The Skinny's Favourite LP of 2010: Joanna Newsom - Have One On Me

Top 10 of 2010
No.1 Joanna Newsom - Have One On Me
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Pay attention: it's hard – when there are photos, graphics, animations, videos and flashing coloured boxes, links to definitions and further reading and green cards and prizes, pages left and right and a billion others nearby, comments to make and songs to hear, hot new bands and unknown cult heroes and trends and friends and not enough time – to focus.

On one thing.

Until its end.

Without jumping away.

We apparently have to hand more information about the last eight years than about the preceding fourteen billion, because every new second spawns gigabytes of data: every sparing thought is a status, comment or tweet, every idea a blog post, every sight a photo, every sound a song, every song a dozen videos and on it goes. It's impossible to keep up with all this... everything, but we try. Multi-tasking is the new relaxing. We’re over-stimulated by unlimited content from an over-populated planet. Nothing sustains; it’s next, next, next, next.

At no point in the history of recorded music has a triple-album been a good idea, but especially not this point in history. It's just too long. Less is more, Joanna. Doubles are already pushing the limits. It just shows you don't know how to edit yourself, Joanna. To an iPod shuffler, filler is the biggest crime of all, and triple albums are serial offenders. To a multi-tasker, patience is an anachronism and subtlety a hindrance. A triple album by Joanna Newsom!? Next!

Have One On Me, astonishingly, wouldn’t be improved by editing. It's truly a first: a triple album that justifies its entire length. With Joanna Newsom, more is more.

After the elaborate fantasia of Ys, Have One On Me is comparatively straight-forward: instead of sinister pacts between runaway animals, here we have songs about the familiar twenty-something concerns of love and relationships, beginning with a blissful announcement of new love and ending with a sorrowful admittance of loves failure. But it's not an easy listen: her voice, modified after a throat injury, is still to newcomers thin and affected; her arrangements are sparse and delicate, her melodies subtle to tease out; her lyrics, more direct than before, are still shrouded by erudite poetry. And – did I mention? – it's more than two hours long. Have One On Me is not casual listening. It pays to pay attention to it.

Joanna Newsom is a dazzling lyricist, in both the positive and negative senses of "dazzling", but now almost wholly in the positive. On her first album, she sang "never get so attached to a poem you forget the truth lacks lyricism" and duly remained so attached. The Milk-Eyed Mender and Ys were full of beautiful lines, but lots of them were impossible to parse; Have One On Me is full of beautiful lines, but few are pure show, and many more lay their truths bare. In Good Intentions Paving Company she develops the story with wonderful phrases like “It had a nice a ring to it, when the old opera house rang, so with a solemn Auld Lang Syne, sealed, delivered I sang"; then she delivers a sucker punch at the end with the plain appeal “I only want for you to pull over and hold me 'til I can’t remember my own name.” Those moments hit right in the gut, because they're a reminder that emotions don't wait for the mind to articulate them. Joanna Newsom is meticulous, but her heart is not.

As carefully as she places each syllable, she places each note. There's not a gramme of fat on Have One On Me. Esme, 81 and On A Good Day are entirely solo, just Newsom and her harp. Baby Birch and Go Long feel just as sparse, every slow string twang allowed to live its full life to create an incredible intimacy. Then jaggedy guitar slaps burst through the former, a heavenly kora rains down in the latter, and they both very gradually build to stirring conclusions. In California, one of the album’s most beautifully frail songs, has 14 credited performers, unbelievably, as does the title track, which develops over its eleven minutes with quite staggering dexterity. Some players shuffle in for a brief flourish and then vanish; it's sufficient. No silence is filled without reason, no solo supported without cause.

Have One On Me stands out in 2010 because it's stimulating art, not just stimulation. Music and technology are moving towards convenience as a common goal, but Have One On Me is not convenient, it’s a challenge. The vast availability of music to the modern listener promotes a box-of-chocolates approach – many flavours, tasted briefly – but Have One On Me defies brief sampling, requiring many listens to reveal all its charms. Scenes and fashions can often be relied upon to flesh out a musician’s image or ideas, but there's no scene or fashion supporting Have One On Me. It’s a unique and uncompromising album, and in the age of tl;dr, that makes it a totem for the independent artistic ideal.

Primavera Sound 2010

Even when it gets little things wrong, Primavera Sound never really fails.

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Primavera Sound has its fundamentals cast in stone: always a great line-up of music (always, in fact, far too much great music to see), in one of Europe's most beautiful cities, under the Mediterranean sun. So, while I'm going to explain a little why Primavera 2010 wasn't a vintage year in the context of its predecessors, it's with reluctance that one would attach negativity to it at all. Weeks like this one make life worth living.

Over the weekend we clocked Wilco, Spoon, Orbital, No Age, Mission of Burma, Tortoise, Low, Sunny Day Real Estate, CocoRosie, Wire, Liquid Liquid, HEALTH, Shellac and Sleigh Bells on the Primavera schedule; we didn't see any of them perform. The depth of the Primavera programme means there's frequently three- or even four-band clashes, which makes for some wrenching choices, and some fast cuts. Gary Numan played Cars third in his set, and then watched half his crowd leave to go elsewhere; it's a competitive market.

Primavera's expert curation and wonderful location mean it's getting more popular every year. Fittingly, as it's primarily an indie music festival, its fans have mixed feelings about it succeeding too much. What the organizers are presenting as the great achievement of attracting record attendances of 35,000 per day, is experienced by the crowds as a reason for disappointment, since it's now harder to get near the stage, takes longer to walk between them between sets, and takes longer to queue for the toilets or for food. As you might argue for many bands on this bill, Primavera's best days may have been before "everyone else" discovered it.

But even if that's the case, it's doubtful anybody left Primavera in the early hours of Sunday morning disappointed. For, at worst there was still the final few gigs in the city centre's Joan Miro Park later that afternoon to look forward to, and a closing party featuring Jeffrey Lewis and Black Lips (another two to add to that list; we chose paella on La Rambla instead). For the non-Barca resident, the Primavera experience begins when you arrive in beautiful Barcelona. We spent the day before the festival wandering the labyrinthine streets of the Gothic Quarter, dipping in and out of old, dark bars and cafes, and exploring parks with glorious fountains.

Despite the rise of music tourism, Primavera's core crowd is still decidedly Spanish (or, more precisely, Catalan). It's hard to say whether anyone ever listens to what The Fall's Mark E. Smith is saying anyway -- as opposed to how he says it -- but surrounded by singalong Spaniards, phonetically feeling their way in the dark, it becomes even more mysterious. On one song, sung by the keyboardist, MES is so bored that he wanders the stage, splays his fingers across her keys like a drunken duck trying to type, and then smirks. He hates the sunshine.

The XX sound like they hate the sunshine too -- tall bassist Oliver Sim looks like a young Lurch -- so their pre-sunset slot is poorly timed. But as the sun drops, the darkness shrouds their songs in gloom, and the bright stage lights shining on their faces present a similar black-white contrast to their album imagery. After much restrained tension, the climax of finale Infinity is stunning, with Sim slamming cymbals as bass beats blast like machine gun fire.

Thursday's headliner is the newly reformed Pavement, who are just as the backhanded compliments of their youth suggested: very good. There's a thrill in simply seeing them perform so many of their best songs, but our favourite parts are when Bob Nastanovich gets involved: leaping to the front of the stage to yell the chorus to Conduit For Sale, leaping up and down to hit a wood block on Silence Kid, and, well, leaping to the front of the stage to yell the chorus of Unfair. Like a big kid, he looks like the one band member enjoying it as much as the crowd.

Geoff Barrow's Jaki Liebezeit-indulgence project Beak> is apparently inspirational in a dark, intimate setting, but as with The XX, here a large stage, bright sunlight and Mediterranean backdrop makes it difficult to admire. A little later, in the dark, Beach House make the same ATP stage intimate with an inspirational set. Their sedated sound bores some, but fatigue makes you forget social pretences, so the Baltimore duo's permanent tiredness lends an end-of-tether honesty to their ballads. Finishing with the unusually peppy 10 Mile Stereo sends us away regenerated.

Les Savy Fav's Tim Harrington is more frontman than singer, and more ADHD-mad toddler than frontman. He emerges in a giant furry bear suit, wearing flashing red lights round his eyes, strips down to his pants, then runs a good 30m through the crowd to balance, on his belly, on the top of a pole. He then races past us -- we're not near the stage at all -- nearly taking our neck off with the mic cable, finds a fan on someone's shoulders and heads to embrace him. There's a burst of noise -- no singing yet -- and he returns to the stage to attempt to climb it. Les Savy Fav are exciting to listen to, but they're much more exciting to watch.

Unfortunately where we headed next, The Vice stage, was problematic. Everything we saw there lived down to expectations. Panda Bear had to perform with a minimum of on-stage lighting, and at a volume which barely washed over the crowd's excited chatter. Stood there in darkness, with a guitar and a mixing desk, Noah Lennox's echoing warble sounded dreary, not trippy. Like Numan, whose fans abandoned him three songs in, Panda Bear had to deal with a quick exodus. Numan himself was delayed 25 minutes by technical difficulties, and Yeasayer's post-Pixies set was hampered by poor sound too.

Pixies themselves were thrilling, moreso than we expected. Sure, Black Francis has moobs and Kim Deal has a new "manageable" haircut, but fans lamenting the loss of Pixies' youth, the fantasy of their early wee garage shows, are clutching expectations wildly out-of-step with, y'know, how time works. Those days are past now, and in the past they must remain. Isla De Encanta and Vamos are sungalong to by Spaniards relishing lyrics they understand for a change, and Hey!, Debaser, Broken Face, Nimrod's Son and the encore of Gigantic and Where Is My Mind? get ecstatic receptions too. In a festival in thrall to nostalgia, the Pixies exude the most vitality. After Diplo finished the night at 5:30am, we walked five minutes to the beach to watch the sunrise, then went for breakfast. More Friday nights should finish like that.

The Food: Do the free-poured spirits with mixer count as food? The non-alcoholic food in Primavera is pretty poor: its signature dish, the pizza cone, is only to be enjoyed ironically ("It's like an ice cream, but pizza!" and so on). The flavour of the pad thai remarkably managed to be overwhelmed by the taste of the cardboard box it was served in, but the felafel kebab gains a few points by actually being a chicken kebab. A nice surprise for me, probably not if I happened to be a veggie.

Inevitably, Saturday begins slowly. Van Dyke Parks is credited with assisting Brian Wilson away from the Beach Boys' surf-pop origins towards the avant-garde, having worked with him on SMiLE. In the auditorium, his traditional pop and classical influences are clear: while superficially similar to Sherman Brothers-era Disney, his arrangements are complex: Parks on piano, his cellist, bassist and violinist all seem to start playing different songs before converging together. His modest patter is hugely endearing, his return for an encore seems genuine, and the standing ovation that follows certainly is. Built To Spill's set at the ATP stage is packed with highlights from classics Perfect From Now On and Keep It Like A Secret, but it's an epic rendition of Goin' Against Your Mind from the less-appreciated You In Reverse that unleashes rolls of energy through the crowd.

Headlining the final night on the main stage, Pet Shop Boys' bizarre on-stage choreography is endlessly entertaining: dancers with boxes for heads building walls, line-dancing skyscrapers of the world, box-headed couples fighting with the bricks of the wall; Neil Tennant dresses up as a king, and Chris Lowe seems to wear a pineapple on his head. More entertaining are their hits -- Can You Forgive Her?, What Have I Done To Deserve This?, Go West, Always On My Mind, West End Girls -- which buffer the lesser known songs to keep the mood high.

Finally, the 3am clash between The Field, Orbital and HEALTH is particularly galling, but we have no regrets about picking the former, at the Pitchfork stage. Playing with a drummer, guitarist and bassist enables Axel Willner to exercise a lot more fluidity in his performance than Ableton Live alone would allow; or at least, it looks more like a performance than a man at a laptop ever could. The drummer is especially good, adding frills, rolls and extra rhythms to create new patterns; he needs a break after 45 hypnotic minutes, before a final 15-minute Over The Ice that seems to hold for an eternity before shattering.

Introducing: Sparrow & The Workshop

Introducing: Sparrow & The Workshop
(well, not if you've been paying attention here already)

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The Scottish live music scene is about as healthy as it's ever been right now, but that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of new young bands trying to live out rockstar dreams based on little more than the ability to detune a guitar. Earplugs are always recommended, to protect your ears and to protect your sanity. But sometimes you catch one: a new band several steps above the others, like athletes where sloths went before, and it all becomes worthwhile. I knew Sparrow & The Workshop were special from the moment I first saw them live in late 2008. Now they're releasing their debut album and, whaddaya know, I was right!

Sparrow formed two years ago after Jill O'Sullivan (lead vocals) and Nick Packer (guitar, bass) moved to Glasgow from London. There they met Gregor Donaldson (drums, vocals), and the boys began to put some flesh on the bones of songs Jill was already writing. Since then they've been gigging relentlessly, in support of British Sea Power, Idlewild and others, and they've also released two well-received EPs, Sleight of Hand and Into The Wild, which have now been combined to make the album. Jill's high, agile voice, like Joni Mitchell's but with a Southern twang, has instant appeal, but a great singer would be wasted without great songs, and debut album Crystals Fall has those in abundance.

"People call us 'folk noir'," Gregor says. "They say it's just a wee bit weird, in a good way, or they say it's a new take on a timeless kind of music. We enjoy making it, so I'd like that to come across, that we're having fun." Early reviews have highlighted the dark themes of their lyrics and the folk roots of their songwriting, but guitarist Nick isn't afraid of causing a racket, as in the thrilling crescendos of Crystals and Into The Wild, and the sliding solo of Swam Like Sharks.

Gregor's drumming is crucial too. He's not content to do the basic 4/4 support while the song marches on. Instead, he's always looking for gaps, chances to duck in and out, like a winger using tricks as well as pace to beat his man. It's no coincidence that his drumming takes centre-stage on some of the album's best songs, such as Into The Wild and Devil Song.

"We've had some pretty nice things said about us already," Gregor says, and those positive vibes are only going to continue.



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Meursault: Escape From Auld Reekie

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(crappy photo taken by me on my phone about a year ago at The Bowery)

In the 16th century, after defeat at the Battle of Flodden, Edinburgh built a wall around its limits to protect itself from an expected invasion by the English. They never came, but the Flodden Wall proved useful to the city's rulers as a means of penning citizens in, making criminals easier to catch and traders easier to tax. The wall is mostly gone, but some mysterious force still seems to pen the capital's musical citizens in.

Every August, Edinburgh becomes the cultural capital of the western world, yet its own contemporary music rarely travels far. For two years, the chatter around these parts has been dominated by Meursault, and if you've been to a small-scale gig here recently, you've probably seen them. Meursault have performed live hundreds of times now and won new fans every time. Our readers poll saw their debut album, Pissing On Bonfires/Kissing With Tongues, qualify as one of the best Scottish albums of the last ten years. But despite their obvious talent, the hype has remained dispiritingly local.

It's time they burst through the wall.

For the uninitiated, Meursault are a six-piece (formerly four-piece) led by singer-songwriter Neil Pennycook, a big bald guy with a breathtaking boom of a voice. Other members combine autoharp-strumming with Ableton-programming, korg-playing and banjo-picking: they play modern forms of indie-rock and electronica, but with strong roots in Scottish folk. Pennycook has a versatile voice, but when he yells, jaws drop.

We caught up with Neil to hear more about Meursault's upcoming second album, All Creatures Will Make Merry.

How did you want your second album to be different from the first?
The main difference would be that I'm a lot more certain of what it is that I'm trying to say with these songs compared with those on the first record. If I've learned anything, it's to trust my own opinion and to work at my own pace. Also, playing with a full live band has helped shape this record considerably.

Do you mean - expanding to a six-piece?
Yeah. The two new members, Pete on cello and Phil on guitar, have opened up a huge range of possibilities with these songs. As well as other less obvious benefits such as Phil also acting as our booking agent which brings a whole new level of organisation to things. With Pete joining it gave me the opportunity to work closely with someone who understands music from a completely different perspective than myself, what with his being classically trained and his ability to understand every facet of a song as he hears it.

What would you say your influences have been for this record?
I've been listening to a lot of The Microphones, Mount Eerie. And I guess that's influenced my production style a fair bit.

How do you expect people will react?
I hope people get what I was trying to achieve with the production and arrangements as well. It's this idea that just because a song has a grander arrangement, or is more than just guitar, bass and drums, that shouldn't necessarily entail that it needs slick production, which always seems to be the case and has been for as long as people have been making records.

Edinburgh's happy to have Meursault, but logistical problems have undoubtedly played a part in keeping them here. They're signed to a bedroom-sized local label, Song By Toad, better known as a blog run by Matthew Young, and there's only so much he can do. And with six members, co-ordinating time off work to tour has proved extremely difficult. Hence most of their gigs in the last couple years have been in the homely Bowery basement, downstairs at what is now the Roxy. They were able to rehearse there regularly, and played so often they became like an unofficial house band. Just around the corner from the Bowery, on Drummond St, is a still-standing portion of the Flodden Wall. They're very close to getting beyond it.

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Caribou: Selling Live Water

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"I thought everybody was going to hate this album," Dan Snaith aka Caribou tells The Skinny over the phone. Incorrect, red pen, cross. Show your working! "I've never been one to play it safe or want to not-rock the boat, but this is a big left-turn, there's much more dance influence, there's much less in the way of poppy songs." OK, so you follow up an award-winning breakthrough album with something very different, and you risk alienating fans. But no-one's going to hate Caribou's magnificent new album Swim.

Snaith is a very open and articulate talker. After half an hour's chat, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that his brain responds to music in a mathematical way. Partly that's because his back-story involves a lot of maths and it's hard to resist a good narrative, but partly it's because of the way he talks about music: like a song is a set of problems that can be solved, expressed in sound instead of numbers.

Dan Snaith's back-story (involves a lot of maths)

The Snaith family could hardly be described as multi-talented. "My dad was a maths professor, my mom was a maths teacher, my sister's a maths professor, my grandfather was a maths teacher, my brother-in-law is a maths professor." According to Wikipedia, his sister Nina works in random matrix theory and quantum chaos; just so you know. Dan himself has a Ph.D. in maths from Imperial College, London, where he now lives.

The very talented Snaith family were based in a little Canadian town called Dundas, in Ontario, population 25,000. Without a music scene, Dan's musical education lacked the constraints of received wisdom. "When I was in high school I was listening to Plastikman and Yes. Maybe if I'd grown up in New York or London or somewhere there'd have been a sense of context to the music, like 'oh yeah people are part of a scene here'. For me it was just like: this sounds exciting, I dont care if it was made fifty years ago or yesterday, I dont care where in the world it comes from. I didnt have any context for anything I listened to, because there was nothing musically going on in the little shithole town where I grew up."

About ten years ago Snaith began releasing glitchy, Warp-like electronic music using cut-up and re-worked samples, under the name Manitoba, but he had to change the name after a legal threat from the lead singer of The Dictators, Handsome Dick Manitoba. "Manitoba is a Canadian province, so it was irksome being told by an American asshole that nobody could use the name of a Canadian province apart from him! So Caribou is the North American name for reindeer and as a word it evokes the same kind of things and places as Manitoba does, to me." It has nothing to do with the Pixies song. "No, I was into Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, and really horrible, terribly unfashionable progressive rock when I was a teenager!"

Manitoba's second album Up In Flames (2003) was the first to catch a prevailing wind, because it contained more accessible melodies smudged by reverb and echo, exactly as the bright, blurry cover art suggested. Having approximated his aesthetic, The Milk Of Human Kindness (2005, as Caribou) improved on it, and Andorra (2007) was better again, winning the 2008 Polaris Prize, the Canadian equivalent of the Mercury. Continuing the pattern, Swim is even better again, though it's far more based on rhythms than melodies. As he said.



The way Dan Snaith talks about music

Stuff like this: "I'm influenced by hearing someone else's music and thinking 'How the fuck do they do that, technically?', and trying to do my own take on it." If you add these notes, and these sounds, in this order, at this tempo, do you get this emotion, every time? And this: "I'd already settled on what I wanted to do for Andorra, I wanted to figure out how to write pop music, how to compose and arrange it," as if pop music is a quantifiable thing, a science that can be learned, with right and wrong answers at the end. And this, about lyrics: "Rather than on Andorra just sketching some hypothetical scene of two people falling in love, say, just this kind of format for lyrics to mirror what was going on musically in the song, this time it just felt kinda natural that the lyrics had more to do with things going on in my life." If I'd misheard that word 'format' as 'formula', it wouldn't change the meaning, would it? This is what a pop song looks like, now see if you can solve it for x.

And this all begs the question: is that how more of us, or all of us, respond to music, even if we don't realise it? Some people hear a power ballad and recognise the melody as being dramatic and emotional, and then feel the emotion and feel the drama; others hear the same melody and recognise the same formula, but refuse to be led to the same conclusion. What causes these opposite reactions? In an interview last year with Eye Weekly.com, Snaith said "Once I feel like I can do something, it becomes less interesting to do it again." He's found x.

"In high school I was in an indie rock band and all my friends were into that kinda shit but I hated it" Snaith says. "I didn't see the attraction to it until I got to university and then it totally changed, it became this very creative, abstract, more imaginative thing." OK, I cheated there. In the first quote he's talking about music. In the second quote he's talking about maths. Where do you draw the line?



Swim isn't about maths, at all. According to the press sheet, he wanted to make "dance music that sounds like it’s made out of water rather than made out of metallic stuff like most dance music does". "The last track on Andorra [Niobe] is essentially an attempt to rip off James Holden's music," he said on the phone, "to figure out how it works, music where elements seem to breathe and grow and then fall apart. It's a very non-machine-like process and I couldn't figure out how he did it, but I loved the idea".

"On a song like Kaili, all the synthesisers are constantly washing around, nothing sits still, everything's moving, appearing and disappearing. So there's this back and forth idea of musical fluidity." So that's why this record is called Swim? "And also just for the totally naive reason that I became obsessed with swimming over the last year, which probably had an influence on me wanting to make the music sound liquid."

So is the clanging percussion on Bowls really made with... bowls? "They're Tibetan singing bowls," he says. "You know you can run a stick around a glass with water? I picked up these bowls while I was in Asia cos I'd always liked the sound of them. I did this kind of thing a lot with this album: I sampled the sound of these two bowls individually and then played them on a keyboard as if they were the starting point for a synthesiser, changed the filter, changed the envelope. So it's kind of a hybrid between a bowl being hit and it being a synthesiser."

Even when Snaith shows his working, he still gets remarkable results.

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Interview: Dirty Projectors

interview feature for clash magazine

Depressingly often, talking to a musician is far less interesting than listening to their music. When "we just make songs what we like, like" is the most perceptive explanation a band can give about their creative processes, the facepalm is instinctive. That's not the case with Dave Longstreth, mastermind of the Brooklyn-based Dirty Projectors, whose new album Bitte Orca is one of the best records of the year so far. Despite Bitte Orca being an endlessly inventive and fascinating listen - and a fun one too, beard-scratchers - he talks a real good game, if you can actually get hold of him. Sure, he's performing with David Byrne, and yeah, he's in the studio with Bjork; we've heard all these excuses before, press person! When Clash finally does touch base, he's still juggling a million things to do, but while we've got him, he's going to make an impression.

Dirty Projectors have been a going concern since 2002, and used to include two members of Vampire Weekend. In recent years they've been cultivating a reputation as a band easy to admire, but not quite so easy to love. Isn't the idea of a chopped-and-screwed rock opera about a suicidal Don Henley kinda amazing? That's Dirty Projectors 2005 album The Getty Address. And what if a band tried to cover an entire album that they hadn't listened to for 15 years, basing the whole thing on blurry fragments of teenage memories? That's Rise Above, from 2007, in a conceptual nutshell. Both albums had plenty of great moments, but ultimately felt like they were born of better ideas than execution. Bitte Orca isn't so easy to narrow down, but it seems like the absence of an overarching theme has taken the edge off its abstract experimentalism, allowing the band more room for baser aims, like hooks.

So I ask Longstreth to explain what Bitte Orca's about, really, and he says this: "Collapsing dualities, conciliating factional antagonisms, creating Mexican blankets of formal beauty and arresting emotionality". I don't quite know what to say to that, so he continues: "Parsing the future for potsherds of the past, reggae kaleidoscopes, goofing around with noise-gated snare drums". There's a pause. "'Stillness Is The Move' is sort of a love song" he continues, much to my relief. "The beat is based on T-Pain. We commissioned a radio mix of the song by the guy who mixes all of Timbaland's records, but the mix we made sounded way better, so we didn't use it." 'Stillness Is The Move' is the album's first single, a juddering, trilling, soaring kind of alien R&B ballad, featuring bright lead vocals from Amber Coffman. Explaining the new prominence of both female band members -- following song 'Two Doves', a clear tribute to mournful German chanteuse Nico, is sung by Angel Deradoorian -- Longstreth says "I wanted it to feel like a Beatles album, each of the singers with a lead number, playing with foreground and background. So much of our singing is about sharing a melody between two voices, or dividing a harmony into component voices, you know. Giving the girls a lead number felt like a natural application of that idea to the album as a whole."



Like all Dirty Projectors albums, Bitte Orca is packed full of ideas - but this is the one which gets them all to coalesce together most smoothly. It's all pretty odd on first listen: you'll hear flashes of Peter Gabriel, King Sunny Ade, Pere Ubu, Captain Beefheart, Talking Heads, The Fiery Furnaces, Arthur Russell and Frank Zappa in there at different times, not forgetting the aforementioned T-Pain and Nico. Somehow, even though he's pulling from so many different boxes, Longstreth still manages to put his hundred-piece puzzle together and form a clear picture, a picture that looks in whole like no-one else. It's been enough to convince two of the world's most critically revered musicians, David Byrne and Bjork, to collaborate with Longstreth in the last few months. Firstly, Byrne and Dirty Projectors recorded 'Knotty Pine' together for the Red Hot Organisation's Dark Was The Night charity compilation this winter. Then Bjork got in touch, having been impressed by a Dirty Projectors cover version of her own 'Hyperballad', and Longstreth agreed to write a suite for her to sing, again in support of an AIDS organisation. The six-song Mount Wittenberg Orca, which is planned for release "sometime", is about an imagined moment of eye-contact between Coffman and a whale. "Bjork is a huge inspiration for me," Longstreth says, "It was a big honour to write music for her. She said the only other person's music she's ever sung was Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire." That's not a name that often gets dropped in interviews with indie-rock bands. But Dirty Projectors are not a normal indie-rock band.

An Introduction: Meursault

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Ask any music fan around Edinburgh who their favourite new local band is, and there’s a fair chance you won’t get the same answer twice.

This is a boom time for a city which lags way behind bigger brother Glasgow in terms of musical heritage. At the forefront of the capital city’s efforts to catch up are Meursault, a foursome led by singer and songwriter Neil Pennycook, who released a superb but slept-on debut album late last year.

Pissing On Bonfires / Kissing With Tongues was released at the height of year-end list season, meaning its many gushing reviews were quickly forgotten in the rush to put 2008 to bed and get on with 2009’s next big thing. But fans in Edinburgh didn’t forget - Pennycook is a big guy with a big heart and a big voice - why look for anyone else?

Though he tells me the word bugs him, we can’t proceed with a description of Meursault without talking about folk. Any group which uses banjo, ukelele, accordion and acoustic guitar, and which has songs that create mythologies around long-forgotten local heroes, is inevitably going to be associated with folk music. But that’s only a small part of the Meursault story, because they also use an assortment of electronic devices to add beats, beeps and rushes. Please, don’t call it folktronica - it’s much more fun than that.

Take ‘The Furnace’ for an example. “I was trying to write the catchiest, most infectious pop song with the weirdest bunch of instruments I could get my hands on,” Pennycook says, and he succeeded: it’s got a ridiculously catchy banjo melody sitting between skipping beats and abrasive scratching noise. Recent live shows under the side-project name Art Fag have demonstrated even more experimentation, with new influences like Holy Fuck and Animal Collective appearing. These recent shows have been stunning.

But then, when the noise subsists, Pennycook’s gift for straight-forward songwriting shines through. Songs like ‘Salt Pt.2’, ‘The Dirt And The Roots’, and ‘William Henry Miller’ from the ‘Nothing Broke EP’, are simultaneously heartbreaking and heartwarming. “There’s not a lot of hard fact out there about him,” Pennycook says of the latter titular figure, “that’s why I like it, because you can piece things together and make your own pseudo-folklore.”

But perhaps their most impressive single feature is Pennycook’s unmistakable foghorn voice, which you can sometimes hear just wandering the Old Town streets, where you used to hear bagpipes. Now there’s a new way to seduce the tourists.

Chic: Good Times Guaranteed

feature for the skinny

Nile Rodgers has an abundance of amazing stories to tell. Some of them are about his band Chic, who were the biggest group of the late 70s disco explosion, and his side-project Sister Sledge, who had several more dancefloor filling hits. Some of them involve world superstars like Diana Ross or David Bowie or Madonna, because be produced the biggest-selling albums any of them made. Some of them involve other stars like Debbie Harry, Duran Duran, INXS and Mick Jagger, whom he also produced. And some of them involve the birth of hip-hop, at which he was present, thanks to The Sugarhill Gang’s unauthorised borrowing of Chic’s Good Times to lie under Rapper’s Delight. He enjoys telling these stories, and The Skinny enjoyed letting him.

Like, there was the one about the time Debbie Harry took him around New York to visit some hip-hops – congregations of hip youths, hopping – where at every single one, Good Times was being spun, over and over. Some time later, he went to a nightclub and heard it again, only for the DJ to start rapping on top of it – "I said a hip-hop, a hippy to the hippy to hip hip hop..." – only, it wasn't the DJ. "I looked in the DJ booth and I thought it was him and a couple of friends rapping over a musical bedtrack which they had created." That was a reasonable assumption to make, because for a while fans had been jumping on stage at Chic gigs to grab the mic and rap. "We didn't mind seeing this in a live arena, like what we'd seen at a hip-hop, that was cool 'cos it was just a performance thing, and it was interesting to watch. To know that people had rehearsed rhymes and routines to perform over Good Times – that was cool!" But the DJ wasn't rapping in the booth, the vocals were coming off the vinyl. "The thing that was ironic was that Rapper's Delight generated more revenue than Good Times because it was only available on 12", so you'd pay $3 for a song that we would sell for 79cents, almost four times the amount! When it comes to artists sharing work there's a sort of unwritten rule that some things are cool. I always find it a little bit weird when we all know where an idea came from but the person changes it enough that, y'know, it's cool. I'm pretty sure you can think of dozens and dozens of records you know that come from another record. I mean I do it all the time myself, we all do! But there's a difference between inspiration and plagiarism. So, basically that happened with Sugarhill Gang, they crossed that line."

It’s interesting to think of that in light of Rodgers' unexpected explanation of Chic’s formation. “When you're coming up with a band and coming up with a concept, you work with artistic ideas the same way you would do a sculpture, you mould those ideas or reinterpret them. It's very clear in today's musical world there's more of a collage culture, because of hip-hop, it's a re-interpretive culture.” In the early 70s, Rodgers and bassist Bernard Edwards had become fans of Roxy Music, and especially liked the glamour portrayed by Bryan Ferry's beautiful model girlfriends on the covers. Meanwhile their friend (and later keyboard player) Rob Sabino was hanging around with a guitarist called Ace Frehley. “This was before Kiss really blew up and got signed to Casablanca. They were still an underground band, but they were already doing the makeup thing. So basically the concept of Chic was a fusion of those two ideas, the Roxy Music covers with the girls and the Kiss logo and Kiss's anonymity because of their makeup. Our version of Kiss's anonymity was putting on suits and pretending to be bankers from France or something!”

The bankers from France didn't stay anonymous for long. "We thought in our hearts artistically we were doing the right things and it would be successful. When Dance Dance Dance forced the black station to play our music because the white station had started playing it first, we realised that, OK, we got something pretty unique here!" In this country, that doesn't really make sense. What's a white station? "David Bowie told me something really fantastic," Nile Rodgers begins another anecdote. "He was explaining to me why people from the UK know so much more about music than your average American. It's because of the way that the radio was formatted, on BBC [Radio] 1 they were just playing whatever was happening, they didn't care whether it was blues or jazz or R&B or dance or whatever." Contrarily, in America, radio stations only play specific niches to specific demographics. This is important, because it's difficult to think of disco without also thinking of the backlash it provoked in America in the late 70s. If disco isn't your cup of tea, that's fine; but in Chicago in 1979, 75,000 people donated disco records to be exploded, with a bomb, in a Baseball stadium. Disco sucks, they said, and then BOOM, and big cheers all round. Isn't that a bit much? Isn't that a bit like a book burning?

That rabid hatred of disco was likely driven by homophobia and racism, but music always finds a way to challenge preconceptions. In these senses, the disco explosion in the States mirrored the UK's punk breakthrough. Both genres were propelled by a new generation rebelling against what rock had become in the mid-70s – no longer the vibrant and exciting challenge to the status quo it represented to the post-war baby boomers, but the status quo itself. Punk's anti-authoritarianism took on confrontational guises, while disco became a vehicle to challenge the homophobic attitudes of the mainstream, as embodied by the macho rock fan. Most disco artists preferred messages of positivity, community, and triumph through dancing – rather than the aggressiveness of punk – as exemplified on Chic hits like Everybody Dance and Good Times. And, of course, Chic became so popular that stations demarcated for white music and white listeners programmed them too. Popular art melts more hardened attitudes than moralising texts or lectures do.

The story of Chic's inspiration coming from Roxy Music and Kiss is telling too. How many of the 75,000 seeking to burn disco down in Chicago donated Chic records and were also fans of Kiss or Roxy Music? It's fair to assume that there were probably quite a lot. With American radio stations so precisely targetted towards narrow demographics of listener, it's no surprise that American listeners heaped a whole pile of identity issues onto everything they heard. Musicians don't care about demographics; musicians are inspired by music, and then they make their own music; it's only marketeers and listeners who make it tribal. Of course, British fans conflate music taste and identity politics too, but we're lucky enough to have a dominant set of non-commercial radio stations which expose us to a wider range. "In America we're very compartmentalised by race and genre and stuff like that," Rodgers continues. "I remember when I was a kid the first time I played in England. There was some song called The Ugly Duckling. We were like R&B guys, and the audience was grooving to us, and then when we finished performing some guy came on-stage and went [singing] 'there once was an ugly duckling', and we were like 'you gotta be fucking kidding me!'".

The transatlantic success of Dance Dance Dance was followed by more seductive grooves on Everybody Dance, Le Freak, I Want Your Love, Good Times and My Forbidden Lover. Then as Chic's successes scattered, Rodgers and Edwards took on the struggling Sister Sledge and gave them We Are Family, He's The Greatest Dancer, Lost In Music and Thinking Of You. Rodgers is especially enthused when I mention He's The Greatest Dancer as a personal favourite. "I really dig what you just said there, because it's funny, a song like He's The Greatest Dancer doesn't get mentioned as much as I believe it should do because it was overshadowed by We Are Family. But it's one of my favourite songs that I've ever written! How often do you hear a diminished chord in a pop song? I make a big deal of that diminished chord, it goes [singing] 'Mweu! He's the Greatest Dancer!' We don't get a chance to do that that much in a pop song and we pulled it off there!" By the turn of the decade, Rodgers was hot property. He was approached to resuscitate Diana Ross's struggling career with Diana (1980), and did just that. Familiar sounding hit singles Upside Down and I'm Coming Out even led to the criticism that Ross was just a new vocalist for Chic. In a previous interview, Rodgers recounted how Ross was suspicious that singing "I'm Coming Out" might lead listeners to think she was gay. Rodgers persuaded her otherwise, that "I'm Coming Out" had an innoccuous meaning, and it worked, though he hoped that the song might become a gay anthem. Ross embraced her new iconic status, encouraged to do so by a career now revived to the tune of ten million album sales.

Later, Rodgers produced Bowie's biggest ever album Let's Dance (1983). "When I worked with him his concept was to do a really really big record, and that's not David's normal life." Only in the 80s could massive commercial success be an 'artistic concept'. This album, of course, spawned the chart-topping title track, and was Bowie's last essential full-length before the inevitable artistic demise. "I spent a very long time working with Duran Duran after Bowie," and 1984 duly gave LeBon's boys their two biggest hits yet - The Reflex and The Wild Boys. Then up-and-coming coquette Madonna chose Rodgers to produce Like a Virgin, and it launched her to superstardom. "The fact that Madonna's the biggest star in the world now doesn't change the fact that when I met Madonna, she couldn't really pay her rent! When I met Madonna I think I had, em, nine gold albums and eight platinum records and she hadn't even sold 300,000 records!" Like a Virgin, including the very era-appropriate Material Girl, sold over 20 million copies and turned Madonna into an icon too. Then there was Jeff Beck, Mick Jagger, Grace Jones, The B-52s; sadly, there's only so many anecdotes Rodgers can recite in a half-hour phone call. He's got time for just one more."I think probably one of my favourite records that never really made it to the big time was Al Jarreau's L Is For Lover, and I know why - we sabotaged ourselves! Al Jarreau did a theme for the TV show Moonlighting and we thought our record was so artistically cool that we didn't want to put the theme for Moonlighting on our record, so we put it on another label's product, and that other record went platinum with our single as its lead record!"

At the end of July, Rodgers is coming to Scotland with some new bandmates for a Chic Organisation spectacular. Former core members Edwards and drummer Tony Thompson have both passed away, but Rodgers is sure that "all the musicians I know are the best people I've ever worked with. We do all the Chic stuff, but it's a bigger world than that, it's also Sister Sledge, it's Diana Ross. Now we've increased the set so we do a Bowie song, we do a Madonna song, we do this song called Spacer which we wrote for a French artist called Sheila B Devotion, and this will be the first time we've done that. Playing with Chic is one of my big loves. To think that I never have to stand on a stage and play a song that I didn't have anything to do with, that's incredible to me."

Nile Rodgers has an abundance of amazing songs to play.

Sparrow & The Workshop: They've Got It All

feature for the skinny

Sparrow & The Workshop only formed a year ago, have never released a record, and their achievements so far have been modest, but you need to know about them. If only they'd ever toured, I'd have the T-shirt and a month off work to follow them. But that's for the future, because I'm in real danger of becoming a super-fan, and you are too.

If it's tempting to demarcate singer and songwriter Jill O'Sullivan as the 'Sparrow', and the rhythm section as 'The Workshop', that's not far from the truth, though they're very much a team. Jill used to perform solo as Dead Sparrow, but she benefits hugely from the creative input provided by drummer, Gregor, who also sings, and of bassist Nick. They found each other through Gumtree after Chicagoan Jill and Welshman Nick moved to Glasgow from London: serendipity saw them move into Gregor's girlfriend's flat, and the rest is history. But it's not, yet, they haven't actually achieved anything. This is it: they've had sessions with Vic Galloway and Edinburgh blogger Song By Toad, they've supported British Sea Power, and they've had discussions with "one or two" labels. Few others have cottoned on - now is a good time.

Your first stop to Sparrow super-fandom is the track which best shows off all their talents: The Devil Song. Beginning with an ominous duet, warning of doom like a ghost story told by a desert campfire, Gregor's galloping rhythm gives the song a cinematic transition, away from the story-tellers and into the story, harmonised over Nick's spaghetti western bassline. "I have to talk to frustrated people at my work, and some of them can be really mean and bitter," says Jill, "so I wanted to know how to be like that, how to get rid of your conscience and your heart so you can just be cruel without feeling bad about it." So that's what she means when the music grinds to a halt and the spotlight lands on her breath-stopping wail: "Take away my heart so I can be free!" It's a stunning climax, especially live where Gregor's drums sound more like a runaway train than a dashing horse.

But Sparrow & The Workshop's talents don't end there. The Last Chance is another tale with Southern Gothic themes, in which Jill's bittersweet twang flies dramatically over Gregor's rollicking, flaring rhythms. Try The Gun too, which wears a lulling acoustic melody like a mask, hiding a bleak tale of domestic abuse; and then there's Swam Like Sharks' impassioned folk lament, or You Got It All's soulful defiance.

"We’re working on an EP right now," offers Jill. "We’ve recorded about ten songs and we're still choosing," and it's apparently slated for "a spring release". But don't wait that long – go watch them live first. See the ones standing at the front, mindlessly clapping out of time, with glazed-over eyes and fixed dumb grins? That'll be us, the super-fans. Join the club.

So what're you waiting for?

First stop, their MySpace

also, their Song, By Toad session here (videos, 10 minutes)

and their fabulous Vic Galloway radio session here (audio, 20 minutes)

Best of 2008: #7 Frightened Rabbit - The Midnight Organ Fight

feature for the skinny

This time last year Frightened Rabbit were playing in city centre bars around Scotland and not selling them out. Tonight, every ticket has gone, and we're in one of the biggest venues in the country. Sure, they're playing Edinburgh's Corn Exchange as support for Seattle indie darlings Death Cab For Cutie, but the suspicion that the Rabbit are a strong draw for much of this crowd is confirmed by the almost capacity attendance during their brief support slot. Frontman Scott Hutchison twice bigs up Death Cab for the crowd, seemingly because he can't quite believe that so many people would be there for his own group. The truth is Frightened Rabbit have taken a huge leap forward in 2008, thanks to a fantastic second album in The Midnight Organ Fight and a relentless touring schedule, and they've become a hot ticket. The Skinny first featured them in September 2007, but we were more focussed on FatCat mates The Twilight Sad last year; 2008 has been, in Swing Out Sister terms, their breakout year. So let's go back to the beginning lads: talk us through a life less ordinary in The Year Of Frightened Rabbit.

"This time last year the album had been done for three or four months," Scott tells us before the gig. "I think I knew it would be quite well received, cos I was very pleased with it, I'm not gonna lie, when I finished it I thought it was pretty good." Hold on a sec - so the second album was finished before the first was even released? Scott's brother Grant, the drummer, chips in "We always saw the first album as a kinda demos album, but when we gave FatCat the remixed mastered version they decided to put a full campaign behind it, so that meant pushing the next album back a bit". "This time last year we were pretty much sick of Sing The Greys" Scott says, "We were saying goodbye to that record and just really itching for people to hear the new one."

Early reports were good. "People were coming up and saying 'new album's fantastic by the way', and we'd ask where they'd got it, and they'd say 'Jetpacks'!" Apparently allowing friends (and now labelmates at FatCat) We Were Promised Jetpacks hear early copies wasn't the best idea. "By about March, Jetpacks had given it to pretty much everyone in Glasgow!" But apart from praise from pretty much everyone in Glasgow, the album was also attracting attention from international publications like Spin and Paste, as well as online zines like Pitchfork and Drowned In Sound, and of course The Skinny. The acclaim was almost unanimous - I say almost: "We got one from this guy from the Costa Del Sol Tribune, or something like that. He gave it a really scathing review, it was quite funny. He was saying 'I don't understand what they're trying to do, it's all over the place, they need to be specific and consistent'. One of his favourite things of the year was a book signing by Mick Hucknall, but, we're saying nothing."

So the big day arrives, April 14th, and it's a huge relief. "I was in Edinburgh actually" Scott says. "I went to Avalanche and bought a copy, and they were already playing it when I went in. I was like [clenches fist]!". "I went into FOPP and it was the same" says Grant, "they were playing it in there. We played the album from start to finish at Mono for free the day it came out. It had been such a long time, we'd been waiting for ages, so for Mono to fill up so quickly that they had to stop letting people in... that was quite a big moment. It felt real then."

But because the album hadn't dropped until late spring, most summer festivals had already booked their line-ups, and the Greys-era Rabbit weren't chosen for too many. They did T, and Belladrum, and Connect, and Summer Sundae, and went on a massive tour of the States which even led to an interview with ABC News in New York when a reporter became a fan. “The shows were getting busier, and as we got closer to Washington and New York we found out that those shows had both sold out. We'd never sold shows out well before the night, even here [in Scotland]. So Washington DC was technically our first sell out.” As we talk in Edinburgh, they’ve just come off another US tour, during which they had to swap with the original headliners because crowds were leaving after their support; and tonight is the third leg of a packed European schedule with Death Cab.

One new song that’s received a particularly rapturous live reception is Keep Yourself Warm. "It's now the standard closer for the set because people always want to sing along, and they really sing those lines with gusto" Scott says, referring to the jarring opening lyric. "I'll get my hole" is such a strange line to be sungalong-to because it's male-only, distinctly Scottish, and really, horribly crude. But it's true - men, women, and probably children, of every background at every gig they play, roar along jubilantly. Does Scott think everyone actually understands what it means? "They might interpret it as whole, with a w, as in 'I'll become complete'. But actually no - it's about fucking!"

As is the album title, of course - The Midnight Organ Fight ain’t something a band has when musical differences arise. So it’s nearly 2009. Frightened Rabbit will see in the bells down under, with a gig in Sydney, before taking a well-earned break before yet another US tour. I ask Scott whether he’s had any time to think about the future. “Well touring has become such a habitual thing, there's not much brainwork going in to what we do these days, so yeah I'm starting to think about what to write about. I can't do another break-up album, cos I haven't had one this year! Maybe it'll just be a bit less focussed on me”. What does that leave, politics? “OK, that's track one, ‘Yes, You Can‘!

And there, bands still struggling to sell out city centre bars, is your encouragement: in one thousand words, or right there in just three.

Vampire Weekend: Hot, then not... now what?

feature for the skinnyI'm not sure why Vampire Weekend's keyboard player is looking at me with a ruffled brow as we're introduced. Could it be because we crossed paths in Edinburgh's Bongo Club 6 months before, and he's struggling to place me 5000 miles away? Maybe he is squinting at the sun? Or perhaps it's because I'm wearing a kilt in 100 degree weather? "I'm not used to this kind of heat!" I tell him enthusiastically, and he looks at my woolly skirt and nods. Obviously. But I think what's actually causing the frown is the matter of the wide open spaces of Coachella this Friday afternoon, and his band's imminent performance on the second stage. "I heard that it gets more crowded at night, and we’re going to be playing a little bit before sundown", Rostam Batmanglij reassures himself. Music festivals just aren't ingrained in the American culture like they are here; this sun-drenched Garden of Eden only really fills for the appearance of Prince the following day, but otherwise it's quieter than T in the Carpark.

Rostam needn't have worried: we see the biggest crowd of the day when Vampire Weekend take the stage. Much of this audience is here out of intrigue, to form their own opinions on the most talked about band of the last six months. Late last year an early demo, creatively dubbed The Blue CD-R, began circulating internet blogs and gathering praise. But for every effusive word of acclaim, there was a disappointed putdown waiting to dampen the hype. By the time that debut LP dropped in January, Vampire Weekend had become hot, then not, then hot again... and now what? What enthused some people - and seriously riled others - was Vampire Weekend's daring to use Afro-pop rhythms, like Paul Simon did so well with Graceland. But Vampire Weekend were accused of being 'cultural tourists', appropriating those foreign styles without properly understanding them, and therefore being inauthentic. The underlying tone of the criticism was "How could they understand African music when they were so well-off, and so white?"

Vampire Weekend never analysed it so. "As an artist it's hard to be aware of that" Rostam says. "First and foremost we wanted to make something catchy and exciting, and something that could inspire people to move in some way. But we also wanted to try and bring different kinds of musical worlds together". But there came a point where they had to resist the primal urge to self-Google. "I think when people started to write things about us, of course we paid attention, but we’ve had to grow out of that stage. I think every artist wants to gauge how people are reacting to you, on some level, but then you want to be able to focus on the art that you do for your own sake. At some point you have to tell people that you don’t want to hear about it, whether it’s good or bad".

The comparisons to Graceland were a little clumsy, but a world famous and Grammy-winning African-based pop record is an easier place to start the mental map than a more obscure and precise equivalent. If you can hear the guitar line and rhythm of 'Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes' in your head now, you're in the ballpark. But I ask Rostam if he likes Graceland, and what he makes of the frequent references. "Oh yeah, I love it. I like the one after it even more [The Rhythm of the Saints]. We met Paul Simon at Saturday Night Live. When we were having dinner we talked to him for a while, and one of the things I asked him was whether he thought our album sounded like Graceland. And he said no. I don’t have any problem with people saying it sounds like Graceland, but in light of the fact that Paul Simon himself said it didn’t sound like it, what more do you want?" One of the most obvious differences is the absence of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, whose unique backing vocals aren't duplicated by Vampire Weekend. That would just be silly. "We’ve got two new songs that we’re playing today, they probably sound more African than anything on our first album. I’ve been thinking a lot about the production of the next album, what kinds of sounds and what kinds of vibes would take it to the next level". Let's hope he's not thinking of giving Ladysmith a call.

Fast-forward ten weeks, and fly 5000 miles eastward, and Vampire Weekend will be seeing men in kilts at another festival. If you want to catch a glimpse of the most talked about band of last season before the new one starts, get to T in the Park's King Tuts tent in plenty of time. Let's hope they're still frowning: it won't be worry about the size of the crowd, so it'll have to be the flare of the sun.

-------------------------

I'm away at T in the Park at the moment: updates, reviews and interviews to come.

The Wedding Present - Gedge Hits Hollywood

The Wedding Present - Gedge Hits Hollywood

interview for the skinny


Twenty-three years after forming in Leeds, seminal indie rockers The Wedding Present are still evolving and learning as they launch their eighth studio album El Rey. Even though two Fifers have joined the band since 2005’s Take Fountain, it’s still hopeless romantic David Gedge who runs the show – he’s the founder, only constant member, singer, songwriter, and tour manager.

Hello there Mr Gedge, where are you and what are you doing?

We're rehearsing this week in Brighton on the south coast, so got a day off tomorrow and one more rehearsal then we're off on our mini tour. Just England, Exeter then Shrewsbury…

All the glamorous places then?

Yeah! Then it’s Norwich and Brighton. Our new album [El Rey] comes out on Monday.

Are you excited about the launch of the album?

It's still nice, yeah, to get a box of the CDs and vinyl from the manufacturers and rip it open and see everything. It's a culmination of a two year cycle of recording and overseeing artwork and everything. It's a lot of work, so to get the final thing in your hands is definitely exciting.

Were you trying to do anything different from previous albums?

Well I try to do something different every time. I've always admired the groups who move on and try different ideas. I hate those bands where you hear a record and you think 'I've already got this!'. I was hearing - do you remember The Lighthouse Family? – they were on the radio chatting about working on a new album, but halfway through working on it they said 'wait a minute, it doesn't sound like The Lighthouse Family', so they scrapped it and started again! I'd see that as a positive thing, if I'm working on stuff and it doesn't sound like The Wedding Present I'm actually quite pleased. We always try to move on and we've had a substantial line-up change since last time.

How does that change the dynamics of the band?

I think it works very well, it's always sad when people have to leave or you have to ask people to leave. You're working with these people quite intimately, so it's quite heartbreaking to see people go, but then a replacement comes in and you've got a whole new set of inspirations and influences and enthusiasms. They always want to ensure that they're as good or better than the people before, they want to be as good as the 1992 line-up or whatever. That competition is good for the group, makes it stronger. After Take Fountain Simon Cleave left the band, he'd been in for 10 years or so, with Cinerama, so that was quite scary in a way. But then again this album is as good if not better than Take Fountain so all these changes work quite well.

Why is it called El Rey, is that a Californian reference?

Nah, it just means ‘The King’ in Spanish.

Is that you?

Nah, it's Elvis! I've always been a big Elvis fan, but also having lived in Hollywood for the last 16 months or so, I quite wanted to have a southern Californian feel, so the artwork and photographs are all from about there. Also thought a Mexican-sounding name would be appropriate.

I was in L.A. recently, is it actually the area of Hollywood you live in?

Yeah, West Hollywood. I kind of enjoy it… when I first moved there I didn't like it, I suppose I'm a big fan of pop culture and that's the home of pop culture really, film music and TV and stuff. It's a big cartoon city really. It is like walking into a film or something.

The city does seem like it’s completely built around the film industry…

Everybody who lives there, or most people, have gone there for a reason, which is fame, working in films or being rock stars. So it's a very self-centered place, it's a very Me Me Me society, and I found that a bit alienating at first. But I suppose I got used to it, and the weather's obviously fantastic. It's just odd that you're sat in a cafe or something... I was in cafe table on the street and as we were leaving I saw a very attractive woman in a very short skirt, and the person sat next to her was Mike Tyson! I thought - of all the people you don't want to be eyeing their girlfriend up, it's probably Mike Tyson! In L.A. you see celebrities everywhere, I saw Dr Who in Urban Outfitters. Not David Tennant, the previous one, what's he called? [Christopher Eccleston - Ed who knows his Who] Lives in Manchester...

Ah but Mike Tyson and Doctor Who were probably going "oh there's David Gedge over there, look!"

Haha, right. I was watching a DVD film one night and then the next morning the actress from the film was walking down the road! It’s funny really.

I noticed on the track-listing for the new album, 'The Thing I Like Best About Him Is His Girlfriend' is listed as the 'Santa Monica and La Brea' version. Well, a guidebook I had in L.A. said that Santa Monica and La Brea was the gay prostitution district. So what's that song all about then?

That's a complete coincidence that! The only reason we did that is the pedestrian crossing there talks to you rather than beeps, it goes 'wait, wait, wait, wait', and that's the intro to the song.

I think it might be interpreted a different way…

Haha! Well you can take something else from that if you want.

'Model, Actress, Whatever' - is that about anyone in particular, or just Californian girls generally?

It's a general thing really, I'm quite interested in obsession, it's about being obsessed about somebody who's probably obsessed with themselves too. I'm interested in relationships and lust and regret and jealousy and stuff like that in my lyrics, and there's loads of that in that town. It attracts those kinds of people who’re driven to try to achieve certain things. There’s all sorts of lyrical references to L.A. in there, and in the song titles.

All your songs throughout your career been about relationships and such, you must either have loads of girlfriends or a really good imagination...

I think George Best was very personal, it was almost like reading out my diary, but after that you have to move on and make stuff up. I think it's always me in every song in some way, if it's not directly happened to me it's always something I imagine myself in a situation. But I just think it's the most successful way to write pop lyrics. I've tried other ways, to write about politics or science fiction or whatever, but I'm just more happy when I'm writing love or relationships songs, and the best are the personal ones.

So have you got a great cheat sheet of chat up lines or is it just 'hey, I'm a big rock star'?

Haha! well a lot of my songs are about failure, aren’t they?

How does Terry's [De Castro, bassist] co-writing influence your songs?

Not at all when it comes to lyrics because they're always mine. Terry's just been helping with musical ideas.

And you’ve been recording with Steve Albini again...

Seamonsters was the last album we recorded with him. Most bands who record with Albini sound like [makes harsh throaty growl], Big Black or Shellac or whatever. I wouldn't say he's bored with that but he does like the challenge of working on music which is different, so when I said it'd be easier to do strings in Britain he was like "oh, we can do strings here."

If you’re able to take a step back, what do you think of El Rey?

I'm far too close to it really! The last album was produced by Steve Fisk [Nirvana, Soundgarden, Screaming Trees] who's an engineer in Seattle, it sounds great, so there was a feeling that we should perhaps go back and use him again. But I had this worry at the back of my mind I didn't want to make Seamonsters Part 2 with Albini, so my main feeling is that it's nothing like Seamonsters, it's got an Albini edge to it but it's such a different type of LP, so I'm quite pleased with that. I think the thing about Albini is he just kinda records the band, whatever songs you've got at that time. Some of the songs on this record are quite poppy actually, he just records it in the best way that's appropriate, so it's got great sound as well.

Apparently you're contributing to a tribute album for The Cure...

I like the first album, think it's really good, and I saw them a couple times about 1979, but then I kinda went off them to be honest, and I'm not a big fan of Robert Smith's voice, I find it a bit whiny. When the list came through, it was my fault, we sat on it too late, and when we went back all the songs we wanted had gone. I think it was Graeme [Ramsay, drummer] that suggested High, so we're doing that. I don't think it's a fantastic song.

Why did you agree to be on the tribute album if you're not a huge fan?

Because I like doing covers, we've got a history of doing covers. It's very helpful over the years to work out how other people write songs and arrange songs, because sometimes you get ideas from that that you can reapply to your own work. And yes it is weird that we don't like The Cure that much, cos normally it is bands that we like that we cover, but it’s probably good for us in some ways that we don't much like them, because it makes us less precious about it. I think we've made it a better song, we didn't feel like we had to honour the initial version.

Looking forward to finding out. Thanks very much for chatting to us Mister Gedge, bye then!

YIFI's Weird Weekends

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Writer’s block is a malaise that all lyricists, authors and journalists suffer periodically, with no known cause, no reliable prognosis, and no certain cure. “Write about what you know”, the clear-of-thought advise, but often that just results in musicians whining about the hazards of musicianing; if it’s not “boo hoo, too much drugs and too much sex”, it’s “whinge, cry - nobody listens to my profound decrees - waaaaahh!”

But after Y’All Is Fantasy Island’s Adam Stafford succumbed to the mind-numb last year, he didn’t recover by writing about what he knew: he made a breakthrough writing stories about murder victims being cooked for dinner, stalkers threatening suicide, and dyslexic skiers with Body Integrity Identity Disorder. Well, we assume they’re just stories, aren’t they Adam?

“Yes!” he laughs, to our mighty relief. “The main difference between Rescue Weekend and the first album [In Faceless Towns Forever] is that the first was lyrically quite personal, it was all stuff that I had experienced, but with this I wanted to write in a more narrative style, so the songs are not necessarily about my life at all.” Rescue Weekend is not entirely flights of fancy - “I can identify with the dyslexic skier because I used to be one myself!” says Adam – and there is, inevitably, one song in which he complains about the struggle for recognition. With these two excellent albums under his belt, he's well entitled to vent such frustrations, because YIFI are undoubtedly fully deserving of your attention. "Some promoters - music fans as well - are really set in their ways. There's a lot of people who only listen to certain bands." But the conversation doesn't dwell on this, because there are plenty of positives to talk about instead: like how gorgeous Rescue Weekend is; how Adam's new found storytelling abilities mean he'll never have to go over old ground again; and how a third YIFI album is but months away. Firstly, where on earth did this Body Integrity Dyslexia tune come from?

"There was a programme on about a surgeon here in Falkirk who was the only person in the world that would operate on people suffering from Body Integrity Disorder", he says, explaining that this is a problem where people desperately wanted their perfectly healthy limbs amputated.

"There was a lot of controversy surrounding that because people thought it was unethical to treat them, but patients came from all over the world to be operated on. Then our guitarist Tommy told us a story about a dyslexic skier who got into an accident because he couldn't read a sign that indicated he was approaching a cliff," and Adam combined both stories to invent one helluva unlucky girl, who sadly won't be making a reappearance on the next YIFI album, No Ceremony, due out in October.

"We don't want to repeat ourselves, we want every album to be different, and this is night and day compared to Rescue Weekend. We're mixing it now, but it's taking a long time because there's a lot of production on it - there's 12 guitar parts on one song. It's a lot heavier, it borders on punk rock." Rescue Weekend, he explains, is essentially a solo album (with key contributions from multi-instrumentalist Steven Tosh), while No Ceremony is a full band effort, hence the quiet doleful record being succeeded by a louder, probably still doleful one.

In whichever formation Adam and Y'All Is Fantasy Island decide to arrange themselves, their first two albums are evidence enough that there's plenty more to come from Adam's active imagination - providing, of course, it can resist the dreaded curse of The Block.

The days of The Triffids

The Triffids re-issue series
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If the character of English indie-rock was formed in the 1980s by bands like The Smiths, The Cure and The Wedding Present, then Australia's indie personality was shaped by The Go-Betweens, The Birthday Party and The Triffids. Oz's very own David Gedge was David McComb, the singer and songwriter for the Perth-based Triffids. He was a similarly romantic auteur who could write about individual loneliness and unrequited love in a juxtapose with the loneliness of his hometown, stuck out on the South-West verge of a vast continent-sized landscape, and the musical backing to his stories often felt like anthems for driving across that outback, in search of a special someone or something else. Last year Domino began an extensive reissue campaign to cover The Triffids' entire career, commencing with three of their studio albums last year, and this month two further albums and an EPs & singles collection were released.


1983's debut album Treeless Plain (***) began with the majestic but disquieting Red Pony, a string-laden waltz that provided the clearest evidence of this new young band's talent. Not only was it the cornerstone of their early success, it also provided the name for one of McComb's post-Triffids projects, The Red Ponies. Though Treeless Plain never sounded quite so grand again, it's still a decent enough indie-rock record with plenty of hooks, and flashes of folk and the odd country twang. Here and there are glimpses of Echo & The Bunnymen and the aforementioned Wedding Present, though Treeless Plain of course came before the latter were formed. Were it a new release by a new band, we would be hailing their promise and expecting bigger things, without going overboard for the moment. The reissue attaches a short radio broadcast gig onto the end, where six of the catchier songs are perfunctorily performed in what is a nice document for fans, but of little interest for the unconverted.

Beautiful Waste and other Songs (****) contains plenty to suggest those indications of promise were being fulfilled. It's not a studio album, but a specially compiled disc of singles and EPs recorded between Treeless Plain in 1983 and second proper album Born Sandy Devotional in 1986. Immediately it's clear that McComb's songwriting has matured to stretch beyond simple indie-pop songs, with ambitious arrangements throughout, including a Tom Waits-like cover of Louis Armstrong's St. James Infirmary Blues. Raining Pleasure features the disaffected tones of Jill Birt on vocals, supported by droning, mournful strings that combine to sound like a downbeat blueprint for The Delgados. Best of all is the Field of Glass EP, which was recorded live in a BBC radio studio. It rocks heavier than elsewhere, and nowhere are The Triffids as heavy as on the vivid and thrilling title track. Field of Glass is narrated by a maniac obsessed with a rich girl ('I'd walk a field of glass, I'd buy you anything'), who pleads to take her on a ride in his car; the song quickens as the narrator loses control, before almost everything stops to highlight his echoing demand: 'are you mine, all mine?'. Presumably the answer is 'no' as trembling cymbals give way to a furious bassline, and drums thunder like he's violently beating them, as McComb wails away like a crumbling psychopath. It's heart-stoppingly intense, and one of the highest points of The Triffids' entire ouvre.


Born Sandy Devotional (****) was reissued last year, but it's worth special mention here as The Triffids' acknowledged masterpiece - that is, as far as most critics and fans are concerned. Its package is more impressive than the others, as it contains a thick booklet which reproduces McComb's hand-written notes for the album. The notes discuss what he wants for the cover, his intension for the album to work as a coherent piece of art, and his deliberations on possible names, plus lyrics and photographs. It's actually the most interesting re-issue booklet I've ever seen, as it also includes scribblings on the books and albums he wants to influence the record, and how, for example, Tender Is The Night should specifically be reminiscent of his own Raining Pleasure, Eno's Discreet Music, and the Velvet Underground's Sunday Morning in different aspects. As for the contents of the disc, again it must be commended for being a rare example of giving real value in the bonus tracks: there are ten bonus tracks, and this whole other album is almost as good as Born Sandy Devotional itself. It begins with a trio of strong indie-pop tunes dealing with unrequited love and chicken killers, but the first real interest is sparked by the theatrical Tarrilup Bridge, where Birt again takes the lead vocals to describe in the first person the suicide of an actress. Lonely Stretch is oppressive and disquieting while Wide Open Road is, unsurprisingly, an expansive and liberating driving anthem. Stolen Property is a string-based epic which closes with McComb ranting angrily, not unlike Nick Cave, over a decaying but restorative outro. The bonus tracks suggest a very different Born Sandy Devotional exists in a parallel universe, where McComb made different choices and released an album with minimalist arrangements and intimate vocals. When a Man Turns Bad features no more than a scurrying overdriven guitar and threatening schizophrenic vocals to build bone-shaking tension, while White Shawl and Wish To See No More are monologues without backing that sound like they were recorded in a cardboard box. They're just as interesting as the released album and greatly add to the value of the package; the reissue of Born Sandy Devotional is the obvious entry point for any newcomer.

Immediately after recording Born Sandy Devotional the band retreated to a shed in the Australian outback to record In The Pines (1986), famously spending only $1000 on the entire recording session, a quarter of that accounting for the essential creative lubricant, alcohol. But as the band were experiencing far more success in the UK than in their homeland, their constant commute between home and work began to take a serious toll. Fourth album Calenture (1987), named after the delirium sailors experience when they've been away from solid land for too long, did little to increase their profile at home, though again it was well-received critically. Both of these albums were reissued by Domino last year.


1989's The Black Swan (**) was, appropriately, The Triffids' swan song. Renowned as a love-it-or-hate-it album, that reductive stance can be more precisely explained as a likelihood to like some songs and hate others. The start is certainly disappointing, as glossy over-production courtesy of Stephen Street, predictable melodies, and a misguided attempt at rapping combine to ruin the first half of the first disc. Unlike the concise original album, this reissue is a double-disc marathon clocking in at 36 songs over two hours. Apparently this was what McComb originally wanted before it was pared down to a more commercially palatable single-disc release - he wanted an eclectic and sprawling White Album to close The Triffids' story. There's something extremely puzzling about this reissue though - the original release was 13 tracks long, and there are two versions of each of those tracks spread across both discs, plus ten discarded tracks from the same sessions - but they are all intermingled, with both versions of the same song appearing before many of the 'new' tracks. This all means that what should have been easily demarcated into 'originally-intended double album' and 'bonus alternate takes for standard added-value reissue purposes' is actually all mixed, abandoning any hope of album-coherence and forcing 'sprawling' to be more accurately reinterpreted as 'messy'. As a collection of 36 contemporaneous songs then, as opposed to a double-album in the traditional sense, The Black Swan is understandably inconsistent. After that initial poor spell, songs like Black-Eyed Susan and the French-aping Clown Prince work somewhat to recoup the losses. There's the genesis of a touching song about, well, casual sex in American Sailors, and the Tindersticks-esque ballad Why Don't You Leave For Good This Time? inspires reflection for all of a minute, but neither song feels fully developed. Over two hours, there's just not enough quality to keep this issue of The Black Swan from feeling like a test of endurance. Single disc albums are more commercially palatable because shorter records are more aurally palatable, and like almost every double-album ever made, a good case could be made here for chopping much of the filler to produce a far more consistent, concise document.

The Black Swan didn't achieve the levels of success The Triffids were hoping for, and the group disbanded having seemingly hit a brick wall in both commercial terms and with their own physical exhaustion. Bass guitarist Martyn Casey joined Nick Cave's Bad Seeds, while McComb and guitarist "Evil" Graham Lee pursued a side-project full-time, the Blackeyed Susans, to little success. After an aborted attempt at a solo career, McComb developed a heroin addiction and needed a heart transplant in 1996. Three years later, David McComb died at home, three days after apparently emerging unscathed from a car accident; he was 36.