Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2017 i Rolling Stone Australia

Thank the Lorde I REALLY DIDN’T THINK Lorde could pull it off again, but I’ve been proven wrong. Thanks for the great story, RS [RS 788] – Ella remains a huge inspiration for me and millions of young women around the world. Shelley Field Castle Hill, NSW Legendary Lady LOVED TINA ARENA’S HONES- ty in your Living Legends feature [RS 788]. Her insight into the treatment of women in the industry – particularly those who are ageing – was enlightening without being bitter. She’s as honest as she is a class act – no wonder she’s had such a long career in the music industry. Bailey Rimrose Maroochydore, QLD Holy Smokes LET’S GET THIS STRAIGHT. According to John Mellencamp [RS 788] he invented modern country and thinks glorifying smoking is…

‘DO YOU ALWAYS do that?” James Hetfield asks Lars Ulrich with a hint of agitation in his voice. The two are facing each other in the “Tuning Room”, where they typically rehearse before a show. They’re trying to get their 1991 classic “Wherever I May Roam” right, but Ulrich is playing a strange off-kilter rhythm. Fifteen years ago, this might have resulted in a long, teary group-therapy session. But today, Hetfield drops the issue and lets Ulrich play the song his own way while exchanging grins with the rest of the band. This is how Metallica are operating on their first North American tour in eight years (and first stadium run in nearly 20): loose and easygoing, but also sensitive to one another’s feelings. “We know where all the nuclear…

Descent Into the Maelstrom is a new feature-length documentary that chronicles the life, death and rebirth of seminal Sydney rock band Radio Birdman. Filmmaker Jonathan J. Sequeira says he knew a bit about the group’s history prior to starting the project, but underestimated the size of their impact. “It became a bigger story than I first realised,” he says. “When I started to look into it I realised what a huge influence they had on Australia, even outside of actual music. It surprised me how big that was.” Sequeira paints a picture of six dedicated rock & roll soldiers who came together in the mid-Seventies to wage war on the traditional rock establishment before dysfunctional personal relations came to a head in England in 1978. Birdman guitarist Deniz Tek says…

BESIDES BEING THE TWO MOST NOTORIOUS criminals in America in the early 1970s, Charles Manson and Patty Hearst had nothing in common. One was a cult leader hoping to start a race war; the other was a teenage heiress who was kidnapped by a group of inept revolutionaries. (Ironically, the demure Hearst was the only one of the two to actually participate directly in a crime.) The pair were media sensations who generated endless hours of news coverage, but it was two teams of ROLLING STONE reporters that ran circles around the mainstream media, scoring exclusive, groundbreaking stories on both. In the process, the journalists elevated ROLLING STONE from a small, youthful journal to a publication that could influence the national conversation. It began in August 1969, when actress Sharon…

“I was ready to write about a lot of shit that had happened in my life,” says Pierce of the new album. JONNY PIERCE HAS A CABIN IN THE woods. An hour from where he grew up in upstate New York, it’s where the frontman and creative force behind nervy indie sweethearts the Drums repairs to think and record. “It gives me time to get honest with myself,” he says. It’s a space he’s needed. Since the Drums’ third album, Encyclopedia, was released in 2014, Pierce has weathered a breakup with his husband – the man Pierce’s anti-gay, Pentecostal pastor parents had seemingly begun to finally accept as their son’s partner. Pierce took the break-up hard. “This cabin became a symbol of that dark period,” says Pierce. “I was ready…

In the past few years, you’ve become a much bigger concert draw. What happened? I don’t like to think about why – because then you find out. I have a theory about any success I’ve had. I don’t think I’m all that bad. I just think I’m competent. I know how to write. I know how to play. I know how to sing in key. I don’t like my own voice. Do you consider yourself a great songwriter? I think I’m OK. Some of my songs are pretty damn good. Some stink out loud. I once tried to write a song in French, and I don’t even speak French. I played it in France and asked a promoter why they didn’t like it. He said they thought I was singing…

1 A Glacier Is Born Just over 100,000 years ago, ice began to form on the sloping edge of the continental shelf in what is now West Antarctica. 2 The Ice Thickens As temperatures dropped and snowfall increased, the ice thickened, depressing the land beneath the glacier. 3 Warming-Ocean Effect As the climate warms, much of the heat is absorbed by the oceans. The warmer water melts the glacier from below, causing the ice shelves to break off. 4 The Glacier Fractures Without ice shelves, the glacier is destabilised, and the ice begins to fracture. As melted ice pools on the surface and water flows into the ice, it fractures further. 5 The Collapse Begins With ice shelves gone and ice fractured, the glacier begins to collapse. As it does,…

 The last time I was physically sick “I’m really bad at not regretting things. That’s my one regret. Oh my God, am I a sociopath?” Last week. I was vomiting like crazy. I was like a little kid. Last time we spoke I was telling you about how I vomited on a young man’s back. That’s what I get, huh? Karma. The last time I said, “Don’t you know who I am?” I say it to my wife every day! I have a joke with her. You know singers, they sing all the damned time. Ever since I was a kid, my sister would be like, “God, shut up!” So if we’re in the car now and I’m singing and the radio’s on, my wife will just turn the radio…

Del McCoury Auerbach recently started having “picking parties” at his home in Nashville’s West End neighbourhood. One guest was McCoury, 78. A veteran of Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, he is one of the last living links to bluegrass’s golden era. “He flies Bill Monroe’s flag hard,” Auerbach says. “I was raised on the Stanley Brothers. I didn’t know that you can’t be in both camps – bluegrass beef, man.” Those parties pushed Auerbach to start writing on acoustic guitar. “It couldn’t be a fragment supported by studio magic,” he says. “I wanted to be able to sit down and just play ’em and have them work. I’ve never been able to do that.” Charlie Feathers Auerbach loves both garage-punk icons the Cramps and swamp-blues great Junior Kimbrough. Both have…

Augie March frontman and principal songwriter Glenn Richards is having trouble with his two warring cats when we check in on the progress of the much-loved Melbourne band’s latest record, their second since returning from an indefinite hiatus. Tentatively titled Bootikins, the record has been percolating since Augie March finished a brief tour in support of their triumphant 2014 comeback album Havens Dumb, with Richards recording ideas between his Hobart studio and Melbourne. “It’s not ideal, but it’s necessary from an economic point of view,” he says. “Because I’m here in Tassie, it’s hard for us to get any sort of groove together.” In an effort to fix that, Augie March decided to work on the album in blocks, hiring legendary Aussie producer Tony Cohen (the Birthday Party, the Cruel…

 THE PASSING OF CHRIS CORNELL CAUGHT EV- eryone off guard. Suddenly, fans and fellow musicians all over the world were grieving. A cynical person might wonder how the death of someone you never knew can have such a profound effect. Indeed, it would be your cynicism that would stop you from understanding. “There are songs that are closer to your life than life itself.” Perhaps it’s just me but I definitely evaluate someone by their affinity for music. What kind of music isn’t the issue, it’s that music has a place in their lives. I’ve been around people for whom music has no place and it’s no place I want to be. Why? Because those who like music havethe toinvest emotion and affection into something that isn’t theirs but by…

The Song That Makes Me Cry Ph. D “I Won’t Let You Down” 1982 “It was in the charts the year my girlfriend and I went to France to pick grapes and have a good time, and she’s now my wife. It brings a tear to my eye in a good way, cos I’m remembering two young people not knowing what life was going to throw at them, not knowing they were going to get married, have kids, that one of them would become a successful novelist. I’d just left university, and it was a weird time cos I didn’t know what to do with my life. It takes me back to that summer and reminds me of what a mixed up kid I was.” The Song That Reminds Me…

“I DID FIVE ALBUMS IN THE EIGHTIES. EVERY ONE OF THEM SUNK WITHOUT A TRACE.” RUSSELL MORRIS SCROLLS THROUGH his phone, looking for answers. “My two passions are history and astrophysics,” explains the formerly flaxen-haired prince of psychedelic pop turned urban blues yarn-spinner. The long years between those two glorious career pinnacles comprise something of a black hole unparalleled in Australian music. At last, he reads aloud the final text in a recent astrophysical debate with Dr Karl Kruszelnicki. “The universe is a wondrous place,” it says. He looks up and smiles. Russell Morris and psychedelia are forever linked in the Australian pop narrative. How does that feel? Well, it’s ironic. I’ve only really done one psychedelic record. When I first got into music I was living in Richmond and…

THE LAST TIME Serj Tankian saw Chris Cornell, everything seemed great. On March 25th, the two friends – Tankian, the singer in the alternative-metal band System of a Down, and Cornell, the founding singer-guitarist of the pioneering Seattle grunge band Soundgarden – were guests at a star-studded 70th-birthday gala thrown by Elton John in L.A. “We had this long chat, sitting next to each other,” Tankian remembers. He and Cornell talked about composing for movies and the prospect of Cornell doing concerts with an orchestra. Tankian, about to go on the road with System of a Down, asked Cornell if he was tired of touring. “For myself, it’s fun but nothing new under the sun,” Tankian admits. Cornell “was just the opposite: ‘I’m really excited. I’m doing this tour with…

“All of the things we’re taking, ’Cause we are young and . . . ashamed Send us to perfect places. All of our heroes fading.” —LORDE, “Perfect Places” Lorde Melodrama Lava/Republic ★★★★ BY WILL HERMES On her debut, Pure Heroine, Lorde ridiculed pop music while glorying in it. The former Ella Yelich-O’Connor displayed an honour-roll-brat-in-detention-hall flow, a goth sense of drama and the sort of supreme over it-ness that only an actual 16-year-old can muster. Full of heart and nuanced writing, the LP was a small masterpiece and a massive hit as well. You could tell the Auckland, New Zealand, kid was in for the long haul, and after a four-year wait, her second album, Melodrama, confirms that notion. Now 20, Lorde signals a new order straightaway, with lonely…

Tex, Don & Charlie You Don’t Know Lonely EMI ★★★ ½ There’s a bloke you don’t want to know, but you can’t look away. He is what he is: a man in conflict with nature, one step ahead of the blues, hitching outta town in the rain, looking for the Plan B he already kinda knows is gonna take him nowhere. You think you know lonely? This bloke knows lonely. On their third album together, the sad, seedy composite character conjured by Tex Perkins, Don Walker and Charlie Owen is as reliable as a hangover after the races. On a scaffold of block piano chords, sighing slide and twanging steel guitar he drags his scarred and sorry bones from closing time and “women of a certain age” to another…

1 Their debut was an unexpected smash Royal Blood’s 2014 self-titled debut LP was partially self-funded, and written when they didn’t have a fanbase. It went on to earn the duo – bassist-vocalist Mike Kerr and drummer Ben Thatcher – a BRIT Award for Best British Group, and led to them playing more than 300 shows around the world, including festivals such as Coachella and Splendour in the Grass. “It wasn’t a huge thing to endure,” says Kerr of the trajectory. “It was about keeping up with the pace of it and trying to enjoy it rather than freak out.” 2 So they repeated the formula on its follow-up, right? “The whole thing was about resisting that really,” says Kerr. “Some of those songs [on the debut] are five years…

LIL YACHTY HAS EMERGED AS one of hip-hop’s biggest stars of the moment: the 19-year-old’s first album, Teenage Emotions, debuted at Number Five in the U.S., after his single “1 Night” racked up more than 107 million YouTube views. But Yachty is a polarising figure: for his casual indifference to hip-hop’s traditions and history (he single-handedly exposed a genre-wide generation gap last year by calling Notorious B.I.G. “overrated” and saying he couldn’t name many Tupac songs) and for the deliberately juvenile irreverence of his music (he rapped over the Rugrats theme). At the same time, he’s won over Kanye West, Chance the Rapper and countless young fans. “You shouldn’t expect one lane, like a hip-hop album,” says Yachty, whose real name is Miles McCollum, of his new LP. “If that’s…

LONDON GRAMMAR MIGHT RE- gret calling their 2013 debut album If You Wait. It did very well, see – selling nearly two million copies worldwide and earning the band an Ivor Novello songwriting award for “Strong” and a Brit Award nomination – and now, four years after it was released, they’re finally ready to put out album number two, to the delight of their antsy fans. In light of the 30 months they spent touring their debut, though, the wait is justified, says singer Hannah Reid. “You can tour in two ways: you can tour and have it really affect your creativity or you can tour and it can be manageable,” she says. “I think we toured in the first way where we didn’t have time for anything else.” There…

The former Jam frontman, who has a new solo LP, A Kind Revolution, picked songs produced by May-field or released on his label Curtom. Curtis Mayfield “The Makings of You” Curtis was a prophet and a poet. With this song, he was weaving together the black-pride movement with a humanitarian message. He was an ambassador of peace. Patti Jo “Make Me Believe in You” This has a real driving beat to it, just a great dance record with very dramatic strings and minimal backing. Leroy Hutson “Cool Out” I first heard this instrumental track in the early 1990s at a club. It’s got this spacey, futuristic sound, but it’s still soulful. Baby Huey “Hard Times” Baby Huey had just one album on Curtom and then died very young. The beautiful…

“I was doing what all writers do – I was creating a world where I got to play God..” ‘WEA Records organised a photocall between Tom Waits and a crowd of rock & roll photographers, backstage at La Cigale concert venue in Paris. Tom was not playing live that evening and the photos were to be used to promote a later gig, which would take place in the Folies Bergère. Tom is highly-professional and doesn’t like wasting time, so he posed for the flashbulbs as soon as he arrived. The photographers gathered around him in a circle. He had a glass of whiskey in one hand and confetti in the other, two watches on his right wrist, one displaying Paris time and the other New York time. He had…

HOM YORKE HAS FOUR WORDS OF BLUNT ADVICE FOR his younger, twitchier self, that paranoid twenty something humanoid who made his band’s turn-of-the-millennium masterpieces. “Lighten the fuck up,” Yorke says, laughing hard. Radiohead’s frontman, who turned 48 in October, is long pas this days of hiding in tour buses and venting pain and fear into spiral notebooks. Now, he dances onstage and DJ’s in clubs. At the moment, he’s sitting in Little Dom’s Italian restaurant in the Los Feliz neighbourhood of his adopted hometown of Los Angeles, wearing a bleached denim jacket with the collar popped up, a thin white T-shirt and what appear to be leather pants. His long hair is pulled back into a tiny, tight bun; he has a stylish grey beard. Little Dom’s is one of…

 I IN A CAFE IN LONDON’S TRENDY Shoreditch, Kirin J. Callinan splits the difference between debonair and demented in a black satin floral pyjama shirt, loose-fitting black satin pants cinched with a vintage leather belt, and navy suede slippers. A recent mullet is gone, replaced with slicked-back hair cut below his ears, and a small pair of wire spectacles sits atop his nose. “I’m just trying to be as real and simultaneously larger than life as possible,” says Callinan. He’s in town for a couple of shows, including one supporting his friend Mac DeMarco, who appears on Callinan’s new album, Bravado, at the Brixton Academy. “I think it’s 6000-capacity or something,” says Callinan. “That might be a slight exaggeration.” Callinan’s never been one to let truth get in the way of…

Fiona Horne The Naked Witch Rockpool Publishing ★★★ The Naked Witch doesn’t know whether it wants to be an autobiography or a new-agey self-help manual. As a result we have harrowing chapters about childhood sexual abuse and the rise and fall of Def FX (with Sean Lowry only ever referred to as “the co-founder”) interrupted by passages on self-empowerment and the benefits of AA and fire dancing. It’s an often compelling read, but a rigorous editor would have helped shape this into something less frustratingly scattered.…