played it for three hours straight – they had an all-request three-hour session and they said “We know what you guys are gonna request, you’ve been requesting it all night, we’re just gonna play it straight” - I think the idea was like, ‘We’re gonna burn you out of this song so you never want to hear it again’! But no, I think with every song – especially songs on the radio – it’s always going to be a spectrum of how involved people are in it. I mean, the four-year-olds that are singing that song maybe don’t catch the deep meaning, and maybe a lot of forty-year-olds don’t either – they just say “Oh, this is that song that’s stuck in my head”. That’s why it’s music: the job is to get stuck in your head, the job is to catch you with a melody. But I figure if you look at the bell-curve of people that in general listen deeper to music, they listen deeper to that song, and just imagining the “Ah-ha!” moments people might be having, like “Oh… this is a little more than I thought” – that’s a good feeling, to think that eight million people or however many people who’ve heard the song might’ve gone through that process.

Was there ever a feeling when you came up with it of “Hang on a minute - this is the one that’s going to catch on”?

Andy, our guitar-player, I remember said at the beginning “Oh this is gold. This is a hit!” For me, every song I write I get excited about, like right after I write it I wanna go share it with somebody. I think that’s just the artistic ego, when you’re done you’re like “Look! Look how good this!”, so for me it wasn’t more or less than any other one.

Has there been any pressure from the record label to repeat its success?

If there has, they haven’t told us about it. They know better than to come to us and say “Give us another Handlebars”! They know we’re gonna write songs and make every song as good as it can possibly be – I’m excited about the new album though, I think we have quite a few songs that to me are hits. I don’t know if they’re radio hits or what station they’ll go on, but musically I’m very excited about this album because we’ve been doing these songs for a year and a half. We had a Colorado release of 2007, and even then it’d been about six months since we wrote those songs, so we’ve worn these songs pretty through and through.

Obviously though this is the first time that people over here are really getting to see the band – does that rejuvenate your love for the material when you see that sort of reaction?

Yeah, new audiences always rejuvenate it - but new material is also priceless, and the time to let that creative energy out. Because we’ve been touring the last six months, it’s been spilling out here and there in soundchecks and writing sessions on the side, and the last month and a half we’ve just been releasing it and it’s coming together so quickly in so many different directions.

I remember a famous comedian saying when Bush disappeared from office that his first thought was, “What are we going to do for material now?!” Now that we’ve had this seismic political change, are your lyrical concerns going to stay rooted in grass-roots politics or are you going to be addressing different issues?

I think of it this way: the concept of Fight With Tools was based around a World War II propaganda campaign – translating that into this war for your mind. And so we were using big shapes, we were speaking in pretty broad terms; it was deliberately propagandist. But every propaganda poster has cracks in it: it was a real person who put it up with contradictions, and it was made somewhere, so to me all of these things are cracks in the surface that are more complex, more personal, harder to deal with – I think that’s where we’re shifting this time. Like, we’ve come together under this banner, there’s been a lot of people who’ve been attracted to the message of Fight With Tools – but now let’s look at us as people. Let’s try to express ourselves as individuals, and let’s also look at the reality of social movements and their limits.

Very specifically we’re looking at sustainability as an issue – it’s kind of a lens for this album, because that was actually what our Street Teams picked as our focus area for 2009. Over New Year’s Eve we had a conference for Fight With Tools members: about 75 people came, half of those from outside of Denver and Colorado, and people spent three days getting to know each other but also coming together around, “What do we want to focus our efforts on next year?” Last year it was voter registration, what’s it gonna be in 2009? And people said “Look. We need to empower ourselves as communities to create sustainability”. Not just environmental sustainability, but sustainability in the work we do as activists, as organisations, economic sustainability… we have to create that.

If you look at the history of American politics over the last forty years it seems like there’s a definite voting trend that goes eight years Democratic, eight years Republican. There’s also this feeling of dread creeping up that if Obama can’t turn water into wine over the next eight years that we’re going to have President Palin with her finger on the nuclear button. There definitely has to be a continued engagement, like: this is a good starting-point, but there’s still work to be done.

Well I think that’s why we try to de-emphasise political leaders too – this isn’t about, like, “Throw that leader up there and see if it works; throw this other leader up there and see if that makes change”. To me, Obama is about having someone on the inside. We have the social movement, we’ve been building it up for years and years and years, but specifically the ant-war movement – like I said before, we didn’t have him six years ago. We just had ourselves. All we have is each other. That’s still all we have, but now we got this guy Obama who’s in the White House working on the inside, and if we push hard enough then he can make some decisions that’ll complement the movement. So my hope would be that the more people that are cognizant of the movement as the power source rather than the political leader, then if the political leader or the political decisions fail in some way it doesn’t mean “Okay, turn the other direction and move backwards”, it means to keep moving forward.

Final question, then: where does the band’s fascination with the platypus come from?

Well, I think we identify with the platypus. The platypus doesn’t fit neatly into any category. The chronology of the story is actually that on our first EP, before we named it, there were two songs with the word ‘platypus’ in there - and then someone said “You’ve mentioned the platypus twice!” so I said “Why don’t we make that our album title?” But it felt appropriate once we did it, we were like “Yeah… yeah!”

Fight With Tools is available now on Universal Republic.

BAND: Dinosaur Pile-Up

2009-02-17T07:26:00.000-08:00

My quarter-life crisis - a rather sorry ongoing affair which basically seems to involve dressing exactly as I did when I was 15 in a bid to salvage some semblance of identity in a world apparently determined to trample all over it – just found its elixir. Leeds-based three-piece Dinosaur Pile-Up take the chunkiest bits of Marcy Playground and weld them, A-Team style, to Weezer’s melodic chug, creating a scuzzy, laconic slab of 90s slacker-rock delivered in the style of classic grunge-pop trios The Lemonheads and Sebadoh.

However, they’re much more than that. Dinosaur Pile-Up are the sound of wallet-chains, scratty cardigans and mooching around outside your local convenience store snacking on Opal Fruits. They are the soundtrack to wasted summers arguing over whether Pinkerton could take The Blue Album, bingeing on Kevin Smith movies and prepping yourself for the prospect of seeing Rage Against the Machine at a summer festival (back when Zack had dreads and they still played Tire Me). They evoke memories of collecting each single on coloured 7-inch in readiness for the album, May 4^th Star Wars retrospectives, Back to the Future marathons and rushing out to get the new Pearl Jam LP on the day of release. They are the sound of house parties scored to Everclear, Pitchshifter, Terrorvision, Kerbdog, The Wildhearts, Smashing Pumpkins, The Offspring and Silverchair. And by God, they’re absolutely fucking brilliant. They even have a song called Hey, Billy Corgan! which manages to cram not one but two 90s rock references into its title (the second being a quote from the Foo Fighters back when they were still that awesome new band featuring Nirvana’s drummer).

If none of this sounds vaguely appealing… get out. You haven’t got a clue. Dinosaur Pile-Up are the mid-to-late-90s incarnate: a period of rock history never given its due despite the wealth of quality music it produced. If you ever found yourself on the receiving end of a townie’s wit and wisdom (usually involving the words “hippy”, “frib” or “grebo”) for the eternal sin of growing your hair out, you need to investigate this band right now. Not just because they bring the crunching half-time breakdown back to its rightful place in the final 2/3rds of a song, and not just because the last recorded use of their bass-tone was by Robert Sledge on Whatever and Ever Amen (a factor which nevertheless pleases me no end). But mostly because they are the sound of glorious fucking sunshine in a world overrun by idiotic try-hards who think that Skins has anything to do with anything, and they're every bit as much fun as their name suggests. Join the pile-up now before some awful cunts in the press coin the term “nu-grunge” and ruin it for everyone.

SONG: "1492" - Counting Crows (Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings, 2008)

2008-09-09T11:30:00.000-07:00

In recent times I’ve found myself in a bit of a quandary when asked to name my favourite albums.

Somewhat harshly ranked #33 in Q magazine’s list of all-time Guilty Pleasures, Counting Crows’ 1993 debut August and Everything After was always, always my favourite record. Naysayers be damned - with its rootsy orchestration (recorded in a big house - just like The Band!), gut-wrenching sentiments (“Time and time again / I can’t please myself…” – right on!) and a healthy dollop of melancholy (two songs with the word ‘Rain’ in the title!), what the hell was there not to love?

Well, plenty, as it happens. I bought the double-disc Special Edition of the album recently and it still holds up incredibly well, but there’s been a disheartening trend in Counting Crows’ subsequent output that’s seen them edge gradually further away from the band I fell hook, line and sinker for all those years ago. Would the sorry likes of New Frontier ever have been allowed to slip past the quality-control barrier back in the day? Would Amy Grant have been allowed to belch a few ill-advised “Bap-bap-bop”s over the likes of Sullivan Street as she was last time around on their lightweight cover of Big Yellow Taxi? In fact, is any of this behaviour even faintly becoming of a band responsible for the magisterial likes of A Long December? Frankly, I think not.

Frontman and chief ornithologist Adam Duritz recently came clean about his history of mental illness and the struggles with prescription medication which caused his dramatic weight-gain over the past decade. These revelations put a rather problematic spin on their latest record, which I admit makes me feel rather bad about glibly dismissing it as the ramblings of a boozed-up middle-aged model-fucker upon first listen. Indeed, since learning more about the album’s genesis I’ve felt compelled to go back and listen to it afresh from the point of view of the artist’s intention: a portrait of Duritz slowly losing his mind and attempting to get it back again. Be warned though - this is an album you’ve got to really want to love.

Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings’ spiritual kin is clearly Recovering the Satellites, the band’s bruised and bloodied sophomore effort which their singer frequently cites as their greatest achievement. Like that album, Saturday Nights totters woozily from one track to the next and buzzes with the disorienting hum of a sickly adhesive. It’s a more obviously lived-in record than the sugary pop of 2003’s Hard Candy, and a conscious attempt to return to both the live group dynamic and emotional honesty of their early work.

There’s a snag though: it’s just not that great. As suggested by the band’s ambitious but frequently infuriating habit of modifying their own material mid-performance, the songs here often ramble formlessly in a futile quest for melody and structure. Constantly teetering on the brink of all-out anguish, as a concept album it’s also fairly uninspired – the first half mostly lacks the exuberance required to set up Side Two’s broken comedown, which drifts by in a haze of twinkling pianos, shuffling acoustics and half-finished balladry. That it’s eventually enlivened solely by closing track Come Around (itself a rather lazy retread of A Murder of One) to me speaks volumes for the band’s collective lack of inspiration.

To be quite honest – and it really does pain me to say this about a group I used to cherish so dearly – but for all the empathy you want to feel for the man, it’s actually getting pretty tedious to listen to Duritz bang on about how his “dizzy life is just a hanging tree”. Whereas the singer used to cloak his insecurities in layers of poetic imagery, nowadays his confessionals have a tendency to sound more like the self-indulgent clatterings of a man given way too much creative leeway. Taken as a whole, the record suffers from the exact same problem that blighted Damien Rice’s 9 – while I’m an avid supporter of honesty in music, the relentless onslaught of naked outpouring is all just a little too much to bear. Indeed, when coupled with the band’s diminishing capacity to construct anything resembling a tune (they badly need David Bryson or T-Bone Burnett to grab hold of the reigns and steer them back on course), it makes for a rather drab and depressing affair that’s closer to Ryan Adams’ abortive “masterpiece” Love is Hell than anything in the Crows’ otherwise palatable back catalogue. All things considered, there’s just not a whole lot to love here.

There is, however, one track on the album which rises high above the firmament to prove itself the equal of any song from their glorious heyday. Opening rocker 1492 is the song in which Duritz inadvertently captures everything he fails so heroically to convey on the rest of the LP – the squalor, the degradation, the heady rush of stumbling from bar to bar blind drunk on a cocktail of euphoria and self-disgust. Whereas many of the album’s lyrics take the form of straightforward first-person confessional, here Duritz wraps himself in metaphor once again as he reconfigures the history of America into his own quest for meaning and identity: “I’m a Russian Jew American / impersonating African, Jamaican…”, he slurs violently before throwing himself headlong into “the dark Italian underground, of disco lights and disco sound / of skinny girls who drink champagne, and take me on their knees again”. Pitching himself as a pathetic modern-day Columbus, the song represents Duritz’s desperate search for meaning in the sordid wasteland of his own self-loathing as he seeks validation in every outlet available to him. Ultimately, however, his quest is rendered futile when he falls victim to “the silence that surrounds us, and drowns us in the end”; eventually he has no choice but to surrender to the beautiful, shattering conclusion that “I am the king of everything / I am the king of nothing”.

Not since Angels of the Silences have the band rocked this hard or scraped such towering emotive heights. Rough, ragged and topped off by the most expressive, tumbling exhalations this side of the lacerating howl which opened Weezer’s Pinkerton (an entirely more successful exercise in public flagellation), 1492 is frantic, exhilarating and quite possibly the best thing Counting Crows have ever done. It is magnificent. It’s so good, in fact, that it proved the album’s lone saving grace in meeting a premature fate at the hands of eBay.

Having given them the benefit of the doubt (let’s face it, any band capable of conjuring something as magical as Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby deserves a second chance once in a while), I decided to let the album settle before going back and giving it one last shot. Sure enough, it’s a tough listen, but I’m slowly coming around to accepting its flaws as part of one man’s rocky road to recovery. Reprieve granted for the time being, Duritz. Just, y’know, a bit more discretion next time around …

ALBUM: "Letters From the Underground" - Levellers (On the Fiddle Recordings, 2008)

2008-09-07T14:05:00.000-07:00

There was an interesting article which appeared in American satirical mag The Onion during the run-up to the 2004 Presidential election. Largely eschewing the acerbic humour for which the publication is famed, author Jacob Ainsworth instead posed a simple but potent question: “Where Are You Now When We Need You Most, Rage Against the Machine?”. In a climate of fear, reactionary politics and widespread disillusionment with the powers-that-be, never it seemed had a country needed a single band more. Zack De La Rocha's acrimonious split from the quartet after a decade of rocking and rabble-rousing had left a gaping hole in the mainstream's ability to bring underground politics to the masses - indeed, one need look only at the fairly muted response to George W. Bush's dubious instatement as President across most of the major media outlets to affirm the fact that an outraged American public lacked a very definite focal point for their defiance.

Since the decline in their commercial stock around the turn of the century, one could argue much the same of the Levellers. Back in the 90s you could not only count on the band to be ranting and raving about the burning issue du jour on each of their albums, but would most likely bump into them on the street waving a banner with the rest of Britain’s concerned citizens. Inevitably, perhaps, the revolutionary zeal couldn't last - I distinctly remember Mark Chadwick telling me around the time of their major-label blowout Hello Pig that he felt there was only so many times you could discuss political issues before starting to feel that you were bludgeoning people over the head. That the band would begin to mellow as the individual members found their priorities shifting wasn't an entirely unwelcome development - in actual fact, they were often at their most affecting when addressing matters of the heart. Nevertheless, their absence as cultural figureheads was notable to social justice campaigners. Where was their raucous outcry at the fall-out from 9/11, the invasion of Iraq and the Downing Street memo? They were still here, you knew they weren't happy about it, and in actuality the band continued to trade in a fine line of defeatist outcry somewhere under the radar. But without a massive chorus, a visible presence and the attention of the masses, they were no longer considered key figures for the counter-culture to rally around.

A recent feature in The Word pitched the sextet as a prime example of Ramones Syndrome: that elite collection of bands who just never seem to change. In truth, though - and this is a fact evidently pointed out to them by their new manager a few years ago in what can only be described as one of the most deserved kicks up the arse in recent memory - the Levellers should never be ashamed of their history. Hardcore-hero-turned-social-commentator Henry Rollins admitted on his recent tour to finding himself bewildered but energised by the fact that he seems to get more vitriolic with age. On this evidence, the Levellers seem to be feeling very much the same way, with the new LP slotting in nicely between the youthful vigour of Levelling the Land and the battered anger of its 1993 follow-up. Even a fleeting glance at the record's song titles - Death Loves Youth, Accidental Anarchist and Burn America Burn to name just three – should give you a fairly accurate indication of their agenda this time around. With the exception of catchy heartbreak anthem Before the End (a real standout), the lyrics are politically driven throughout and the album’s closing track, Fight or Flight, is even faintly reminiscent of Motörhead. Make no mistake, they’re pissed off. And by god, it makes for an absolutely cracking listen.

That they’ve never sounded more confident or self-assured speaks volumes for the renewed sense of purpose of a band entering into its third decade and realising that it still has something important to say. Rollicking opener The Cholera Well – Dirty Davey with a serious bee in its bonnet – sets the pace and tone with blistering intent. As ferocious as any barnstormer from their heyday, the track sees Jon Sevink’s fiddle restored to its rightful place at the forefront of the charge as drums race, guitars slash and the bassline bounces. Mark and Simon's vocals sound particularly frenzied on these faster numbers, with lyrics spilling off the page as if years of pent-up frustration have finally rediscovered their natural outlet.

And yet maturity serves them well this time around as compassion and understanding accompany age and experience. The album's finest moment arrives midway in the form of Behold a Pale Rider, a mournful and poetic ballad reminiscent of Mouth to Mouth's stirring centrepiece, the elegiac Far Away. Gone are the days when the band could be accused of reckless sloganeering in their lyrics; instead the track represents a genuinely moving attempt to come to terms with feelings of collective responsibility for the tragic events of 7/7 as Simon sings, "Millions cried sweet Mary / A million more cried tears of shame / When they saw what they had done in the name of all their hopes and fears / When they realised what they became".

Whereas previously it may have seemed like their weary latter-day anthem Wake the World represented the last gasp of the band's weathered political conscience, Letters From the Underground tackles their previous failures head-on and burns with the feeling that they must now attempt to improve the world for their children. It’s heartening that R.E.M.'s recent reawakening and the long-overdue return of Rage Against the Machine seems to have had a knock-on effect in popular culture that may yet direct the spotlight back towards this most vital of acts. Their zippiest and most consistent offering since 1995’s Zeitgeist, Letters from the Underground is exactly what long-term supporters of the band have been secretly longing for since the sonic curveball of Hello Pig and their well-intentioned but muddled subsequent output. However, to say this marks a return to form is to sell their achievements short; it's a rousing assault on apathy that for newcomers will prove as vital and exciting an introduction to the Levellers as any of their early recordings. It’s time to believe again.

SONG: "Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo" - The Bloodhound Gang (Hefty Fine, 2005)

2008-08-31T08:13:00.000-07:00

Despite having been an unapologetic proponent of The Bloodhound Gang’s breakthrough LP Hooray for Boobies back in the day, I was surprised to hear this song for the first time just recently while skim-watching an MTV rundown of The 100 Greatest Dumb-Ass Videos. I suspect its lack of exposure as a single was partly due to its harmless but thinly-veiled smut ratio (a fact that predictably led to its unilateral banning across US commercial radio), and partly the fact that its parent album features the decidedly unappetising image of a naked fat bloke on the cover.

As a song, there’s really nothing to it. As the title suggests, the entire thing is basically just a series of barely-coded shagging metaphors, including such masterful couplets as “Marinate the nether rod in the squish mitten / Power-drill the yippee bog with the dude piston”. Dig a bit deeper, however (stay with me here), and there’s actually more to be had from the band than a cheap kick and the occasional smirk.

At the risk of stooping to one of their own awful puns, you can take The Bloodhound Gang one of two ways. On the one hand, they’re the ultimate musical throwaway, a funny-the-first-time amalgamation of every reason why American culture will never ascend beyond the level of pie-fucking and Rob Schneider. However, I prefer to take their oft-stated motto of “No reason to live but we like it that way” as an artistic manifesto of sorts. Rather than simply being content to scrape the bottom of the barrel à la cosmetically similar frat-rap bozos Hot Action Cop and Limp Bizkit, the band’s penchant for witty wordplay and knowingly childish visual antics (the video for this song is an absolute hoot) make them America’s premier practitioners of a peculiarly prescient strain of blank-faced Gen-X dropout humour. Their wilful nihilism is there for all to see in their unending preoccupation with sex, mooching and pop culture, all delivered in frontman and chief creative architect Jimmy Pop’s unblinking monotone. As his knack for a pithy reference attests (“Why try? I’m that guy / Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye”, he spits on the smartly-titled Magna Cum Nada), it’s not that the boy can’t write – he just chooses not to. Indeed, beneath the gratuitous smut there’s also quite a sweet little tune here. I reckon there’s something to be said for the gleeful sense of sheer pointlessness exuded by their “art”.

Then again, it could just be a bunch of elaborate knob gags.