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Saturday, 22 November, 2008

PLANETNOTION TELEVISION!

CAMERA-FOLK AND FILM EDITORS WANTED!

Planet Notion is looking for guys and dolls to film and edit features for its new TV channel, PNTV. Accompanying Notion to artist interviews, gigs, fashion shows, festivals and international events, you will be skilled, passionate and full of ideas about how to produce shit-hot video content. Camera-folk will be experienced and ideally have their own equipment, or at least access to equipment, while editors must be able to turn projects around quickly, and with stylistic flare. If you can both film and edit content, we would especially like to hear from you! These casual, unpaid positions would be ideal for those looking to develop their showreels, and to get the chance to travel, film major artists and top events.

Please email lucy(at)musichqmedia
(dot)com if you’re interested in getting involved, cheers!

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Lust For Life: Maximo Park

Lust For Life: Maximo Park

An open mouth presides over Maximo Park’s fateful second album like some sort of capricious god, guiding the music according to its desires. Singing, talking, kissing, drinking; ‘Our Earthly Pleasures’ is a record riddled with what the band like to call ‘urges.’ ‘You’ve lived your life with your mouth wide open,’ fall Paul Smith’s lyrics to punctuate each energetic beat; just as the LP is peopled by appetitive beings, ‘open’ is also a word they like to describe their new sound. Stand by to be startled by a record that is achingly human and seething with sensation. ‘My favourite word?’ Paul wonders when we’re settled with drinks, ‘Vernacular.’ I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect example of the frontman’s love of language; better still, the intimate attachment he has to his Geordie accent. To understand a band whose roots remain firmly planted in their native soil – Paul treats me to a potted history of coal and ships as we first head for the waterfront - it is only fitting that we make the mission from London up to Newcastle. ‘This record was like the first time round,’ says guitarist Duncan Lloyd, ‘because we all live very closely, me and Tom used to live in a flat together, Lukas was downstairs, Paul down the road, Archis was around the corner...’ Maximo Park are a band for whom people, place and identity cohere meaningfully; lines like ‘Standing By The Monument, just waiting for the rain,’ ring with especial resonance in local ears. While ‘The lines of transport make their way through towns,’ in Paul’s lyrical imagination – the LP is alive with earthly activity – this Monday morning the trains are buggered. Quelle surprise! Keyboardist Lukas Wooller is travelling with us after a romantic weekend with his city dwelling girlfriend. His excitement diffuses our annoyance at each gloomy, penetrating announcement from the train company: ‘Electrelane have agreed to support us on our tour, I’m so pleased, we never thought they’d agree to it!’ We give up lurking about the departure boards to find a greasy spoon – no hard task in deepest Kings Cross. Lukas’ morning treat is a Danish pastry washed down with a cup of tea. We talk about his hot new haircut, free bars and football, but after listening to ‘Our Earthly Pleasures’ on loop the previous night there’s only so long I can last; ‘Yeah, (‘Books From Boxes’) was one of those tunes that just worked. Once we played it the whole way through for the first time we were like, ‘We might just have something there!’ And indeed they do. Trademark Maximo melody, sliding chords and a sturdy drum section distil the poignant story of a lover’s departure – ‘scattered Polaroids and sprinkled words’ are the fragile remains of a relationship gone wrong. ‘We’ve all got someone to look after this Valentine’s Day,’ Paul smiles when we finally link up with the rest of the band at Newcastle station. ‘Not me!’ bassist Archis Tiku corrects, nodding at my estimation that he is ‘safe, sane and single.’ Not that the phrase could ever be applied to Maximo Park’s music, impassioned and unhinged as it is. Paul’s consistently personal lyrics transfer so well because of their fixation with human relationships. ‘You don’t have to deny your urge,’ is how he opens ‘Your Urge,’ a piano-led call to indulgence where intricate keys alternately collect desire and disappointment. ‘What are your urges?’ I have to ask. ‘Relationships,’ is his ready reply, which drummer Tom English simplifies as, ‘Just the people around you.’ And where there are people there is love, lust, loss and language. ‘You’ve been with me a year to the day / Three hundred and sixty, watching me decay,’ is how this spirited second album begins. ‘It’s the best way that I could think of opening the record,’ Paul asserts. ‘It felt like a statement...Let’s talk about time and you’re gonna listen to this record hopefully in its entirety or whatever, as a piece, we intend it to be as such. A story is hinted at.’ The record ricochets between pleasure and pain as it spins, just as the site of every song is either a flourishing or a fading relationship; for better or worse, ‘It’s kind of a celebration of us as human beings.’ But where does the balance lie here between love and lust? The question raises a collective belly laugh from the band – ‘Ah, well that’s the thing,’ explains the frontman, ‘There’s more active lust! There’s a love that’s been lost and a lust that unfortunately gets in the way...It’s not wrong to feel like that – I’m pretty sure that the majority of people have lusty thoughts!’ While ‘A Certain Trigger’ was the subject of Maximo Park’s first LP, here emotions are mapped onto specific entities: ‘the lock of hair that won’t sit still’; ‘the weight upon your kiss.’ Subject and object, self and other are all around locked in complex union. Equally, Paul’s lyrics embed themselves well within euphoric melodies and rousing rhythms; like Lukas states, ‘It’s the passion, that’s why we do what we do on stage, because they’re passionate songs and we’re a passionate band.’ Live, Paul twists and writhes with it, the microphone is his imaginary cane as he breaks into a dance. To his side Lukas almost convulses over his keyboard, while the others are all jiving to the same crazed beat. Tom agrees: ‘With some other bands, it’s just devoid of passion or it’s trying to be too knowing or...’ Paul picks up the drummer’s thread, ‘It’s not part of themselves like this music is us.’ By extension, the LP itself is like an incurable romantic, a scarred, hopeful, soldiering lover that just keeps coming back for more – chuckles meet Paul’s prophetic ‘The next night you’re back involved, the wolf is there!’ Unbridled desire certainly rumbles through the record, but ‘lusty’ moments are tempered by earnest attempts to make partnerships last. Therein lies another of Paul’s fetishes: language, both its potential and its impossibility as a tool to unite two people. Healthy relationships are awash with words – ‘Every night we’ve got so much to say,’ – while splintering occurs just as language falls away; ‘You have to leave, I appreciate that / But I hate it when conversation slips out of our grasp.’ Paul is a lyricist at once fascinated and frustrated by language; we have poignant poetry from a man who tells me that ‘words are as meaningless as anything else.’ The spoken word antics of ‘Acrobat’ on the first record here morph into fragments of speech and instructions to ‘communicate your needs’ and ‘prepare your vocabulary.’ Further, literary figures abound: the ‘chapter’ of a relationship, the ‘sheets’ lovers lie between or use to etch their yearning, the ‘paper trail’ that encodes a lifetime and links a couple, the books that bring people together – ‘We’ll meet in Russian literature,’ - the unread books that are evidence of romantic distraction, the books one of a pair packs away at the end of a liaison. (For your information, the last one Paul read was ‘Tender Is The Night,’ by F Scott Fitzgerald, and now he’s moving onto a copy of ‘The Great Gatsby’ that he’s owned since he was 17.) And you can bet that all of this –‘It’s not a very linear narrative,’ - is collected in Paul’s iconic red leather book of lyrics. ‘That’s me unfortunately. I lost one of them in this very building and that was one of the traumas of our time!’ One comment from a fan on the Maximo Park website is ‘I live my life by your lyrics.’ Unperturbed, the band joke about turning this into a ‘social experiment – like eating McDonalds all of the time, let’s start it on hamsters first!’ Jokes aside, the very clarity of Paul’s vocal delivery – ‘It’s better,’ the singer assures me – make the lyrics centre-stage, but silence is vital, too. ‘It’s the gaps between words that really intrigue me,’ he insists on the album’s opening track; ‘It’s the gasps, and the sighs that say more / About what’s inside you.’ In the real world those gaps are given up to body language; in this recorded world it is of course music that serves for expression. As Paul explains, ‘On this record there are more spaces when I’m not singing. There are more spaces when a mood is created. I love the way that in the middle of ‘Karaoke Plays’ it goes down to these two guitars and you can hear this music just drifting off of the big chorus, ebbing away and you’re just left with this skeletal pattern on the guitar.’ It’s fitting that Paul uses a bodily metaphor; the bodies dominating this earthly album are sentient, hypersensitive, so that ‘an inkling in your pores’ is enough to manipulate fate. ‘Heavy’ and ‘raw’ are signifiers the band feel best approximate this new sound, a quality imported partly thanks to their producer here, Gil Norton, who is known for his work with The Pixies and Foo Fighters. Influence-wise, there’s an agreement among the band members that ‘Our Earthly Pleasures’ is something like the lovechild of The Smashing Pumpkins (for their muscular arrangements and dark, brooding melodies) and The Smiths (for that band’s frank and tortured lyrics). The piano is imbued with fresh significance: ‘It’s just pure,’ explains the nimble fingered Lukas, ‘If what you’re doing is from your urge, even if it’s just basic riffs, the piano gives it that richness. It’s a straight and natural acoustic instrument.’ A pure piano singing with undiluted emotion. ‘All of us in the band are looking to broaden our musical horizons,’ explains Paul, ‘we all wanted to do something different.’ Everything from a line in a song to a single guitar phrase has been built to ‘infiltrate people...stir them a little rather than have them blankly going through and consuming things.’ For Maximo Park, it seems like music is the one thing in life for us to cling to: the ultimate earthly pleasure. Music to crystallise unions that can get extinguished in the outside world, music to alleviate pain, music to speak when words fail, music to be savoured rather than swallowed like everything else, music to immortalise love. And so it is that energised, uplifting music gets married to songs about suffering and feelings unrequited. According to Duncan, ‘We like different levels. Instead of having a very melancholy lyric let’s have a nice minor chord, a strong emotion with different music underneath it...Abstraction like that brings in new meanings.’ With the first LP Maximo Park, under the guidance of producer Paul Epworth, used more studio trickery to distinguish their sound - Tom remembers ‘putting mics in the air conditioning unit or in the yard’ – but this time the music is unadulterated, more human. Paul remembers worrying about their new producer, ‘Will he get the subtlety?’ This is a ‘subtlety’ that registers immediately within the senses; passion rules and the cerebral world of reason and language gets left behind. The singer goes on: ‘It’s kind of what Maximo Park is for...To get some energy out there and something that really shakes people up in a way, rather than just relying on words and some sort of downbeat mood.’ The energy pulsates between piano, guitar and drums, not only owing to their intricate parts but to their collective tempo. However, gone is the insistent ‘fidget’ rhythm of ‘A Certain Trigger,’ what the band call the music’s ‘di di di di di’ or ‘catchier’ quality. Now, ‘It doesn’t feel like you have to put your foot on the pedal all of the time.’ On a record that takes ‘Our Earthly Pleasures,’ as its subject, time itself is of course a crucial theme in terms of style as well as substance. Faster rhythms and urgent arrangements abound because Maximo Park are dealing with transient lives and loves, feelings that are fleeting. Tom laughs, ‘We’ve been messing around with time, squeezing a lot into a small space of time and finishing it very quickly!’ Paul’s impression relates back to the concerns and pressures of his lyrical characters: ‘That’s the economy of our song writing, they don’t waste a second because time is precious, and it’s the same with each word.’ But the tempo does vary to act like the petulant will of a lover, urging a particular date to arrive – ‘In fortnight’s time / You will be mine,’ - lingering upon those brief, defining moments and even racing back to a rosier past; ‘I touched the place where your hair had been.’ Although Paul’s lifestyle advice is ‘Don’t try to accelerate and don’t try to reverse!’ the record moves along these contradictory lines; our natural instincts are uneven and our earthly pleasures can elude us – ‘The human heart is on offer for a limited spell.’ Conversely, Maximo Park have longevity. The tiny waterfront pub we’re sat in is the first venue they ever played several years back. Some other young hopefuls setting up their equipment for a gig later that night notice the local heroes and come over for handshakes. Before their second LP release, the Newcastle quintet are already planning a third album – ‘We’ve got plenty of albums to make, I think next time it’ll be a bit different.’ Lukas mentions the possibilities he’s been considering, with Paul concluding, ‘That’s the beauty of it really, we’ve all got ideas and they’ll all just click together.’ On a similar level, ‘Our Earthly Pleasures’ is a dynamic record, the sound of ‘two bodies in motion,’ and a mosaic of human feeling. The lovers in ‘Karaoke Plays,’ are typical, coming together and falling apart just how waves form and break; ‘The North Sea crashes through your dreams.’ Paul stands by his oft quoted remark that the band do ‘metaphysical pop’; ‘It tries to grasp subjects which are ungraspable. Because that’s what we do as people and that’s what this band is about – working something out that we can’t understand.’ Killer riffs, exquisite melodies and provocative lyrics aside, that’s the prime reason Maximo Park are so compelling as a band. They are a bunch of genuine, fallible blokes who are, like Paul says, ‘kind of out on a limb. There’s no real irony about what we do.’ In an age of cynical media manoeuvres and fad-fuelled recordings, we can look North Eastwards for a band who will always be real. With Maximo Park we can recognise the sound of our own rapture and misery, and according to the frontman, we ‘can go right, this guy isn’t messing around, this is what he sees.’ This is guitar music as catharsis; perplexing emotional states made ‘touchable,’ to use Paul’s word, so that we can move to them and move on. ‘I think there’s something to be said for dancing as much as there is for silence. They are obviously at other ends of the spectrum, but you can have a moment of elucidation that occurs within you at both of these points.’ Dance, romance, reflect, remember, communicate; ‘Our Earthly Pleasures’ is an impassioned call to live to the fullest, most bittersweet limit. Like the opening tune’s ‘Girls Who Play Guitars,’ – ‘We clearly get turned on by them, constantly!’ - Maximo Park’s message is that we need to be open to the world despite our fear or pain; we need to be alive with all of our imperfections intact. Whether or not you still need convincing about this twisted Earth we inhabit, as you experience the majesty of these twelve tracks, you’ll truly rejoice that ‘life is worth living.’ Viva Maximo! ‘ OUR EARTHLY PLEASURES’ IS OUT NOW (WARP ) WORDS: LUCY WILSON PHOTOGRAPHY: DAVID RYLE

tags: | maximo park | our earthly pleasures | paul smith | geordie | duncan lloyd | london | more...

In The Bag: Kraak & Smaak

In The Bag: Kraak & Smaak

When 'Money In The Bag' slowly burned onto porn soundtracks, crime documentaries and over late night airwaves, Kraak & Smaak were plotting the next stage of their assault. Reaching back into their work bank, Wim Plug, Oscar De Jong and Mark Kneppers decided to put the finest cuts together in one album to form 'The Remix Selection'. Jamiroquai and Max Sedgley remixes may keep the chin strokers of the dancefloor elite nodding in approval, but how does their live show measure up? Fairly well, if critics the world over are to be believed. The Dutch three piece sold out one of L.A.'s most prestigious clubs, earned an army of respectable fans in Britain and are flying high in their native country. So where did it all go right? At home your name means 'crunchy and tasty' but here in England it means something quite different! Did you ever consider changing your name or do you enjoy the different meanings that can be taken from it? Oh dear… we could see that one coming… Apart from beer and wine we don’t do drugs. It is something we run into now and then, explaining it over and over again; we have thought about it but it would be strange to change your name in the middle of the process of having an album out and doing a lot of shows. It’s a great sounding, original name and in this way it gives us some extra publicity as well. So, as far as we are concerned it’s not really an issue. How would you describe your sound? House? Funk? Breakbeat? Or something new and different? We don’t really feel restricted by styles, so we guess it’s a mix of everything really. Most importantly though, all our music seems to have a distinctive original sound (or at least that is what people tend to tell us all the time!) and musicality that perhaps goes further than the average dance or loungey record you hear. And it appeals to both underground lovers and the greater ‘pop’ public it seems. That doesn’t mean at all that we’re not influenced by other music; we listen to a lot of different things, either DJ or other stuff, from dubstep to electro, jazz, minimal, breakbeat, etc. Maybe next time we’ll end up with a rock album! (Err… well, probably not…) You’ve been doing quite a few shows in America. Do you find that your music is received differently in other countries? Does the reaction you get from the audience change depending on the city? As we hadn’t played live before in the US before we were a bit depending on the buzz that we created with our earlier US DJ tour, the album and our live shows in Europe, but we were pleasantly surprised that we managed to almost sell out one of the major clubs in LA when we were there, the El Rey. Anyway, it’s really weird to meet fans at the other end of the world who know all your music an even more so if they really dig it! Still, you have to put up a good show and if we failed there it would have put us a couple of steps back. In that sense we think the Dutch music and club scene provides a very good basis for acts and bands like us: people are very critical over here and very hard to please, both for DJ’s and live bands. But if you win them over you have them ‘in the bag’. A lot goes on in your live shows. Is it difficult to put what you created in the studio onto the stage? It is quite a process actually. On stage, we don’t want to sound just like a traditional happy live funk band or, at the other hand, like a passively operating electronic dance act. We try to combine the best of both worlds: performing our music live by an energetic band while retaining the clubby flavour of the studio album sound. Many of the tracks played live have evolved from the album versions in terms of more or less different arrangements and vocals: live shows have another dynamic than listening to an album or dancing to club 12”es, so we have to take that into account. The band members also play an active role in that development by suggesting arrangements, breaks, fills, etc. You toured with Faithless, who have been around for a long time and also put on a great live show. Did you learn anything from them? They seem to have taken a similar route as we did: first producing club music, releasing 12”s and so forth, and after some time they decided to start a live show. While of course it is a far bigger production than is the case with us, it shows that dance acts can grow into something that appeals to club, rock and pop audiences with the right songs and tunes, ideas, etc. It’s great and to have been able to have a look at that backstage; respect! What’s the strangest thing you have seen whilst performing live/touring? Last winter we were in the middle of a live gig in a Dutch club when there was citywide electricity fallout. So there we were with about 500 people staring us in the face with all the music gone dead, in the white generator lights ….Very naked! And just the other day at a big open air festival in Holland Wim got his fingertips burnt because the CD players he scratched with stood in the hot burning sun. He got blisters on two of his fingers and for the next couple of gigs he had to tape ‘em up. You’ve been remixing material from other artists for a while now, but you got a name for yourselves as DJs over the past year. Why did you decide to release a Remix album rather than go straight into another artist album? We are working on the new album of course and hope to have it out before the end of the year but because of the many DJ and live shows it has taken more time than expected. All of our remixes have that distinctive K&S sound so we knew that there was an album worth of material just waiting to be released. These remixes are often hard to find, sometimes only on promo or limited 12” and a lot of people haven’t heard them before. We played with them for a long time sequencing it like an artist album and we’re really happy with the results. What’s more, we still also have loads of short beats, breaks, soundscapes and snippets, but a bit more Madlib / Stones Throw style. We still need to put out those as well! How did you decide which tracks to use? Were there any disagreements between the group about what material to use and what to leave out? We discussed all our remixes up until now and some of them didn’t pass the test of time, so we left them out. At first we had only one CD in mind but we concluded in the end that there was enough material to fill two CD’s, loosely based on two themes: one more for listening at home (‘smaak’) and one more dance floor beats orientated (‘kraak’). It was great to be able to use the Jamiroquai remixes, we didn’t think it was possible to clear those at first. The videos for ‘Keep Me Home’ and ‘Money in the Bag’ are very creative. Do you have much input in the process of the making of these? Does the same go for your album artwork? We have input into who we work with and the initial ideas but after that and as we get busier and busier – you have to trust other professionals to do their jobs well. It’s not always easy to let that go but we’re very happy with the people who have made the artwork and the videos up until now; we feel they really reflect the music that we make and the ‘not so serious image’ we want to stress. 'Money In The Bag' was used over a sex scene in a Dutch film! It obviously wasn’t intended for use on a soundtrack, but when you make music, do you ever picture the scenario it will be played in? E.g. is it purely for the club, the after party, etc? When we work on new tunes we generally already quickly feel in which direction a track is heading in terms of style, broadly speaking either for the dance floor or for listening. When that’s clear we’ll try and arrange and tune it appropriately to that vibe. But after releasing they sort of find their own way, i.e. with the Money in the Bag track, which we heard back in the scene you mentioned but also under a news item on banking! What can we expect from your next album? It will probably be a bit more electronic than the first one but essentially with the same bandwidth of styles and the same attitude. And now that we have built up a bit of a name for ourselves with the ‘Boogie Angst’ album and our remixes, it’s become easier to ask other artists to collaborate with us, so you can also expect a couple of guest vocalists if all goes well. Will you be performing at any of the festivals this summer? Will you be doing any shows in Ibiza? We had to make a decision that if we were going to get our second album out this year we wouldn’t be able to play live too much this summer. We are still doing some DJ shows and we have a couple of the big European Festivals booked. We haven’t toured the UK extensively yet, so that’s the first thing we have planned for when the albums finished. KRAAK & SMAAK’S 'THE REMIX SESSIONS' IS OUT NOW ON JALAPENO RECORDS. www.myspace.com/kraaksmaak

tags: | kraak & smaak | faithless | funk | breakbeat | dance music | minimal | jazz | pop | more...

Birds of Prey: Eagles of Death Metal

Birds of Prey: Eagles of Death Metal

Overpriced drinks, amateur pole dancing...It could be any night in Soho. But tonight there's a biker guitarist writhing about the greasy stage to a crowd of screeching birds. Rabid rock n rollers Eagles Of Death Metal are indulging themselves and their effusive female following with a Ladies Night - surely 'Death By Sexy' is more erotic than this? The next day I meet EODM frontman Jesse Hughes: interviewing this dude is alternately like navigating a trap laden sleaze circuit and keeping pace with an amphetamine fuelled genius; my favourite combination! SO, JESSE, WHAT IS IT ABOUT ROCK N ROLL THAT MAKES YOU FEEL SEXY?! That's probably the voodoo element of it, there's a little bit of the unknown...I don't give a fuck what it is, as long as it is, you know what I mean? I approach it sincerely, I really believe in what I’m doing and I'm not trying to bullshit anyone. I'm not here to save whales or tell you who to vote for...Just to have a big party and to remind everyone that life is actually fun! AND ARE ROCK CHICKS BETTER THAN AVERAGE BIRDS? I like women in general. I mean I’ve got my Grandmothers' names tattooed on my arms, they're my heroes! Real rock n roll women can almost be any woman. It’s the attitude of just having a good time, where that sense of insecurity is gone. HOW ABOUT LONDON LADIES? Are you kidding? You were at our Ladies Night, so c'mon, it was such a bang, man! I didn’t want it to end, I hung out all night long and then I paid you know, the bicycle guys? We hired two of those, me and a couple of girls that I met and we raced around Berkley Square! We paid 'em, like 50 quid each to race, it was like chariot fucking races - that's how I ended my night in London, you can’t ask for more! ARE YOU DANGEROUS? Of course there’s an element of danger to me, darling, I mean - yeah! ARE YOU SINGLE? Newly single. I exist better in relationships believe it or not - I love women and I love flirting; men don't truly know who they are until they’re with a woman, that's how you realise yourself. WOULD YOU SAY THAT YOU WRITE LOVE SONGS? 'Chase The Devil' is a pure love song, and of course 'I Want You So Hard'! IS IT LUST OR IS IT LOVE THOUGH? Well - I love lust but I don't confuse the two, and I'm never dishonest about it. I'll be backstage flirting with a girl and she'll say, 'You're only saying that cos you want to get into my pants,' and my response is 'Duh! Hello?' (Laughs) 'I Want You So Hard' was written because I was desperately trying to date a girlfriend of mine who I adored and one of my own friends told her that I was 'bad news.' And because I am a God damn devil my attitude is like, 'OK, I'll take the words of rejection and I'll wrap them into a song and give them back, and then I'll be accepted!' IT'S LIKE AN OPERA WITH THOSE CONFLICTING THINGS VOICES! SO WHO IS YOUR IDEAL WOMAN? I like beauty, I like class, I like elegance and fidelity...Those are simple things. I also enjoy enthusiasm for wanting to experience something with someone else, and the ability to share and grow... BLONDES OR BRUNETTES? Again darling it's...I mean I've dated seriously both. It's the girl. I like darker eyed blondes. I mean you don't have bright bright eyes though, baby, like Hollywood blondes, you know what I mean. Those icy fucking snake eyes. See, I have dark blue eyes. I have my grandmother's eyes. I used to think I was adopted cos I was the only red head in the family, and everyone's got dark hair and green eyes. Maybe I look like the postman! WHERE DO YOU DRAW THE LINE, LYRICALLY AND MUSICALLY, BETWEEN SERIOUS AND SLEAZY... It's a balance between where the words stifle the movement and where the movement can be inspired by the words. It always starts with a sensation; the lyrics to all of my songs could be 'I got a feeling'. You can actually see it on my face when I'm performing, I'm experiencing a sensation...I wish I could just drop it on your tongue and you could trip out like this, cos this is fucking bad-ass! I feel like a little Richard White fucking honky preacher up there sometimes, it's kind of a weird-ass combination. SOMEONE SAID YOU GUYS PROVE WHY ROCK MUSIC SHOULD NEVER BE STRAIGHT... That's why I approach rock n roll the way I do. It's part Rocky Horror Picture Show as much as it is serious metal rock. Yeah you can’t take yourself too seriously but you have to take your music as serious as a heart attack... Where glam rock failed is that they stopped taking the music seriously and it became an inflated coke fucking flaccid fantasy...If you're promising cock and balls, you'd better show up hard or else you’re full of shit. SO YOUR VERSION OF ROCK N ROLL ISN'T STRAIGHT, IT'S...TWISTED?! It's a twisted, dark world, baby. It is darlin'. DO YOU LIVE THE ROCK N ROLL LIFESTYLE EVERY DAY OF THE WEEK? I mean I'm a single Dad and a very serious father, a member of the PTA! But I ride a motorcycle and sometimes I fight, as you can tell. ( Gestures to a bruised left eye ). I don't fucking care, I live my life the way I want to and that has nothing to do with me keeping my commitments. So yeah, I'm blasting, killing, rocking n rolling every second of the day, but to me rock n roll is working with a hangover and taking care of business, that's rock n roll too. I love my son more than I love anything in the whole wide world and I'll be damned if rock n roll is going to mean something that makes me a bad father! There's nothing cooler in the world. So I’m walking around like Mr Biker in hot Mum rock n roll town...Thank you my son - it's like, yes! I use him as bait too. You like dangle him on a hook and it works... WAS MUSIC A MEANS OF ESCAPE FOR YOU FROM THE CUSTODY BATTLE WITH YOUR EX? Absolutely - oh my God. Josh only heard the songs because he was worried about me, I wasn't answering my phone so he broke into my house on New Year's Eve. He thought I'd overdosed on drugs. He stumbled across a file called 'New Music.' He was like, 'What the fuck is this, dude? Where you been hiding this, Motherfucker!' I wrote the whole album in a week and boom! Here I am darling with you in London, isn't it amazing? I love it. HERE WE ARE! WHAT'S YOUR POISION? I don't often drink, but I would get a Coke and a separate shot of vodka - they mixed this one, so therefore I won't be drinking it. WHAT DOES 'DIRTY DOG SHIT' INVOLVE?! I like the nightlife, girl. I mean I am a night walking fool if ever there was one! I love red light districts and I love porno book stores at fucking four in the morning high on speed... I WAS GOING TO ASK WHAT IS YOUR DRUG OF CHOICE... Speed! It’s such a porno drug, especially when it's pure unadulterated biker meth-amphetamine from the low deserts of California. I mean you can stay up for days if you have the right constitution for it, which I do, cos I'm hyperactive and I've been on one form of speed either clinically or otherwise since I was 17...You feel like a cat, the world takes on an acid like glow without hallucinating, it’s wild. RIDING YOUR BIKE IN THAT KIND OF STATE CAN’T BE SAFE... Oh, certainly! I've spent a little time in a coma when I lived in San Francisco but you fall off the horse to get back on it! Otherwise you’ll be afraid of your own fucking shadow... WHAT'S THE CRAZIEST ENCOUNTER YOU'VE EVER HAD WITH A GROUPIE? There's this new bite right here do you see it? This girl kissed me at the Ladies only gig and then she bit the fuck out of me and I went, 'Oh my God!' Then she kissed me gently again, and she goes, 'You like it rough!' She socked me with her ring and I’m like, 'Woah!' I've woken up not knowing where I've been, penniless and utterly robbed! Police have been called out to find me; I mean I've had that shit happen to me because of groupies. But I actually try to avoid them! I genuinely think Eagles Of Death Metal discourages the typical groupie attitude - simply because someone wants to have sex, it doesn't make them attractive to me! TELL ME ABOUT THE FREE PARTIES YOU USED TO SET UP? It was the early days of rave; black street gangs like The Crypts and shit were running all the drugs in and out of it. And being that I have this inclination towards immediate ferocity, it was lucrative to me. It put me through college! In the desert and in Compton and warehouses in east LA. Bizarre tents, makeshift manufactured tents and WWII airplane hangars. There weren't many rock parties, it was mostly trance and fucking Josh Wink. CAN YOU LEAVE YOUR CLOTHES ON BUT GIVE ME A TOUR OF YOUR TATTOOS?! This skull (decorated with lightning bolts) is a biker gang affiliation tattoo, let’s just say. The star represents my son. Death From Above is the battle group that has protected us from the Soviet threat along the Alaskan skyline. It's a fucking bomber group, it's badass! The cock, my Mamma calls me a 'strutting rooster' when I'm on stage; Josh wants me to have 'Don't Mess' tattooed underneath it. The sailing ship with the red pirate flag of 'No Prisoners,' that’s for my Grandmother, Emily, cos she was the most uncompromising woman I've ever met in my life. She's like this dagger through the heart, should you fall in love with her, and when she died that's the way it felt. She's my biggest hero and probably my main influence. The green dragons are for England...I also have a 'Liberty Or Death' tattoo up here... DID THE SAME GUY DO THEM ALL? No, these were all over the world. Copenhagen, France, New York, Vacaville which is a prison - I visited a tattoo artist who was allowed to give me a tattoo, a very famous biker. These new tattoos are from an asshole on Christmas Eve. No hair will grow here right now. I’ve got like little scars. AND ARE THERE ANY DODGY PIERCINGS WE SHOULD KNOW ABOUT? No, darling. Nothing dodgy! FRANZ FERDINAND'S MISSION IS THE SAME AS YOUR'S - TO MAKE GIRLS DANCE. WHO WINS? Well, we do! They’re very tiny charming Scotsman really is what they are - I think their fucking brand of rock n roll is fantastic, it’s their own. Like Justin Timberlake can twist his whole fucking body around his shit, it moves him and you know it's real. You can see it in Franz Ferdinand, the way they jerk, it's happening! DO YOU ANTICIPATE THAT MOST OF YOUR FANS ARE FEMALE? I hope and pray! For smart reasons like...John F Kennedy won the election because women loved him. Women run the show, they really do. To be loved by women is it for me, I want to be fucking Tom Selleck! WOULD A WOMAN EVER BE ABLE TO CONVINCE YOU TO GET RID OF YOUR SIGNATURE MOUSTACHE? Anything's possible, but not everything is probable... KEEP AN EAR OUT FOR NEWS OF THIS MONTH'S EPIC EODM WORLD TOUR! TEXT: LUCY WILSON PHOTOGRAPHY: DAVID RYLE

tags: | eagles of death metal | death by sexy | soho | jesse hughes | eodm | chase the devil | more...

Doctor Beat: Tayo prescribes a mixed bag

Doctor Beat: Tayo prescribes a mixed bag

'I think I've done quite a good job with it, it flows well...' Allow Planet Notion to elaborate: Tayo's Fabric Live album flows with the rich, inexorable progress of molten lava; the sub bass bubbles under just as stray beats splutter and bleed into new territories. Tayo's quietness about his skills might partly explain why, as one of the recognised Godfathers of the UK breaks scene and with over a decade of spinning and producing under his belt, those Fabric folk have only just asked him to step up to the Live series. Tayo's mix ransacks countless musical styles - 'It does move around a lot,' - but is also an expression of his love for another relatively new and burgeoning British genre: dubstep. Tayo's penchant for dubwise creations informs his Live album on every track of this bass-heavy, unpredictable journey. Last year he honed his production skills, pressing up original releases and remixes on vinyl for desirable labels like Functional, Bassrock and Apple Jaxx. The man himself is a determined multi-musicalist, defending himself against some sinister tribe he calls 'The Genre Police,' and urging his listeners: 'Don't worry about the small print!' How to uncover such an insistently open DJ's current fixation? Get him to isolate just one track, the tune that really floated his boat in 2006. 'Anti War Dub', featuring Spen G, by Digital Mystikz on DMZ records,' arrives his quickfire response. Gotcha! Tayo even gives this track the pivotal role of concluding his Fabric mix; Spen G has the last word, instructing everyone 'We don’t want no fuss and no fight,' over a mellow two-step beat and ratcheting reggae effects. Could dubstep spread further to take the lion's share of the UK’s underground dance scene that breaks never quite fully snatched from drum n bass? Hooking up with Rennie Pilgrem and Adam Freeland back in 1997 to unite around a passion for leftfield beats, Tayo and these fellow fresh producers/DJs brought breaks to Britain with their new weekly mash-up, Friction. Breakbeat became a veritable scene and Tayo found himself at the forefront of it. Next came Mob Records - the vehicle by which he would fulfil his need 'to leave a footprint somewhere' - and productions from Pilgrem, Stanton Warriors and Krafty Kuts spread globally. Breaks is one of those scenes that, as Tayo agrees, has an aura of 'cool' about it right now, but why hasn't it carved out a bigger space for itself on our native beat map? Breakbeat's players were woefully less prominent on the 2006 dance festival bills and the likelihood of a breaks tune leaping onto mainstream radio like Pendulum's evidently digestible variety of drum n bass is slim. Tayo's theory on the perplexing 'State Of Breaks' debate is well considered. He certainly doesn't belong to the hardcore who want to keep breaks deep underground: 'Good luck to them!' First, we discuss the freewheeling, derivative nature of breaks itself, which is both its blessing and its curse in terms of the genre's crossover potential. Like a luxurious reservoir breaks imbibes eclectic genres, rolls with them, changes tack, snaps up another style and warps it. 'Yeah, it absorbs stuff. People will often hear me play a tune and ask, 'What's breaks? Is this it?' That's its strength and its weakness. But we should worry less about getting technical. The other thing is that there aren't enough fantastic tunes; breaks stays in a permanent state, while drum n bass has stone cold classics... 'Shadow Boxing,' Bad Company, LTJ Bukem, Pendulum... The Plumps have done a few but there haven't been that many.' And Tayo's beat goes on: ‘Dubstep is easier to identify than breaks, it’s at the other end of the scale where tunes are defined by their tempo - that half time thing is distinctive.' True to traditional Tayo styles, the tempo of his Fabric Live album shifts according to the influences he drops, but pure beatdriven energy is the constant. For over seventy blistering minutes, the LP undulates about dubstep, baile funk, breakbeat and electro. Tayo's sequencing surprises all the while but some quality mixing melds this colourful selection of tunes into a coherent whole. 'Dread Cowboy' serves as the dubbed-up opener, a joint effort between Tayo and close collaborator Acid Rockers. These first three minutes almost invite you to relax; 'It's a bit slower and has different rhythms - it's my favourite in the mix.' 'Choppa Riddim' is another tune he's keen to talk about, his 'dancehally, ragga influenced' production with the illustrious Baobinga - is there one Fabric compilation where this guy hasn't made his influence felt?! 'It's still breaks and beats,' the DJ assures, 'just new rhythms.' Deekline's remix of 'Step Back' by Ursula 1000 is the second track on the list, with Sista Widey's ballsy rap upping the ante and signposting Tayo's enduring attachment to strong vocal performances. Do vocals ever get in the way of a decent track? 'No way! I love them, you can define a tune by its vocal, like when you go into a record shop, it's a lot easier to track something down when you don't have to just stand there going, 'Well, it's kind of like... da-dub dup dadub!' A vocal also brings in that human element, it stops you from getting lost in sound, all of the darkness and abstraction that some beats have.' Another stand-out track for the vocal part is the Radio Slave remix of 'Blaze N Cook' by Stereotyp and Al' Haca, with its growling dictate to turn on, tune in and get high bringing in a bassline all of its own. Still, as Tayo points out, 'It all depends on the state of the listener, of course!' The almighty Warrior Queen also lends her vocal might to Sarantis' grime stomper 'More Than Money.' Her booming, heartfelt 'Serious!' holds up well against all of the beat breaking madness, with Tayo stretching it across the next record, Skream's dub anthem, 'Lightning.' Further we are encouraged to join in with the Ragga Twins’ primal chanting as Aquasky loans them a section or two of his 'Ready For This' anthem - here it's Baobinga's mix, naturally! Just as Tayo doesn't shy away from bold vocals, nor is he one of those breaks DJs who refuses to touch house music or gets vexed by people's confusion of the genres, owing to their similar tempos - 'Absolutely not! I play house sets on the terrace at Space every year. I just like making different records in a set make sense for those on the dancefloor. The purists can split hairs, and I'll leave the technical stuff to the genre police!' But there must be something that turns this cosmopolitan DJ off? 'Alright, I don't like trance!' he exclaims, but is eager to follow the statement up with a list of bands he is currently feeling: 'New Young Pony Club, The Rapture, Klaxons, Killers, The View, Pixies, The Cure, Bloc Party, their new stuff is excellent.' So does he believe that music is the most powerful form of expression we Earthlings have? 'Music is the most upfront, the most instant. It appeals to the senses immediately and you make up your mind about the fastest. Basslines hit you in the chest, and a melody takes instantly.' Tayo's Fabric Live 32 serves up an unwavering assault of that kind of 'chest bass' dubstep is revered for, and the second Digital Mystikz track on there, 'Neverland,' is hauntingly melodic, leading the listener into strange new territory, only for Tayo to wrench you right back with the more upbeat 'Loveage' by 'hero' Rob Smith. A ferocious bass-led melody stamps the Bassbin Twins' signature all over 'Woppa' as it shudders along. Others are hyper-percussive: baile funker Buraka Som Sistema brings varied instruments into 'Com Reispeito,' while one of the four of Tayo's own productions (this time with Undersound), 'Putaria Toda Hora,' uses syncopated keyboard horn. Exotica! When he's playing out - London's The End and Fabric are his regular haunts - Tayo likes 'to let the records speak for themselves. You're entrusted with two hours of the crowd's time, you have to keep them! DJs like myself and DJ Hell focus on making everything sound right in the mix; he'll skip between techno and Miami bass and it works.' Is showmanship important to his live show? 'Well, let's just say I won't be standing on a speaker near you anytime soon!' What's more, unlike 'The Freestylers' one, which is mental, just the same as their DJing,' Tayo calls this a 'listening' album, one for driving, chilling - 'It's not too ravey or twisted!' Without a concept in mind, he says how 'I looked at my records and plotted a vague route with set peaks. It starts at a certain tempo, then gets deeper and darker.' And the result is thrilling. Tayo himself recognises its seminal quality: 'It's a record of where you are, my calling card. Everyone knows I love reggae, basslines... I like to link a lot of styles. It's a celebration of bass culture.' Cheers Tayo, we'll drink to that! 'FABRIC LIVE 32: TAYO' IS OUT NOW (FABRIC) TAYO AND HIS TRACKSUIT PARTY ARE PITCHING UP AT NEWQUAY'S BEACHMBOMBING FESTIVAL ON 7 - 10 JUNE. FOR DETAILS, VISIT THE OFFICIAL WEBSITE . Words: Lucy Wilson

tags: | tayo | fabric | functional label | bassrock | apple jaxx | the genre police | more...

LCD Soundystem

James Murphy is a busy boy. One part remix-production guru - tweaking the dials for pop idol Justin Timberlake - and one half of the omnipotent DFA, plus being head of Grammy award winning cult dance-rock-punk-funk outfit LCD Soundsystem, he takes being productive to a new level. Having risen to stratospheric heights via the release of LCD's debut albumin 2005, James has been doing touring rounds for the past few years before finding some time to catch his breath, get some sleep, and more importantly make his new record. 'Sound of Silver' is the record. A nine tracker of what we know him for best: inspiringly original dance-tastic pop. No Liberscenestercopying here, no new rave madness, just fucking great tunes -the way it should be. But first things first - how on Earth did Murphy manage to fill this gaping hole that was screaming out for him before the debut, and why hadn't anyone done it sooner? 'You know I think I'm the result of not being happy with stuff. It's to a certain degree how I operate - there has to be a certain sense of necessity, otherwise I don't see the point.' Maybe this is why Murphy has his fingers in all the pies. 'You can't complain about bands and then not make a band. You know you can't complain about labels without having your own label that tries to operate in a way that you feel is better than the labels you're complaining about. You can't whine about New York and not having any fun without throwing a party. You can't watch a DJ and then roll your eyes and walk out because it sucks without DJing.' Right then! 'So I wind up doing things like - I hate this soundsystem, so I design a soundsystem. But I don't like the speaker boxes so I feel like I have to design the speaker boxes and it just kind of goes in that direction all the time. I just don't join stuff very well.' Join well he may not, but he sure as hell makes some kick-ass tunes. And 'Sound Of Silver' is jam-packed with beaty-blippy gems. Taking its lead from that ever present debut, James sure hasn't gone down the experimental second album route a la Bloc Party or Radiohead. Oh no. He's taken all the goodness from the first one and expanded on it. So for those of you out there that love LCD as they were, well, this one's going to have you creaming your Y-fronts. If you wear any that is. 'I chose to make it similar because we're not a traditional band as such. It's not like there's a drummer and a couple of guitar players... There's no pressure for it to be anything in particular. So if I wanted to make a record of just organ music, you know I could make a record of organ music.' Thank the Lord he didn't though. Nine tracks of nonsensical dance fused goodness with those ever rough and ready vocals see James do that I'm-kind-of-rappingand-singing-at-the-same-time thing he, and only he, can do so well. One song in particular seems to catching a lot of attention, and that's before it's even been played: 'North American Scum.' A title like that has sent many a cynical muso tongue wagging both across the Atlantic and UK side. There's the signature tongue-in-cheek lyrics that we love LCD for, plus those partyin-an-instant beats and basslines that'll have booties a jiggling from Berlin to Boston. Yes, really. But what does James think about the reaction? 'I don't know - I thought it was funny and I needed a song that would be good to play live. I really honestly, almost naively, didn't think it would be a big deal at all... It's weird because I'm learning a lot about Americans and learning about what I think, which is a funny weird thing.' Although the lyrics for this track sarcastically touch on people's muddled and somewhat stereotypical views of Americans, perhaps they weren't so contrived on James' part - all his words for the songs are written on the day of recording. Does he ever get worried that he might forget a lyrical nugget? Not at all: 'I generate a lot of stuff endlessly. There’s a permanent barrage of bullshit kind of spewing around in my head. I've learned not to be particularly precious about, 'What if I forget this song?' And, 'What if I forget that?' Because they constantly come out. So it's just better for me to try to remember it, and if I remember it then there's something memorable, so that seems like a good filter.' Not only a musical genius – he's got a mind of steel too... What about making the new album? The LCD Soundsystem head honcho muses, 'The first half of making the record was pretty brutal. Psychologically it just wore me down and I kind of wanted to quit. But doing the Nike thing (James created '45:33,' a special 45 minute 33 second track for Nike released through the Nike store for joggers and music fans alike) freed me up because it was such a weird thing to do. After that I was in a really good space and I think I had 35 straight days without a day off on the album, working 14 hours a day. I just cranked through and I felt like really sane. I would leave and go home and see my wife and felt pretty focussed. I didn't leave the studio destroyed - I left kind of rejuvenated. Probably the best period I've ever had in my life.' Recorded over two US based studios - DFA Studio in Manhattan, New York and Farm Studio in Massachusetts - James finished his pop masterpiece 'Sound of Silver' in November last year. 'I kind of determined and chose and agreed to be a pop band and I'm down with that - that makes me happy. So once that decision was made I thought, 'What do I like about the first record and what do I not like? What do I think the failures are and how do I improve upon the failures without apologising for it?' So I was listening to the first record and I realised I had kind of deviated a lot from the 12 inches and played a little too close to character, and played it safe to a certain degree within that character. I felt like the record as a result had a beige or brown tone to it... It had a kind of Todd Rundgren-y thing about it. I was like, 'OK I don't want it to do that this time, I want it to be more silver!' And that was kind of my obsession.' 'So when we went to the first studio we just brought garbage bags filled with silver fabric - yards and yards of fabric and tin foil and just covered the entire farmhouse studio in silver so it looked like a space ship.' There’s always something in a name. Not only does 'Sound Of Silver' feel like a silver record (or possibly platinum if the high calibre of tracks is anything to go by), it was inspired by the magpie's favourite shiny colour that James saw as his muse. James continues, 'I got kind of obsessed with this idea of creating a space that could unconsciously remind me of a very complicated idea that a phrase would not. So I'd sit on the couch and look at the ceiling covered in tin foil and wonder about what I should do... I felt like I was really trying to honour the songs and not produce them. I was trying not to be James Murphy and DFA producer - I was trying to be like artist guy. Just writing the song and letting the song stand. That's when I was like - I don't want to do that, it's a waste, I'm a good producer you know. I should push them (the songs) just like I would push any other artist and I felt like that would make the record cohere more as an album, and I think it does.' It does indeed. From start to finish, 'Sound Of Silver' is an insight into the mind of James Murphy producer and songwriter extraordinaire. The album is splitting at the seams with banging party monster tunes that’ll surely be gracing many a record player over the next few months. But, it's also a sneak into the thoughts of James the poet, the politician and the intellectual. A rarity in an industry that seems to be becoming more and more obsessed with hairstyle over music and rock n roll behaviour rather than melodies. May this be the second of many releases from our musical madman. TEXT: EMMA EDMONDSON

tags: | lcd soundsystem | james murphy | dfa | sound of silver | justin timberlake | more...

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