Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2017 i Rolling Stone Australia

Rockin’ Ryan WELL, IF THAT ISN’T THE sexiest goddamn cover of ROLLING STONE I’ve seen in a long time! As a diehard fan of Ryan Adams, thanks for giving the man the attention he deserves. Love him or hate him, at least Ryan is always pushing the boundaries: long may it continue. Carissa Williams Killara, NSW Monkees Magic IT HAS BEEN AN ABSOLUTE pleasure reading RS 783 from front to back. I can honestly say it has been a long time since I have achieved this. Truly engrossing and enjoyable reading. Topped off with the Monkees scoring a single in the 2016 Top 25. Well, does that bring back memories to this subscriber in the older demographic grouping. L. Flanagan Beaconsfield, WA The Voice FINALLY AUSTRALIA IS slowly but surely…

IN LATE NOVEMBER, 40 years to the month after their debut album was released, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers got together to jam at their rehearsal space in L.A. “We mainly did cover songs,” says keyboardist Benmont Tench. “When we get together, we tend to do a lot of Chicago-style blues songs, but Tom was also making up songs on the spot. We were shaking off the rust.” The rust had built after a three-year hiatus from touring, the band’s longest break in 25 years.Butthe [Cont. on 12] Heartbreakers are making up for lost time in a big way, with a 40th-anniversary U.S. tour that begins in April and runs through August. Besides the anniversary, there’s another reason the tour could stand out: It might be, Petty says, “the last…

Toby Martin’s second solo outing since longtime band Youth Group announced a hiatus in 2009, Songs from Northam Avenue, was conceived during back-to-back artist’s residencies in the Western Sydney suburb of Bankstown in 2013. The suburb’s celebrated ethnic diversity provided Martin with both ample inspiration for the character studies that ground the album, and an opportunity to collaborate with several talented local musicians born in Vietnam, Lebanon, Iraq and beyond – including Dang Lan on Đàn tranh (Vietnamese zither), Mohammed Lelo on Qanun (Arabic zither), and Maroun Azar on Mijwiz (Arabic reed pipes). “It’s a part of Sydney’s music scene I didn’t really know about when I was growing up and in my 20s, playing indie rock,” Martin says. A cautionary study in the radicalising influence of senseless hate, “Olive…

“One of the craziest things about the record is how strange it is,” says Zane Lowe. “It’s really odd.” LAST JUNE, RAE SREMMURD HAD ONLY TWO DAYS LEFT TO HAND IN THEIR second album, which the hip-hop duo hoped would build on the success of their exuberant 2015 debut, SremmLife. But they needed a hit – the two singles they released early in 2016 failed to catch fire. That’s when their producer Mike Will Made It called a last-minute meeting to play them some new beats. One stuck out: a mellow, mechanical bass stutter that inspired the duo’s main creative force, 23-year-old Swae Lee, to write about “living the rock-star lifestyle”. That night, he hit on a theme: “Black Beatles”. “It was a dope phrase,” says Lee. “I’ve always loved…

DAMN IT, GEORGE MICHAEL – another beloved pop legend gone in 2016, dying on Christmas at the far-too-young age of 53. This one really hurts, because George Michael was a true pop visionary, one of the great Eighties glam eccentrics. No one else could have scored a classic like “Faith”, his biggest, best and weirdest hit. It’s one of the briefest Number One smashes of recent decades – under three minutes. Yet every moment is coded with sexual and stylistic provocations – the stubble, the black leather jacket, the acoustic guitar and handclaps, the breathy gasps and careless whispers, the paranoid lyrics, the way he sabotages his own straight-boy makeover by tricking out that leather jacket with a string of pearls. Even when George was draping himself with scantily clad…

“The template got thrown out the window on this record.” IT’S THE HOTTEST SYDNEY NIGHT IN over a century, and the Red Rattler – ostensibly a small warehouse located in the inner west – isn’t quite equipped to cope, with the large metal fans attached to the wings of the stage offering little respite for the capacity crowd. Canadian indie-rock duo Japandroids are, however, as prepared as possible. Their usual skinny jeans have been swapped for jagged-edged shorts, exposing the pair’s sun-starved pins as they part the backstage curtain and walk onstage. “That’s a very different show to when you come back six months later and play a room that holds two thousand people,” says frontman/guitarist Brian King. “It’s a different vibe.” It’s the morning after the Red Rattler sweat-fest,…

IN EARLY 1967, A young law-firm employee named Angie Kucherenko came home to her apartment in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood and found her roommate’s boyfriend, a 21-year-old Berkeley dropout named Jann Wenner, sprawled on the couch and strumming an acoustic guitar. He had a big idea he couldn’t wait to share. “He sat up, put the guitar aside and said, ‘I want to start a rock & roll magazine’,” Kucherenko remembers. “I said, ‘Rock & roll? Isn’t that a passing phase?’” Not to Wenner. For him, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones and local bands like the Grateful Dead were hugely important cultural figures who deserved an outlet that took them seriously. “There was nothing called rock journalism as a profession,” Wenner says. “If you picked up Billboard, you…

Who are your heroes? I’m fascinated with the Alamo, so I go back to Davy Crockett. There was a lot of bravery on both sides of the walls. Crockett was an example of someone who could have left the fort, but he did the right thing and stayed, and he was killed for it. Also, and I know this sounds random, but I admire Jack Nicholson. He’s so honest as an actor, down to his hair. It’s always out of place. What book has left the most lasting impression on you? Romeo and Juliet touched me very much. It’s a bit like the Alamo in its two factions. When the Franco Zeffirelli movie came out, I saw it many times. I was drawn to the romance – total romance. I…

What’s the best part of success? On the personal side, giving back to your family. On the musical side, it’s having the freedom to go in whichever direction you want to. A case in point would be that we don’t go on tour for longer than two weeks at a time. We did almost 200 shows in two-week increments for [2008’s] Death Magnetic. We don’t want to miss out on seeing our kids. What’s the worst part of success? I don’t think there is a “worst part” [laughs]. I think you should stop whining and be happy that somebody gives a shit. Who are your heroes? People who challenge the status quo. In no particular order: my dad, Steve Jobs, James Hetfield, [painter] Mark Rothko. People who encourage you to…

You’ve worked steadily for 50 years, but you’ve never been a superstar. Do you think you’ve benefited from not having one huge period of success? My father, Lloyd Bridges, had a big TV series in the late Fifties and early Sixties called Sea Hunt. He was so good at playing a skin diver that people thought he actually was that character. That’s as great a compliment as an actor can get, but it was also frustrating, because he kept getting offered skin-diving scripts. In my career, I really set out not to develop too strong a persona, so that you wouldn’t have a hard time imagining me in any given role. I wanted to pleasantly confuse the audience on who I was. When you’re not making movies, you lead a…

You spent part of your childhood in North Carolina. What’s the most Southern thing about you? I remember waiting for the school bus and seeing a chain gang across the road. There were a dozen black prisoners bound together at the ankles and guards with 12-gauge shotguns. It was scary. I don’t know when I began to think about Jim Crow, but we grew up knowing what was right and what was wrong. Who are your heroes? Musically, Ray Charles. The first time I heard Yes Indeed!, that really took the roof off. I have a strange story, actually: When I was a teenager, I went to a [psychiatric] hospital called McLean, and while I was there, Ray was incarcerated for four or five days. It must have been part…

Japandroids Near to the Wild Heart of Life Inertia **** While on the surface album number three might seem to comply to Japandroids’ strict motif – a tracklist of eight songs, black-and-white portrait artwork and a hook-leading single ready for fist-pumping crowd revelry – appearances can be misleading. This is Japandroids 2.0. And this new model comes with a notable upgrade: lyrical density. While previously satisfied with shouting single-line sentences, Near to the Wild Heart of Life takes the opposite tact, primary vocalist Brian King often tangling himself amongst alliteration and punchy, poetic lines (“passport, past life, a drifter’s demons”). The complexity is complimented by the music itself, with formerly frantic drums/guitar punk minimalism and heartland hedonism now funnelled by both variety (the folk-rock skew of “Midnight to Morning”)…

Dune Rats The Kids Will Know It’s Bullshit Ratbag Records *** ½ Dune Rats know well that their charm lies in their ability to distil punk and pop down to its most elemental. Their 2014 debut was a heady mix of surf-rock and garage-punk, but it also had some interesting melodic tinges, lending otherwise stupid songs like “Dalai Lama, Big Banana, Marijuana” a sense of self-aware piss-takery. On The Kids Will Know It’s Bullshit, that playfulness has been mostly replaced with rebellion so nihilistic that it seems irresponsible. By the time you get through the punny first single “Scott Green” and the bogan anthems “Bullshit” and “6 Pack”, it becomes clear that The Kids Will Know . . . is the Dune Rats’ party manifesto taken to the extreme. Early…

“If you’re going to get a tattoo of some Powderfinger lyrics, you could probably do better than ‘Sunsets’.” The last time I did something for the first time About five minutes ago. I recorded over a bass line that was way better than the one I ended up recording. I was working on a demo of something and it was sounding pretty good, and I thought, “Oh yeah, I’m gonna try this”, and I did and it completely killed the vibe of what the song is doing. [Laughs] So I think I might have to learn from that in the future. Step away from the bass guitar, dickhead. The last time someone quoted my lyrics back at me This is not quite a quote, but someone sent me a photo…

Guns N’ Roses JAN. 21-SEPT. 8 Against all odds, GNR’s “Not in This Lifetime” reunion tour went smoothly, with no late starts or signs of onstage tension from a band that fought famously. “Every day we do at least an hour soundcheck,” guitarist Richard Fortus recently said, “and we’ll play through different ideas, put stuff down on tape. It’s really organic.” Red Hot Chili Peppers JAN. 5-SEPT. 24 Coming off a European tour that produced their best ticket sales in more than a decade, the Chili Peppers return January 5th for a sweeping North American run. They’ve been playing all the hits, plus deeper tracks like “Aeroplane” and a cover of John Lennon’s “Watching the Wheels”. Bruno Mars MARCH 28-NOV. 11 After hitting Number One with 24K Magic, Mars sold…

AFTER COUNTRY LP, SHERYL CROW PLOTS POP RETURN Sheryl Crow moved to Nashville in 2012 and released a country album, Feels Like Home. But it didn’t take Crow long to realise the genre isn’t for her: “Country music is commerce at its most fully realised,” she says. “I want an experience completely detached from that.” For Be Myself, out in April, Crow reunited with 1990s collaborators like Jeff Trott, who co-wrote hits including “If It Makes You Happy”. She cut 17 songs in three weeks: “I wanted the feeling I had when I first made records – like a kid just playing with my friends.” ANDY GREENE REZNOR PLANS NINE INCH NAILS REBOOT, FILM WORK Since finishing Nine Inch Nails’ 2014 tour, Trent Reznor has been working on several projects,…

AFTER SCORING HIS FIRST- ever Number One song with his last album, John Legend was confident enough to take a huge risk on his new one, Darkness and Light: He sought out indie-leaning producer-guitarist Blake Mills, whom he admired for his work with Alabama Shakes. Mills is more of a critics’ fave than a hitmaker, so “there was scepticism from the label”, says Legend, who brought in an eclectic crew of guest vocalists (Shakes lead singer Brittany Howard, Chance the Rapper, Miguel), backing musicians (Kamasi Washington, Pino Palladino) and unlikely songwriting partners (Will Oldham, a.k.a. Bonnie “Prince” Billy; Tobias Jesso Jr.). “People in the industry get bound by genre more than artists,” says Legend, who also plays a bandleader in the film La La Land and exec-produces the Underground Railroad…

“Our real boss is the people who are gonna buy the record,” says Tuckerman. IT’S A BLAZING SUMMER’S DAY AT AN outdoor cafe in Sydney’s Inner West, and MC Brendan ‘Tuka’ Tuckerman and DJ/producer Morgan ‘Morgs’ Jones – half of Australian hip-hop group Thundamentals – look happy to be seeing sunlight. Having spent the past eight months holed up with other members Jesse ‘Jeswon’ Ferris (MC) and Kevin ‘Poncho’ Kerr (DJ/producer) in the Sydney recording studio of fellow Blue Mountains-bred hip-hop group Hermitude, Thundamentals decided upon a refreshingly direct method to reconnect with fans when announcing their impending fourth album, Everyone We Know. “Jesse and I put our phone number on the internet, and three weeks before we launched the name of the album we asked people to text us,”…

The Song That Reminds Me of School U2 “Gloria” 1981 “I quit school when I was 15, that was 1982, and in my last year the school wanted to set up a little radio station, and I volunteered to be the DJ. I think this is the first song I played on air. I just loved the song, I loved the energy, the rawness, the ferocity of Edge’s guitar sound, everything. It had so much of that early U2 punk spirit that really captivated me.” The Song I Fall Asleep To Brian Eno “The Ship” 2016 “It’s not a song, it’s one of his ambient records, and it’s the album I play whenever I get on a plane and it’s time to zone out. I put my headphones on and…

Who are your heroes? That’s easy – my husband, John Lennon. He was the only person who put up with me. It’s difficult for a guy to understand what women are thinking. Most guys don’t even listen. He was very forward-thinking in that sense. He really jumped into feminism, no argument. He would ask me, “Could you find feminist groups for me?” Even now, I don’t think men get together and say, “Let’s be feminists.” Do you have a favourite city? I love every city I’ve been to, but Liverpool is great. John and I would pass through and say hello to relatives. People there are really strong in spirit, especially the women. I wouldn’t say they’re working-class – I don’t think they’d like for me to label them that…

You live in Los Angeles, but you grew up in Louisiana and Mississippi. What’s the most Southern thing about you? I was raised to be proud of where I was from. When I first came to New York, I met a Southerner who got rid of her accent so she could be in radio or film. I said, “That’s fucked up. Don’t you want to have an identity?” I have a certain Southern Gothic sensibility. I related to Flannery O’Connor at a young age. My mother’s father was a fire-and-brimstone Methodist preacher. I saw a lot of that kind of thing growing up, and I read about it in O’Connor. Her writing was really dark but also ironic and humorous. It informs a lot of my songs. Who are your…

What’s the most British thing about you? I’m attracted to things that aren’t simply pretty – there has to be an element of darkness to it, like the beauty of the smog. That comes from growing up in London. I also find it very hard to say something intimate without following it with a joke. “Quickly, make it sarcastic! Pull it back!” I don’t know if that’s a British thing or just a Welch family thing. What was your favourite book as a child? Little House on the Prairie. For Christmas, my aunt gave me and my sister little custom smock prairie dresses, and we would make a prairie in our house, with a lake made out of towels. I may have sensed something unsettled in my parents’ marriage; they…

GARY CLARK JR. IS ON A HIGH THE DAY after playing Carnegie Hall, with one regret: “I wanted to re-create Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Live at Carnegie Hall album cover!” he says in his New York hotel room. Clark has been getting deep into photography on the road, mostly taking photos of his two-year-old son, Zion, “because I’m obsessed”. Clark’s Fuji camera is one of his many must-have items on tour. He also brings plenty of John Varvatos clothing, prized watches, and a portable studio for use after he and his wife, Nicole Trunfio, put Zion to bed. “I’ll make a beat and send it to the band,” Clark says, “then I might play a game of NBA 2K.” He’s looking forward to downtime at his new 50-acre ranch outside his…

When the Menzingers toured Australia in 2014, the band were eager to maintain the momentum garnered by the runaway success of 2012’s On the Impossible Past. Maintain they did. This month Philadelphia’s favourite melodic punks return to our shores, kickstarting yet another album cycle for their fifth release, After the Party. And they’re having the time of their lives. “We wanted it to be this ultimate bar jukebox record,” laughs co-frontman Greg Barnett over the phone. “We wanted every song to be fun as hell.” After the Party is an optimistic call-to-arms, inspiring listeners to take the future by the horns. “We’re told that we need to have all these things – own a house, have a car, a great career by a certain age, but it’s all just bullshit,”…

ON DECEMBER 27TH, CARRIE FISHER PASSED away after suffering a heart attack on a flight from London to Los Angeles four days earlier. Late last year, she sat down with Andy Greene for an interview in support of her most recent book, The Princess Diarist. The interview never ran in ROLLING STONE Australia, and portions of it are presented here for the first time. What’s the best part of success and the worst part of success? The best part is money, travelling and the people you meet. The worst part is money, travelling and the people you meet. That’s something Dorothy Parker would say. But I’ll answer it straight: The worst part is being criticised. Things are taken out of context. Now, with the Internet, you’re your own worst enemy.…

The Eurythmics co-founder just teamed up with Louisiana blues singer Thomas Lindsey for the collaborative album Spitballin’. Oliver! “Consider Yourself” My dad used to play the Oliver! soundtrack on his gramophone record player, and the whole house came alive. This song always cheered me up. Bob Dylan “Tangled Up in Blue” The bit about abandoning the car out West feels like it comes from a Raymond Chandler novel. And the melody is fantastic. R.L. Burnside “Jumper on the Line” This just stays on the same blues riff over and over. It shows you don’t need complicated lyrics and epic chord changes. Tyrannosaurus Rex “Debora” I saw Marc Bolan in my hometown of Sunderland when he first started out. About 800 girls were spellbound, and you couldn’t get this song out…

“Bluegrass music will always make you speed” ‘Ican’t recall offhand if I was assigned to photograph the Violent Femmes or if I requested the shoot. They arrived at my fourth-floor walk-up apartment in Manhattan’s Lower East Side/Chinatown lugging all their gear, as requested. It’s a toss-up as to what I enjoyed more over the next few hours: photographing and hanging out with them, or listening to my own private concert. They were as good-natured and fun and friendly as you’d imagine. After we did the interior shots, I took them to my favourite street corner a block away. They set up as buskers and played for the mystified passers-by. At some point a young girl eating an apple walked over and was entranced by them. Snap. I also dig…

“IT WAS A BIT BIGGER THAN I WAS COMFORTABLE WITH. IT TAKES A TOLL.” AFTER SLOGGING IT OUT IN THE pubs of Perth with her first band, Photoplay, and a stint in London in the Eighties as an aspiring solo pop star, when fame finally came for Suze DeMarchi it did so quickly – within two years of forming in 1989, the Baby Animals had a Number One album with their self-titled debut. This month the band embark on a tour celebrating the 25th anniversary of the single “One Word”, a song DeMarchi wasn’t initially a fan of. “[The demo] was a bad country song,” she chuckles, sitting in the ROLLINGSTONEoffices. “It really came into its own when we were doing pre-production in New York. But I still didn’t love…

The singer on the importance of not growing up, all the drugs he did, and what’s ahead in his seventies What’s the most important rule you live by? Don’t lose yourself. If you take enough dope, you lose your body, your mind or your life. Conversely, if you do everything everybody else tells you to do, you’ll be miserable and lose your self-identity. At some point you gotta figure out the balance. “Am I the guy who’s gonna relive the life of King Farouk, or am I more like a steelworker who got lucky?” Who are your heroes? Keith Richards and Bo Diddley. The primary thing is how they play. Each of them keeps it straight and plain, and they don’t gild the lily. It feels like the real thing…

What’s your favourite city? I have four. London, because I’ve lived there for 23 years. Then New York. I think the terrorist attacks in 2001 shook the world so much because everybody who’s been there falls in love with it. Buenos Aires, because the people are unbelievable, and my best shows have happened there. And then Manchester, because it’s where I’m from, and it still feels like home – plus, I’ll get my throat cut next time I’m back there if I don’t mention it. What’s the most Manchester thing about you? My accent. It was the first thing that Americans ever noticed about me when I came to the U.S. I was subtitled on MTV, which I found highly amusing. I’m so proud to be a Mancunian. If I…

What do you wish someone had told you about show business before you entered it? I’m not sure anything anyone said would’ve made life easier. It’s like asking, “Do you wish somebody had told you about that scene in Poltergeist before you watched it?” [Laughs] There are a lot of moments in show business – and I’m sure in everyone else’s life – where you’re skipping along with a huge confidence, and then you step into a manhole and crack all your teeth on the pavement on the way down into the sewer. The idea of somebody telling me where all those holes were makes me sad. If I had avoided them, I don’t think I’d be as good at what I do. What were the manholes in your career?…

You were raised in an evangelical Christian household. How did that affect you? I remember asking my Sunday-school teacher who made God. It was the first time I ever saw someone’s eyes glaze over and robotically recite something. She said, “God’s always been.” For the Western world, enlightenment is having an airtight answer to a question. That to me is the quickest way to make yourself absurd. I think certainty is completely grotesque. Was there anything valuable about your evangelical upbringing? I was promised redemption and forgiveness and salvation over and over, but it never manifested in any meaningful way. It was like Charlie Brown and Lucy with the football. There’s something about my writing that keeps looking to that problem. What’s the first song you ever connected to? I…

“If I was born to be the loner, okay, but I’m not made of stone and I’m so blown away. Don’t know what’s the rubble and the parts I want to save.”—RYAN ADAMS, “We Disappear” ***** Classic | **** Excellent | *** Good | ** Fair | * Poor Ratings are supervised by the editors of ROLLING STONE. Ryan Adams Prisoner EMI **** It would be unfair to regard Ryan Adams’ excursions into emotive 1980s-inspired rock on 2014’s self-titled LP as anything but sincere. After all, he was aged six to 16 during that decade, and it’s only natural that the likes of Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen and his beloved Bruce Hornsby made a meaningful impact on this now 42-year-old songwriting phenomenon. Yet Ryan Adams, while highly listenable, lacked…

Thundamentals   Everyone We Know Universal/High Depth **** It’s been over two years since Thundamentals dropped their last album, 2014’s So We Can Remember, and from the first notes of this follow-up it’s clear the time has been spent pushing their sound even further than their last genre-defying effort. A mellow trumpet, piano and choral intro announces that Thundamentals won’t be constrained by a hip-hop template, but one track later the De La Soul-vibing “Sally” is a reassuring blast of funk, letting you know they haven’t forgotten how to bounce, either. Lead single “Never Say Never” is a party jam with heart and showcases some of the best flows MCs Tuka and Jes-won have produced, while “Wolves” heads in a different direction altogether, all autotuned vocals and a haunting synth…

Fences Denzel Washington Directed by Denzel Washington **** LIKE BEING HIT BY LIGHT- ning. That’s how you feel watching Fences, the Pulitzer-winning play by August Wilson that director-star Denzel Washington brings to the screen with all its flamethrowing ferocity and feeling. The year is 1957. The place is Pittsburgh, where Wilson wanted to illuminate “the poetry in the everyday language of black America”. Washington plays Troy Maxson, a garbage collector with the chip of broken dreams on his shoulder. Troy made it into baseball’s Negro Leagues, but no further. His bitterness touches his two sons, Cory (Jovan Adepo) and Lyons (Russell Hornsby), and his mentally challenged brother, Gabriel (Mykelti Williamson). Troy can swill gin and play king while jawing with his pal Bono (the outstanding Stephen Henderson). But the only…