Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2017 i Rolling Stone Australia

Radio-gaga I HAD TOTALLY FORGOTTEN what a game-changing record OK Computer was until I read your interview with Radiohead. Twenty years ago I remember thinking that OK Computer was the best sounding record in my collection, and I didn’t respect anybody who didn’t appreciate it. Listening to it with fresh ears, it’s still amazing, and Radiohead haven’t come close to topping it in terms of songwriting. Darren Best Pyrmont, NSW Lighten Up THOM YORKE’S ADVICE TO his younger self is to “Lighten the fuck up!” Does he really think he’s a positive ray of sunshine these days? Jess Robarde Fortitude Valley, QLD New York State of Mind MARK SUMMERS’ ILLUSTRA- tion of Billy Joel [RS 789] is right on the money. The expression perfectly crafted of the grounded, street wise…

THE TRUCKS BEGAN arriving in Tulsa in March 2016, each filled with priceless artifacts from Bob Dylan’s past. Open up one box and see a handwritten draft of “Visions of Johanna” on yellow legal paper with alternate lyrics (including mentions of “nightingales” and “infinity codes”). Look inside another and find the leather jacket he wore at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, and the guest list for a 1974 show at Madison Square Garden (Yoko Ono got two tickets; Allen Ginsberg got four). Another has a 1969 letter from George Harrison: “Dear Bobbie, Thanks for Nashville Skyline, it is beautiful. Love to you all.” The collection is still arriving in stages at Tulsa’s Center for American Research at the Gilcrease Museum, but it will eventually include about 6,000 largely unseen items…

IN “THE DEFIANT ONES”, JIMMY IOVINE REMEMBERS THE FIRST TIME HE EN- countered Dr. Dre and protégé Snoop Dogg. “I said, ‘These guys are the same as Mick and Keith’,” Iovine says. “‘They scare you, but the music brings you in.’ ” Iovine released Dre’s The Chronic on Interscope, beginning a partnership that culminated with the two selling Beats Electronics to Apple in 2014 for $3 billion. Their relationship is chronicled in The Defiant Ones, which runs for four episodes on HBO. What may seem like a vanity project turns out to be a multilayered history of pop music, touching on Seventies arena rock, gangsta rap and the digital revolution. Director Allen Hughes talked to friends from Eminem to Bono, and pushed Dre to get personal, discussing his 1991 assault…

‘I HAVE SIX HOURS OF MUSIC coming up tonight,” says John Mayer. In a little while, he’ll take the stage in Atlanta with Dead & Company – featuring Grateful Dead alum Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann. After that, Mayer will play a surprise midnight club gig with Dave Chappelle, one of several pop-up shows they’ve been doing. “I’m sort of the acoustic DJ,” Mayer says. “He’ll just be like, ‘John, hit me with this or that’, and I’m pretty good at coming up with any song if I’ve heard it a couple of times. It’s like two guys taking over some little back room at a party.” Following the Dead run, Mayer will resume his solo tour, where he’s been debuting songs from his excellent LP The Search…

AMID THE COMFORT OF BOOKS stacked floor to ceiling in one of Bondi Beach’s local haunts, Celia Pavey, AKA Vera Blue, recalls how she learned to wear her heart on her sleeve. “There’s definitely been a shift from the first EP. I say things I probably wouldn’t have said two years ago.” Pavey’s debut record, Perennial, moves beyond the tropes of a classic break-up album, sliding between ruminating on love lost and parsing emotional contradictions. Telling lyrics aren’t disguised in metaphor, nor are they snuck into the ends of verses. Lines such as “Don’t need nobody that much/Don’t need no regular touch” and “I just wanna make you feel good” are themselves weighty hooks and land with a thud. The record is organised into three chapters that chronicle Pavey’s emergence…

“‘Cradle to the Grave’ makes me want to run through brick walls..” ‘Sire Records was getting ready to release the Brian Eno and David Byrne album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which they had recorded together from 1979 to 1980,” recalls Ebet Roberts. “I had been asked by Trouser Press magazine to photograph them at an interview that writer Scott Isler was doing for the upcoming release of the record. “I arrived at a sparse Soho loft in downtown Manhattan that Brian Eno had been subletting in January of 1981. They were in the middle of the interview when I arrived, and I took some candid photographs while they were talking and drinking tea. Following the interview, as I was looking for a place in the loft…

“I think jumping off the deep end artistically is a genuinely positive thing,” says Sultan. IT’S A CRISP WINTER’S DAY IN MEL- bourne and Dan Sultan, dressed head-to-toe in black denim, is pacing around the upstairs bandroom of The Gasometer Hotel in Collingwood, not far from his home in Fitzroy. When the musician sits, he compulsively sweeps his hand across the table. When he stands, he smokes. He might have completed his new album Killer, but the nervous energy is palpable. Perhaps it’s because Killer is different. After three albums of gutsy roots-rock, Sultan’s legion of fans will laud Killer for its big-swinging hooks, smart pop arrangements and that distinctive voice – a soulful, dusty bellow. That’s if they embrace the sonics. It isn’t that Sultan’s gone electronic, exactly. But…

“Innocence is what you lose. Like keys and dreams and old tattoos.”—QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE, “Hideaway” Queens of the Stone Age Villains Matador/Remote Control ★★★ ½ BY BARRY DIVOLA “I was born in the desert, May 17 in ’73, when the needle hit the groove I commence to moving, I was chasing what’s calling me,” Josh Homme states in the opening line of the first Queens of the Stone Age album in four years. It sounds like nothing less than a mission statement, giving us his origin story before getting down to business. He’s not been idle since 2013’s …Like Clockwork, making an Eagles of Death Metal album, collaborating with Iggy Pop on last year’s Post Pop Depression and even writing songs for the latest Lady Gaga…

Dan Sultan Killer Liberation ★★★★ Trading the red clay rock & roll textures of Nashville excursion Blackbird (2014) for more manicured production leaning on synths and drum programming (see the sputtering electronic snicks of “Cul-de-sac”), Sultan’s fourth long-player is a marked departure from his earlier blues-and-roots-oriented incarnations. From the hard-hitting drum triggering of opener “Drover” – a self-described prequel to Paul Kelly and Kev Carmody’s anthemic “From Little Things Big Things Grow” – it’s clear that Sultan has distilled some fresh ideas from recent forays into urban territory, including last year’s collaboration with A.B. Original (“January 26”). Produced by Jan Skubiszewski (Cat Empire) and featuring input from a slew of collaborators including Sparkadia’s Alex Burnett and Julian Hamilton (the Presets), Killer’s neo-soul trajectory positions Sultan alongside the likes of…

Jen Cloher Jen Cloher Milk! Records/Remote Control ★★★★ ½ Meet Jen Cloher. Sure you’ve seen her around, maybe shared some quality time. But here’s where you bust in on her playing guitar naked on her bed. Her girlfriend’s away on tour. Again. The job’s a slog. The country’s a joke. Shut the door on your way out. She’s going somewhere with this. The bliss, longing and jealousies of her life with the celebrated Courtney Barnett simmer in the present, in the wiry opener “Forgot Myself”, and the sweet intimacies and raw insights of “Sensory Memory”, “Waiting in the Wings” and “Dark Art”. The past comes in raging flashbacks to Catholic girls’ school, where “to love was to live in sin”; and to scenes of music as salvation, as ecstatic…

Tex Perkins with Stuart Coupe Tex Pan Macmillan ★★★★ There’s something faintly depressing about reading Tex Perkins’ excellent autobiography (or, more accurately, the oral history of Tex Perkins, as presented to venerable music writer Stuart Coupe): the Australian music scene of which he speaks pretty much doesn’t exist anymore. And sure, it’s hard to get nostalgic about the record company politics leading to his contract-escaping covers album with his unfortunately-named Ladyboyz, and no-one yearns to return to a Queensland where getting bashed by yobs or police was an accepted price of a night out. Still, these are snapshots of a more innocent time when young Australians had the economic freedom to fart about with instruments and see if anything interesting resulted, and when a weirdo band like the Cruel…

 The last nightmare I had “I’ve become a ninja with knife throwing. I could put about 20 in an area the size of a grapefruit.” I’ve had tidal wave dreams before, and they’re not fun. I had one just the other night. I was on the shore and waves are breaking, and all of a sudden I saw this wave coming that was the size of the Empire State Building and it kept getting bigger. And it was inevitable that it was going to hit, and of course you wake up right before it hits. Psychologists say that usually means there’s a problem in your life, or something that’s overwhelming you, and I can’t think of what that would be right now. The last time someone called me Vincent The…

ON DECEMBER 8TH, 1980, ANNIE LEIBOVITZ arrived at the New York apartment building of John Lennon and Yoko Ono to photograph the couple for a cover of ROLLINGSTONE. She urged them both to take their clothes off, a flashback to their first ROLLING STONE cover, in 1968, when they appeared naked to promote their Two Virgins album. Ono declined, but Lennon was game, and stripped down before getting on the floor near their bed and curling up in a fetal position next to the woman he called “Mother”. “I remember peeling the Polaroid and him looking at it and saying, ‘This is it. This is our relationship’,” Leibovitz recalled. Hours later, Lennon was shot dead in front of the building. The image (which in 2005 was voted the best magazine…

Near the end of the clip for Batpiss single “Weatherboard Man”, the Super 8 movie camera pans to a white horse with a broken leg, stood in a front yard. Filmed by guitarist Paul Pirie’s grandfather after Darwin’s 1974 Cyclone Tracy, the frame holds resonance. “That yard was Paul’s grandfather’s house,” says bassist/vocalist Thomy Sloane, who is in Upstate New York on a two-week artist residency. “The horse had blown in. It was Christmas day and Paul’s mum walked outside and thought she’d been given a pony.” Bleak themes stitch together the Melbourne trio’s third album, Rest In Piss. Death of close friends recurs. “Weatherboard Man” etches the hardship of disadvantaged rural areas, with self-hatred tacked on in “Tell Them My Name Is X”. Pirie’s cover art, trowelled in oils,…

Thomas and his band Matchbox 20 have launched their first U.S. tour in four years, featuring co-headliner Counting Crows. The Boomtown Rats “I Don’t Like Mondays” A lot of people don’t realise this is a song about a school shooting. You can see Bob Geldof’s social awareness coming out even back then. The Rolling Stones “Ruby Tuesday” This was a great experimental time for the Stones. There’s nothing special about a Tuesday, so you might as well start with this song. The Cure “Friday I’m in Love” This song is pure candy, especially for such a morose band. Robert Smith smiles through the whole video like a lunatic. Rob Thomas “Sunday Morning New York Blue” Stylistically, I was going back to the Eagles’ “New Kid in Town” with this. I’m…

ON A RECENT MONDAY AFTERNOON, THE QUEEN WAS TAKING her tea. “Could I just be more English than sense itself and get an Earl Grey?” asks Emilia Clarke from the deep folds of a leather chesterfield sofa in the so-called Drawing Room of her downtown Manhattan hotel. The young waiter is only too happy to oblige, though it’s unclear whether he knows he’s in the presence of the Khaleesi, Mother of Dragons and rightful ruler of the Seven Kingdoms. That being said, seven seasons into HBO’s Game of Thrones – a cultural phenomenon that plays in no fewer than 170 countries, has inspired countless tattoos and baby namings, and has proved to be the network’s most popular show of all time – it’s more than likely that he does. Clarke…

Arcade Fire Everything Now Sony ★★★★ Arcade Fire aren’t shy of maximalism. Since roaring into public consciousness with 2004 debut Funeral, the Canadian collective have habitually gambled with excess. When finessed and expertly deployed (Funeral, The Suburbs), they convincingly paint a singular universe. But when ambition outpaces them (Neon Bible, Reflektor), their passion sounds a lot like pomp. Fifth album Everything Now is a playful genre-surf back to that giddy universe. Produced by a pro pop team including Thomas Bangalter (Daft Punk) and Steve Mackey (Pulp), the album swings wildly through songs both concerned with the modern onslaught of data and borne from it. Take back-to-back cuts “Infinite Content” and “Infinite_ Content” – the former a garage-punk rush, the latter a wistful Americana lope. But they’re also the same…

“It was a lot of ego, a lot of drama,” Antonoff says of his last band, fun. “I just wanted to go home and write records.” JACK ANTONOFF HAS BEEN GETTING a lot of shit today. It’s late May, the same day news breaks that both Chris Cornell and Roger Ailes had died. From his Brooklyn apartment, Antonoff reacted with a tweet: “Roger Ailes was a sexual predator who ruined many lives,” he wrote. “Chris Cornell was a brilliant artist. World was made better and worse today.” Reaction has been swift. His Twitter mentions have lit up with people calling him “stupid” and “terrible”, and insulting his girlfriend, Lena Dunham. “A surprising amount of people are saying, ‘But it’s a human life!’” says Antonoff, sitting on a couch at Electric…

BACKSTAGE AT BONNA- roo, Dua Lipa has a hard time believing what just happened. Two hours ago, she took the stage in the 30-degree Tennessee heat to an overflow crowd full of fans who sang along to every word of her moody pop songs, even though most of them have been out only a week. Stalking the stage in a white tank top and a choker, Lipa seized on the energy, firing off acrobatic kicks and punches, urging everyone to “Make some fucking noise!” “There are some moments where I just stop dancing and stare because I’m trying to take it in,” says Lipa, 21, in a thick London accent. She recalls playing for a small crowd at Lollapalooza only a year ago, when she was little more than a…

AUDIO-TECHNICA LP3 TURNTABLE As the renewed love affair with vinyl continues, many are looking at upgrading from their initial forays into hi-fi by upgrading their components. You could do a lot worse than the Audio-Technica LP3, a fully automatic belt-drive turntable. It comes with a balanced straight tone arm and a high quality diamond-tipped stylus cartridge, but most importantly, its universal cartridge mount allows you to upgrade to a huge number of compatible audiophile cartridges (not just those from Audio-Technica). This means that at any time you can upgrade your sound with a different stylus, without having to replace the turntable itself. Being automatic, you can press the stop button and the arm will return to its cradle and the table will stop spinning. Best of all, the LP3 comes…

What are the best and worst parts of success? I get to meet like-minded people like Harry Belafonte and Desmond Tutu. I also got to meet Dr. J and Wilt Chamberlain. You ask Wilt, “Hey, how’s the weather up there?” He says, “Which state?” Sometimes you also get to meet a knucklehead. If I’m out at a restaurant, I’m more than happy to take a photo with someone, but if they get a little too intense or drunk, I tell them, “I need you to honour my wife and honour me because you may have to call an ambulance for you and the police for me.” They say, “Oh, I thought you were spiritual.” I say, “I am, and I’m trying to stay that way.” What was your favourite book…

The Song That Reminds Me of School Metallica Master of Puppets, 1985 “It reminds me of walking to school. One of the best gifts I ever got from my grandmother was a Sony Walkman, and I had a handful of dubbed tapes, and Master of Puppets was one of them. So I walked to school, I lived a few miles away, and that tape really got me to school, helped me avoid the bullies and all the bullshit. I can remember by the time that song hit I was passing the five-and-dime on the way to my junior high so I knew I was about half way.” The Song That Made Me Want To Be a Singer Journey “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)”, 1983 “I was 10, and I was hanging…

”I WISH I COULD WRITE MORE POP SONGS. I’M PLEASED TO HAVE THIS NEW RECORD.” A SLIGHT, BALD, WIRY FIGURE IN jeans and an Elefant Traks hoodie unlocks the gate to the weatherboard cottage in St Kilda that he’s called home for 25 years. He offers a firm, warm hand and a grin that makes light of the fact that he is, against all odds, Paul Kelly. “Really, I’m not that conscious of any expectations,” says the man who might, outside of the sports arena, be our most universally revered public figure. “I still hold my heroes in my head. Al Green. Curtis Mayfield. Sam Cooke. Leonard Cohen. Bob Dylan. Hank Williams. That’s the measuring stick, for me.” What stories did you love as a kid? I mostly remember family…

ON A HOT, HUMID NIGHT LAST AUGUST, TWO WEALTHY Mexican brothers went out to party in Puerto Vallarta. ¶ Ivan, 35, and Jesus Alfredo Guzmán, 29, had been vacationing in the resort city all week. Now it was Sunday, the night before Ivan’s 36th birthday, and they booked a table at an upscale restaurant called La Leche to celebrate. Six men and nine women joined them there – young, attractive and well-dressed, driving Range Rovers and Escalades – where they sat at a long candlelit table in the centre of the all-white room, ordered champagne and sang “Happy Birthday”. Three hours later they were wrapping up their night when, shortly after midnight, a half-dozen men with assault rifles burst in and surrounded them. ¶ One gunman forced Ivan to his…

Grizzly Bear Painted Ruins Sony ★★★ ½ It sounds absurd, but Grizzly Bear have carved a career from baroque-pop obfuscation. The US indie band’s knotty creations very rarely sound like four guys in a room jamming a tune. Instead they’re more slow-motion unspoolings of woozy sounds, teased and twisted into treacle-thick compositions so dense and dreamlike that somewhere along the line you forget how they began. Painted Ruins is the band’s first record in five years, and that labour shows. “Three Rings” begins as a reverbdrenched chatter, moving through groaning woodwinds and blossoming into a racket of fuzz bass, celestial synths and rippling guitar arpeggios, Ed Droste singing, “Don’t you ever leave me/Don’t you feel it all come together”. Those details and underlying accusations continue on the glam groove…

The War on Drugs A Deeper Understanding Atlantic ★★★★★ Just as the first track on the War on Drugs’ third and breakout album signalled an urgent new path lit by Springsteen and analog synthesisers, “Up All Night”, the opener on A Deeper Understanding, leapfrogs the band’s previous heart-stirring efforts. It sneaks up on you with bagpipe guitars, club-ready percussion summoned from Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” and Adam Granduciel’s tobacco drawl communicating a kind of wearied optimism: “I’ve been through it, I always have/paranoia, but it wouldn’t last.” The song and entire record mark a perhaps unintentional shift towards arenas, bold but safe in Granduciel’s perfectionistic hands, whether he’s coming over all Rod Stewart on the Mellotron-warm “Pain”, sending scorching guitar solos skywards in “Strangest Thing” or steering…