Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2016 i Rolling Stone Australia

“When Siri can get more than 10 per cent of the things I ask her correct, come back and talk to me about new life forms.” We Be Jammin’ JUST WHEN I THOUGHT I knew everything there was to know about Pearl Jam’s classic album, you go and prove me wrong. Thanks Paul Brannigan for renewing my love for this amazing, life-changing album. If you haven’t listened to it recently, I recommend digging it out for a spin. Ben Young, Ballina, NSW Into the Frey DAVID BOWIE GETS A LARGE feature when he dies, Lemmy gets a full story, even Jon English gets a page, yet Glenn Frey gets a couple of paragraphs as issued by the Eagles with a disclaimer at the bottom saying he died too close to…

One of the night’s most surprising moments came when Steve Miller launched into a backstage rant against the music industry and the Hall of Fame itself. “This get-together you guys have here is like a private boys’ club, and it’s a bunch of jackasses and jerks and fucking gangsters and crooks,” he said. Hall of Fame president and CEO Joel Peresman issued a point-by-point rebuttal to Miller, who claimed, among other things, that his band didn’t receive free seats to the show. “He should have looked at the night as a celebration of his music and just gone from there,” Peresman said. (Disclosure: ROLLING STONE editor and publisher Jann Wenner is chairman of the Rock Hall Foundation.) The Black Keys, who inducted Miller, were baffled by his behaviour. “The first…

U.K. rockers Bastille scored a hit with their 2013 debut, thanks largely to the smash single “Pompeii”. Now, the band are working on a follow-up, LP2 (due in the spring), wherever they can: hotel rooms, tour buses and even backstage at festivals. “Getting to see outside of our lives and different places all over the world has had an effect on our music subconsciously,” says singer Dan Smith. Expect some serious variety among the songs: Smith says that LP2 mixes “hip-hop, Tarantino-esque guitars, alternative music and everything in between”.…

1 A LANGUAGE ‘SHARED’ Hailing from Northern Ireland, Vance is no stranger to Australia, touring here in 2015 with label boss Ed Sheeran and Sir Elton John. “I think it was [promoter] Michael Chugg said to me last time I was out there, ‘If you think about it, the Australian accent is derivative of a drunk Irish accent’ – I always liked that,” Vance laughs. 2 MICHAEL JACKSON VS PRINCE True to form, third LP and Gingerbread Man debut The Wild Swan elicits a heady mix of musical associations, from classic soul to T. Rex. For Vance, inspiration is an alchemical process. “It’s almost like everything you hear is important in some way – it’s like a scientist doing an experiment. Every time it goes wrong is a step closer…

MERLE HAGGARD WAS AS deep as deep gets. He always wrote and sang profound songs. No superficiality about him whatsoever. He definitely transcended the country genre. You can’t imagine him being in a group like the Highwaymen. Totally himself. Herculean. Even too big for Mount Rushmore. The best thing about touring with Merle was I got to see him a lot. He was funny, and he could imitate anybody. I always thought that everybody got “Okie From Muskogee” wrong. It’s one of the funniest satires ever – the Roman sandals, the burning draft cards, the courthouse square, the white lightning – all of it combined. If Randy Newman would have written and sung it, nobody would have thought twice. Sometimes you forget about how much natural-born heartbreak there is in…

Merle was a man of means His heart beat to the rhythm of Havana His voice was golden and blessed He was as tender as a rose Yet strong enough to lead God’s army He was a lover, a father and a son A hilarious giver He was divine in his stance An outlaw for the common man He stood for what was right A warrior of truth and to the lost A Christian in every sense of the way God has found favour with him He is and always will be a blessing to all whom he touched And that would be the world!…

“I had ‘Perfect Day’ in my head every day for two years.” The Song That Reminds Me Of Growing Up Soul Asylum “Runaway Train”, 1992 “I was in Austin and met [Soul Asylum singer] Dave Pirner a couple of weeks ago, and I remembered ‘Runaway Train’ and was like, ‘Man, that was a fucking good song!’ I distinctly remember the video, because it was about missing people, it was quite sad. The song came out when I was in kindergarten. When I met Dave I refrained from telling him that I loved his song when I was five – I just pretended I didn’t know who he was! I was like, ‘So, what do you do?’” [Laughs] The Song That Reminds Me Of Touring Future Islands “Tin Man”,…

“I usually wake up at about three in the afternoon,” says the Aerosmith guitarist, who is touring with the Hollywood Vampires. “The first thing I do is put a record on the turntable.” Deep Purple “Highway Star” This was constructed back when real players knew how to hold your attention with a solo for three minutes. J. Geils Band “Love Stinks” I don’t know if there is a better front-man than Peter Wolf. They were one of the first bands to understand the value of videos and MTV. Jimi Hendrix “Driving South” There’s a version from the BBC with the original Experience where he just cuts loose for six minutes. It really gives you an idea of his blues roots. Rolling Stones “Honky Tonk Women” This has all the elements…

“I don’t think I cheated death. I think this was planned. My room wasn’t ready.” NOT FOR THE FIRST TIME, TRACY MORGAN is getting a glimpse of heaven. “Look at this,” he says, pointing to a city-size mass of white clouds, framed against a marble-blue horizon, outside the window of his leased private jet. “Ain’t no war up here. Ain’t nothing going on up here. This is the friendly skies. This is calm. Ain’t no room up here for none of that bullshit from Earth.” He leans back in his tan leather seat, takes a breath, checks the color touchscreen of the high-end new insulin pump he just got yesterday. (“It’s basically my whole pancreas,” he explains. “It’s kind of complicated.”) ¶ On a Friday afternoon in early March, Morgan…

Ramones RAMONES 1976 1 When the Ramones recorded their debut album for $6,400 in February 1976, the agenda was simple: “Eliminate the unnecessary and focus on the substance,” as Tommy put it in 1999. But the brilliance of punk’s most influential and enduring record – how four disparate outcasts from the American adolescent mainstream made such original single-minded fury – remains hard to define. Storklike singer Joey was a pop kid chanting “Hey ho, let’s go!” at the start of “Blitzkrieg Bop”. Guitarist Johnny pared Dick Dale and Bo Diddley down to the airtight, bluesless staccato of “Beat on the Brat” and “Loudmouth”. Bassist and primary lyricist Dee Dee wrote about what he knew (drugs, despair, hustling) with telegramatic wit. And drummer Tommy, a former recording engineer on Jimi Hendrix…

Paul Dempsey Strange Loop EMI Strange Loop opener “The True Sea” is a red herring – an urgent, seven-minute lament with a refrain (“She makes the ocean seem like a drop in the ocean”) that recalls Something For Kate at their most angst-ridden. It’s a finely crafted song, but in some ways it’s the least interesting track on Paul Dempsey’s second proper solo record. On the 10 cuts that follow, the frontman tackles new challenges, proving that his dextrous guitar playing and his skills as an arranger can be applied in a variety of contexts. The album’s straight-faced predecessor, 2009’s Everything Is True, took its cues primarily from folk-rock, and traces of that sound remain. But this is a lighter, wackier record: the American South is the touchstone, so…

Gleeful London trio drip distortion on breakneck debut Alas Salvation Kobalt London newcomers Yak love a bit of pantomime. The trio’s live show is a neck-snapping wad of punk squall meets psych-rock theatre – strobes, psychedelic visuals, high cheekbones, and blasts of distorted guitar. Just the kind of thing that can’t be recreated on record. Except! Credit producer Steve Mackey (Pulp) for making Alas Salvation sound entirely like Yak are slicing up your speakers in real time – this thing kicks. It helps that Yak already have a handful of genuine barnstormers. “Hungry Heart” is a blitzing standout, like the natural offspring to Nirvana’s tongue-swallowing take on “Love Buzz”, while “Harbour the Feeling” and “Use Somebody” rip along with a kind of demented Primal Scream swagger. When the white noise…

Lemmy: The Definitive Biography Mick Wall Hachette It’s been 14 years since Lemmy Kilmister unveiled his autobiography – the fittingly titled White Line Fever – giving this book a purpose that should fend off suspicions of it being a cash-in in the wake of Kilmister’s December passing. Also in British author Mick Wall’s favour is the fact that he brings to the table a long friendship with the sadly deceased Motörhead frontman and the level of trust that comes with it, not to mention the benefit of perspective gained from decades spent in the orbit of Kilmister. Over years of interviews and late night hangs, the frontman opened up about his life and career, reeling off wisdom and anecdotes: “If you wanted to see some athletic fucking, Jimi was the…

Vinyl Bobby Cannavale, Ray Romano, Olivia Wilde Cr. by Martin Scorsese, Mick Jagger et al New York, 1973, and Richie Finestra is fighting to save his music label, American Century Records, in an industry that’s fierce with competitors, corruption and corporate behemoths. But his deadliest adversaries are the demons of his own coke-and-booze-addled soul. That’s the premise of this study of addiction that takes the form of a rock & roll odyssey, with executive producers Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger’s experiences bleeding into every scene. Bobby Cannavale is sensational as Richie, spiralling into ever-greater madness between moments of clarity, surrounded by co-dependent allies, underlings, overlords, enablers and/or victims. Special kudos to Ray Romano as much-betrayed partner Zak, Olivia Wilde as long-suffering wife Devon and Juno Temple as assistant Jamie, who…

BY JULY LAST YEAR, PAUL SIMON had been working on his 13th solo album for more than three years. But he still felt it needed a more modern touch. So while on tour in Milan, he made a pit stop to visit the obscure Italian dance-music artist Clap! Clap! “My 23-year-old son, Adrian, is a composer, and he told me about him,” says Simon. “He’s hardly known here in America, but he takes African samples and puts digital dance grooves behind it. He makes music sound new and old at the same time.” Clap! Clap! ended up adding beats to three songs on Simon’s Stranger to Stranger (due June 3rd), e-mailing his contributions from his studio in Sardinia. With his help, Simon was able to realise the adventurous sound he…

CLAIRE BOUCHER, A.K.A. Grimes, prides herself on being a one-woman show. She writes, produces, engineers and performs some of her generation’s most inventive indie pop – most recently Art Angels, which shifted her from hazy synth-pop toward an off-kilter guitars-and-beats sound. The Vancouver native, 28, takes charge of the videos too: At the moment, she’s lounging in bed at her Los Angeles apartment, editing the clip to her next single, “California”. As if she hasn’t got enough on her plate, this month she’ll join Florence + the Machine on tour in America. You learned to play guitar just for this album, right? Yeah, this was just my first attempt at playing the guitar. Which is apparent when you listen to the album. After [previous LP] Visions, I didn’t want to…

LATE LAST YEAR, I HAD THE chance to visit Merle on his ranch near Redding, California. We took a ride on his golf cart, and he had some pointers for me. He told me I shouldn’t cuss onstage. He told me how to talk better to musicians to get what you want; musicians are fragile people – you need to be supportive when you ask them for something. It was amazing how vulnerable and gentle he was. He was an open book. Merle Haggard was one of the top five all-time most important American musical artists. He’s up there with Miles Davis and Bill Monroe, people who really carved out a singular sound. Merle was a phenomenal singer, but he also wrote those songs. He was a great bandleader. His…

MERLE AND I WERE BUDDIES from way back. I first met him at a poker game at my house in Nashville in the early Sixties, before he went back to Bakersfield and I went back to Texas. We always had a lot in common. We both hopped trains as kids. We both got our starts playing bass in other bands before stepping out on our own. We’d both been married for the last 20 years. We both had our sons playing guitar with us. Over the years, we played a lot of dates, a lot of poker. He was a great audience for my jokes. I told him recently, “You know what you call a guitar player without a girlfriend? Homeless”, and he laughed. In the early Eighties, he came…

“You wake up, do the eye mask, swan-dive into the avocado pond,” jokes Turner of L.A. A LEX TURNER IS FINISHING HIS second martini at a stuffy bar in Manhattan when he starts reminiscing about his earliest visits to New York, a decade ago. The English singer-guitarist was 20 when his band Arctic Monkeys performed on Saturday Night Live and played a very hyped show at the Bowery Ballroom. “David Bowie came backstage,” he says in his thick Yorkshire accent. “We didn’t know what to say to him, you know. We were just overwhelmed. It was like a fucking runaway train in those days.” At the time, the Monkeys had just topped the U.K. charts with a debut album that became the fastest-selling LP in British history. But Turner, who…

SUMMER FLAKE SOUNDS LIKE: Introspective, melodic, re-verb-heavy rock with self-effacing understatement, adorned with some compelling breathy vocals FOR FANS OF: Juliana Hatfield, the Breeders, Elastica, shoegazey Nineties sorts WHY YOU SHOULD PAY ATTENTION: Hello Friends, the second LP from Summer Flake, aka Stephanie Crase, is a work of shimmering, hypnotic melancholy that, despite benefiting from the production expertise of Crayon Fields’ Geoffrey O’Connor, still retains the homemade, lo-fi spirit that defined her earlier work. Adelaide-spawned, Melbourne-based Crase has honed a style that is unassuming yet defiant in its emotional gravitas. “All the songs are personal but I do intentionally put some ambiguity in there to push things to a general place and sharpen it up,” says Crase. “I don’t know how other people will take it and I don’t…

IT’S A WEIRD FEELING, CRUIS- ing around Silicon Valley in a car driven by no one. I am in the back seat of one of Google’s self-driving cars – a converted Lexus SUV with lasers, radar and low-res cameras strapped to the roof and fenders – as it manoeuvres the streets of Mountain View, California, not far from Google’s headquarters. I grew up about eight kilometres from here and remember riding around on these same streets on a Schwinn Sting-Ray. Now, I am riding an algorithm, you might say – a mathematical equation, which, written as computer code, controls the Lexus. The car does not feel dangerous, nor does it feel like it is being driven by a human. It rolls to a full stop at stop signs, veers too…

Melody Pool Deep Dark Savage Heart Liberation Music Melody Pool isn’t squeamish about calling a fuck a fuck. She knows when she’s done with “all of the shit I used to promise myself” and she can read her pulse well enough to parse guilt, contempt, defeat and rage in the jaws of the “Black Dog”. In short, the Hunter Valley singer’s second album delivers with thumping conviction on the promise of track two, “Old Enough”. Gone is the country gal of 2013’s The Hurting Scene, as she stares down a world of darkness with a crushing mix of vulnerability and defiance. Her language is classically poetic in the Euro-folk echoes of “Southern Nightshade” and barbed with real violence in the swooning beauty of “Mariachi Wind”. Her voice has a flinty…

The last time someone sang my lyrics back to me “I opened my eyes at the end of the night and I was standing on a chair singing ‘True Colours’.” About a half hour ago when I was taking pictures with everybody at this function. The chef sang “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” to me. You’ve gotta understand that some of these songs meant a lot to people, and they meant a lot to me. I was very serious when I put that out about what it was supposed to do and how it was supposed to lift people’s hearts up, and it did, and it was a moment in time for them as it was for me. The last time I asked for an autograph I did want…

‘THE QUESTION IS, ARE WE rock & roll?” Ice Cube asked the crowd at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center during N.W.A’s induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on April 8th. He was referring to Gene Simmons’ recent claim that hip-hop acts like N.W.A don’t belong in the institution. “I say, ‘You goddamn right we rock & roll!’” Cube continued. “Rock & roll is not an instrument. Rock & roll is not even a style of music. Rock & roll is a spirit.” Moments earlier, the surviving members of N.W.A had joined together onstage to become the fifth hip-hop act to enter the Hall of Fame. Said Compton native Kendrick Lamar in his induction speech, “The fact that a famous group can look just like one of us and dress…

A year and a half after releasing Songs of Innocence, U2 are still hammering away in a Los Angeles studio for the companion album, Songs of Experience. They’ve considered 50 song ideas so far; now, according to the Edge, they’re concentrating on 20 songs they’re “actually really excited about”. The difficult part is being “brutal” in their elimination process, but, the guitarist says, “Things are still in their rough state but sounding really great.” The bandmates are still at work recording without any time frame for releasing Songs of Experience, and they may even head out on tour before the record gets released. “We’re definitely still in the weeds here,” Edge says. “We’re not booking the pressing plant just yet.”…

Jesse Jarnow’s fascinating new book, Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America, explores what he calls “a vast and learned psychonautical diaspora” – the social and physical world shaped by drugs like LSD, DMT, peyote, MDMA and mushrooms. At the centre of the story is the freewheeling economy that grew up around the Grateful Dead and quickly trickled down to the “hip capitalism” of Phish, Dave Matthews and jamfests across the country. Jarnow describes how echoes of head culture have touched various corners of America’s past and present, from New York’s graffi ti scene to frat boys to the founders of Google. Jarnow, who published a book about Yo La Tengo in 2012, touches on pop-culture offshoots from Freaks and Geeks to Miley Cyrus, while perspectively probing “the apolitical morass of…

When I was a teenager, I was listening to songs like they were books, and studied them to learn how to write songs of my own. Who ever thought something great could come out of Bakersfield? It made me feel a whole lot better about living in a place called National City. “Let Me Sing You Back Home” “I Am a Lonesome Fugitive” “If We Can Make It Through December” “Mama Tried” “Walking on the Sidewalks of Chicago” and “The Fighting Side of Me”. . . Merle Haggard’s songs and his voice are golden. He takes the lives of common ordinary folks who we had all stopped seeing and put them in songs and gave them a voice, and kept them alive. His songs have boots on, and they name…

“We have hit something. We stagger out of the van to see destroyed cars and injured people.” IF YOU’RE IN THE BUSINESS OF being a touring musician, chances are you will have some memorable experiences. It is rare that the veteran road warrior doesn’t have more than one scrape on their resumé that they were lucky to walk away from. To be succinct – I don’t know how I am still here. Most of the times my existence was at risk was while inside moving vehicles. With the sheer amount of time on the road, the stats are not always smiling. If you’re travelling with a bunch of maniacs, the stats beg you to stay home. So many examples, so little space! 1984. I’m in the back of the gear…

“THERE’S NO WAY I’D CONDONE THE USE OF COKE, BUT I’VE GOT NO REGRETS. I WROTE SOME GREAT SONGS ON COKE.” ‘I NEED A CIGARETTE – WHERE can we go?” says Richard Clapton, pacing around the foyer of the ABC studios in Sydney in the midst of a run of radio interviews about his new album, The House Of Orange. The 67-year-old’s 20th album since debuting with 1973’s Prussian Blue, it finds the singer-songwriter exploring an Americana feel with new songs and re-recordings of some classics. After inhaling a cigarette outside, he retires to the back of the ABC cafeteria for a coffee. I offer to pay and Clapton, looking clear-eyed and relaxed, pushes my hand away. “I’m the record company for this one,” smiles the man his friends call…

“If you don’t know what you want, other people are going to tell you.” SOUNDSLIKE: Jeff Buckley leading the John Butler Trio through a blues rock swamp FOR FANS OF: Feist, Mama Kin, the Beautiful Girls WHY YOU SHOULD PAY ATTENTION: In the past month, 19-year-old Sunshine Coast native Beck has picked up the Queensland Music Award for Folk Singer/Songwriter, played some wildly well received shows at Byron’s Bluesfest, released her new album – the genre-hopping Panacea – and, the morning of our conversation, locked in some support slots with one of her inspirations, the Cat Empire. “I just went out and bought myself a box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts to celebrate,” she laughs. It sounds exhausting, but for the person who wrote an entire album at age 14, after…

“When my depression was really severe I saw it as a different part of me.” IT’S EARLY APRIL AND THE YEAR’S first week of crisp weather has descended on Melbourne. Melody Pool is sitting outside a bluestone cafe on a Fitzroy backstreet, under green trees mottled with orange patches that spiral to the bitumen with each swish of a passing car. The weak sunshine is still yet to thaw the morning, and Pool – having just completed a cigarette and revelling in a high-necked knit jumper – is loving it. “I really hate hot weather and humidity,” says the singer/songwriter, who’ll turn 25 in June. “That’s why I love Melbourne so much. This is perfect. I’m so excited for winter.” Pool made the shift from her hometown, Kurri Kurri, NSW,…

Ratings are supervised by the editors of ROLLING STONE. Eric Clapton I Still Do Bushbranch/ Universal He wears his blues light and casual in his 70th birthday cover portrait, but there’s no escaping the weight of history when you’re Eric Clapton. Consider the painter, for instance: Peter Blake’s album sleeves go back to that notable commission for Sgt. Pepper. Then there’s the return of Angelo Mysterioso, playing acoustic guitar and singing a plaintive duet on the sentimental old friends’ promise, “I Will Be There”. Classic rock sources have made much of the witty pseudonym’s earliest appearance, when a Mr. Harrison went undercover on Cream’s final album of ’69 (verdict: sure ain’t George, might be Dhani). The return of distinguished rock producer Glyn Johns, who brought the lucky charm to Clapton’s…

Anohni Hopelessness Rough Trade/Remote Control Anohni was announced as a project, a collaboration between singer Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons and producers Oneohtrix Point Never and Hudson Mohawke, in early 2015. It’s telling Hegarty now goes by the name Anohni; this is deeply personal and political music, “an electronic record with some sharp teeth”, as Anohni described it. Ecocide is a longstanding Anohni concern, but on Hopelessness this and other issues are brought into sharp relief against the jarringly incongruous foundation of beats and synthesisers. Lead single “4 Degrees”, released to coincide with the Climate Conference in Paris last December, and in which Anohni implicates herself as part of the problem, sets the tone. “All those lemurs and all those tiny creatures, I wanna see them burn, it’s…

Richard Ashcroft These People Cooking Vinyl The last we heard of the Verve’s former frontman Richard Ashcroft was a solo album with a bunch of L.A. session musos under the name RPA & the United Nations Of Sound. It was a terrible record. But at least it was terrible in a new way – a misguided appropriation of electro-soul. These People is terrible in an old way. After six years of silence, Ashcroft’s new material is simultaneously undercooked and overblown. Wil Malone, who put all those grand strings on the Verve’s Urban Hymns, is back, but he’s dressing up leaden songs that drag past the four or five minute mark when they’ve got around 20 seconds of ideas in them. On “Hold On” and “Out Of My Body” Ashcroft ill-advisedly…

Mayer Hawthorne Man About Town Charles Bradley Changes Anthony Hamilton What I’m Feelin’ THESE ALBUMS STRIVE TO FIND liberation in throwback sounds. Mayer Hawthorne’s fourth LP finds the Michigan-bred groove merchant, 37, putting down what passes for roots in Los Angeles. Gone are the Motown beats and fur-cloaked Philly soul of previous efforts. Man About Town is full of California sunshine and mid-Seventies studio funk. “Book of Broken Hearts” slides along on a pop-disco bottom like Silk Degrees-era Boz Scaggs, and the small-town girl trying to keep her Hollywood dreams clean in “The Valley” could have wandered in from a Steely Dan song. When the rubber-band bass and rhythm-box clicks of “Lingerie & Candlewax” give way to a hip-hop chant, it’s retro, for sure, but in a…