Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2017 i Rolling Stone Australia

Ganging Up HAVING WATCHED GANG OF Youths from the early days before they even had a single out, I swelled with pride to see them on the cover. What a long way they’ve come. And the story itself captured everything I know to be true about the band – they are sincere, passionate and truthful, qualities sorely lacking in the world today. Jasmine Harvey Chiswick, NSW Monster Mash SO ALICE COOPER STABBED himself with a knife and didn’t feel it? [RS 790] Finally, proof that he actually died years ago and he’s a zombie who’s revived every night to put on a rock show. I knew it! Kevin Walters North Adelaide, SA Oz Rocks LOVED THE AMOUNT OF AUS- sie content in the last issue. From Gang of Youths, Paul…

ALBUM RELEASE DAY INSPIRES A MIX OF EXCITEMENT and nerves among even the most self-assured artists, but when the Killers’ fifth album, Wonderful Wonderful, drops on September 22nd, frontman Brandon Flowers might be feeling a touch more anxious than usual. It is, he admits, his most personal album yet. “It’s like a precious flower that’s opened up,” jokes drummer Ronnie Vannucci in a London hotel a few days after their recent sellout Hyde Park show. “I’ve bloomed,” adds Flowers with a grin. THE KILLERS [Cont. from 13] Where previous records dealt largely in fictional stories – the murder of a girl called Jenny, a Springsteen-inspired portrait of the band’s Las Vegas hometown and other mini-narratives – Wonderful Wonderful speaks largely to personal experience, from “Rut”, an emotive anthem recalling Whispering…

FOR HIS 19TH SOLO ALBUM, Ringo Starr planned to record his first country album since 1970’s Beaucoups of Blues. But when his touring schedule made an extended trip to Nashville impossible, Ringo decided to simply work in his living room, inviting old friends like Peter Frampton, Dave Stewart, his brother-in-law Joe Walsh and Paul McCartney to collaborate. “It ended up like a regular Ringo album with a ballad, a country song, a rock song,” says the drummer, whose new album, Give More Love, is out September 15th. “It’s always very casual. With Pro Tools, you don’t need all that space like we had in Abbey Road. Sometimes the dog will bark, and it ends up on the track.” Ringo, 77, is approaching his 30th year leading his All-Starr Band, whose…

“I was giving too much of a shit,” says Kim Churchill, describing the decision to scrap the follow-up to his breakthrough 2014 record, Silence/Win. That album had propelled the songwriter to new heights, and the pressure to produce something as compelling was immense. “I was recording this music, and it was good,” he says of his initial attempt. “I thought it was a really strong album . . . but there was [this] pressure I was putting on myself, which was evident in the music.” Not long before the slated release, Churchill scrapped the album and went back to the drawing board, and a week later emerged with what’s become his sixth LP, the solid and worthy Weight_Falls. “There’s a levity to it,” he explains of why Weight_Falls finally worked.…

In 2012, when Judd Apatow used the Avett Brothers’ buoyant, love-drunk ballad “Live and Die” in his coming-of-middle-age comedy This Is 40, it was a choice that reflected a passion for the band’s heartfelt folk pop. “Their music is about reaching out and trying to connect with other people, as well as the obstacles of love,” says Apatow. “And I try to express some of the same things in the realm of comedy.” So when he heard that his friend Rick Rubin was producing the Avetts’ ninth album, True Sadness, which came out last year, Apatow asked the band if he could document its creation. The resulting film is May It Last: A Portrait of the Avett Brothers, which Apatow made with co-director Michael Bonfiglio. In addition to telling the…

“Dr G and I connected through music and laughter.” SAT IN A TINY ABC STUDIO IN SOUTHBANK, MELBOURNE, with a live feed in my ear, the camera in my face and a monitor playing out-of-sync below my eye line – that’s a strange place to hear one friend announce the death of another. On that monitor, Mark Grose from Skinnyfish Music was pouring his heart out about Dr G Yunupingu. It’s hard to sum up a person so succinctly within the conventions of TV. Only so much can be said about a person’s life and impact in a short segment, and watching Mark, I realised I was about to attempt the same kind of tribute. Counting down, I felt almost like I was trying to solve an equation in my…

What are the best and worst parts of success? Well, I never had to work in a factory, so that’s a blessing. The worst part is the distractions: money, women, partying. When you’re young it’s easy to lose your perspective. I started believing I was who everybody thought I was, which was a crazy rock star. You know, “Life’s Been Good”, that whole story. It took me away from working at my craft. Me and a lot of the guys I ran with, we were party monsters. It was a real challenge just to stay alive. So many of your friends from that era – Keith Moon, John Belushi – didn’t make it. How did you survive? I wonder every day. People ask me if I believe in God, and…

“I have to make it very clear that I really can’t stand Bruno Mars.” The Song That Reminds Me of School Air Supply All Out Of Love, 1980 “In the Eighties I went to an American school in Luxembourg, and believe it or not I actually did some sports; I played soccer and basketball. And we used to drive to Belgium, Germany and France and have games against other American schools, and on the bus trips a lot of people would bring their boom boxes, and it would end up as a kind of battle of the boom boxes. The guy who really liked Air Supply usually used to win because I guess that was the band that the chaperones could tolerate the most.” The Song You Wouldn’t Expect…

ON HIS DEBUT SOLO RECORD, Jumping the Shark, Sydney vocalist Alex Cameron positioned himself as the hapless schmuck, arriving on the scene fully-formed as a burned-out loser – “I used to be the number one entertainer,” he snarled on “The Comeback”. In the time between that album’s 2013 release and this month’s follow-up, ForcedWitness, Cameron has lived his art, detached from his Australian homeland while spending time on U.S. and European roads with saxophonist (and business partner) Roy Molloy. “I think support slots are often looked upon with a decent amount of shame,” says Cameron, minutes after warming up a Nashville stage for Foster the People. “When we get asked to support a band, it’s like getting vouched for in some respect. I started saying a few years ago we…

“The old guys are frightened, And frightening to behold. The kids come out fighting, And still doing what they’re told.” —LCD SOUNDSYSTEM, “Call the Police” LCD Soundsystem American Dream DFA/Columbia ★★★★ BY ROB SHEFFIELD The time has come, the time has come, the time has come today. LCD Soundsystem have finally returned from a mysterious five-year breakup they never quite explained, despite making a high-profile film documentary ostensibly designed for just that purpose. As rock & roll retirements go, it was about as believable as Cher’s sixth farewell tour. But wherever these guys have been, what matters is that they’ve returned at top strength. James Murphy and his wrecking crew of New York punk-disco marauders don’t waste a moment on the superb American Dream – it’s a relentless,…

Foo Fighters Concrete and Gold Sony ★★★ Foo Fighters are the world’s biggest modern rock band for many reasons: Dave Grohl’s immense likability; his talent for writing three or four really good songs every few years; their killer live chops; and outlasting competition for the title. They maintain relevancy via challenges (see: recording to tape in Grohl’s garage on 2011’s Wasting Light), and the latest (according to the frontman) is to make “Motörhead’s version of Sgt Peppers”. A lofty ambition, and one they don’t quite reach. With Adele producer Greg Kurstin – and guests Paul McCartney, Inara George, Alison Mosshart and Boyz II Men’s Shawn Stockman – on board, Grohl’s reliably anthemic songwriting and the usual Foos crispness is cluttered with messy, overwrought studio fuckwittery. “Arrows” and “Dirty Water”…

Alex Cameron Forced Witness Secretly Canadian ★★★★ Alex Cameron has built his solo career on celebrating losers, telling stories of delusional deadbeats that are at once searingly funny and – thanks to his earnest, gravelly delivery and way with some affecting analog synthesisers – oddly poignant. On Forced Witness, the characters he inhabits are more pathetic than ever, from the“fucking lonely man” on “Candy May” (“I live with a deep regret/of what I do on the internet”) to the bloke who counts “the Down Syndrome Jew from the real estate crew” in his “pretty mean posse”. The more depraved Cameron gets, the more ecstatic the music, and it’s a hilarious device that sometimes obscures just how strong the songs are of their own accord, as when you’re doubling over…

In mid-1967, at the tail end of the Summer of Love, Berkeley freshman Danny Goldberg went down to Haight-Ashbury to check out the scene. The neighbourhood was buckling under the weight of 100,000 new hippie inhabitants, but a sign in a store window told Goldberg all he needed to know; it read simply “Nebraska Needs You More”. “It couldn’t possibly survive the attention it got,” says Goldberg of the San Francisco counterculture. “It was dead.” Goldberg may have arrived late, but 1967’s transformational spirit stayed with him as he navigated through the music industry in the coming years, first as vice president of Led Zeppelin’s Swan Song Records and eventually as Nirvana’s manager. In recent years, Goldberg has taken on a side career as a historian. His newest book, In…

SEVE LUCAS IS A VISION OF UNRE- pentant rock & roll glory. Statuesque, platinum blond with just a hint of blue eyeliner, he’s dressed like a Harlem dandy complete with walking stick – a stylish necessity after a devastating injury in 2009. The last remaining member of Sydney punk outfit X has learned to live with death, betrayal, excruciating pain and commercial reward far short of his reputation. How? With a twinkle in his eye, that’s how. Any kid in a Ramones T-shirt knows Radio Birdman, the Saints, the Birthday Party. X is a legend for aficionados. Do you take pride in that? Yeah. The secret to our success is a total lack of success. Every time we had a chance to do something we fucked it up gloriously and…

Lil Yachty AGE 19 BACKSTORY The rapper scored a Top Five LP thanks to a happily naive spin on Southern hip-hop referred to as “bubblegum trap.” GROWING PAINS “I don’t want to be 20 yet,” he says. “I dread my teenage years being over.” Shawn Mendes AGE 19 BACKSTORY Mendes has gone from hockey-loving Canadian kid to Vine star to chart-topper, thanks to a gift for singer-songwriter intimacy (John Mayer is a mentor). THE NATURAL “I was one of those kids who was just . . . always on YouTube, so it was easy for me to do it. It’s not work, it’s just fun.” Noah Cyrus AGE 17 BACKSTORY Miley’s little sis is finishing up her debut, NC-17, which blends country, pop and R&B. NO-HATE ZONE “Miley always says,…

Cloud Control Zone Ivy League Records ★★★ ½ From the onset, Cloud Control have been in search of a heightened state: seeking out a Bliss Release on their 2010 debut; finding a fabled Dream Cave for their 2013 follow-up. On the group’s third LP, they’ve discovered their Zone: a new space situated between triumph and tragedy that sees them still keeping one eye on the horizon, questing for something greater. That questing has taken Cloud Control a notable distance from the humble psych-pop of their past. Now down to the trio of Alister Wright and siblings Heidi and Ulrich Lenffer, the band have spent the four years since Dream Cave’s release shaping their sound into something markedly different. “Zone (This is How it Feels)” is a bold opening gambit…

Neil Young Hitchhiker Reprise ★★★★ ½ Hitchhiker marks a pivotal moment in Neil Young’s ongoing series of archival releases: Instead of a live classic-songs set, this is a buried-treasure mother lode – 10 newly unearthed studio recordings, cut in one acoustic session, on August 11th, 1976. Young wasn’t exactly swept up in the country’s bicentennial spirit at the time; now grouped together rather than spread out over later records, the violence-drenched “Powderfinger”, “Captain Kennedy” and “Pocahontas” feel like pointed rejoinders to the whitewashed history offered up during America’s 200th birthday. He’s in peak lonesome-guy mode on the never-released failed-relationship chronicle “Give Me Strength”. Another previously unheard song, “Hawaii”, is a spooky mysterious-stranger ballad. The take of the Nixon-sympathising “Campaigner” here includes a newly relevant verse deleted from the version…

Lolla Rocks Despite a vicious rainstorm that forced Muse offstage after just three songs and cut short Lorde’s set, this year’s Lollapalooza fest in Chicago still featured stunning performances by the Killers, Arcade Fire and Lil Yachty. The highlight was hometown hero Chance the Rapper, who played Lollapalooza for the third time and thanked everyone from his mum to the stage managers to “the security niggas”.…

IN 2013 ANGUS AND JULIA STONE were on the brink of dissolving their creative relationship until a call from ultra-producer Rick Rubin convinced them to give it one last try. The result was 2014’s self-titled album, which was both a creative and commercial triumph, becoming their biggest selling album to date. More importantly, it was a personal watershed for the pair, who discovered, almost a decade into their musical partnership, a brand new way of working – most significantly in that they started writing songs together. For their new album, Snow, the duo decided to put their new methodology to the test by decamping to Angus’ studio Belafonté in the wilds outside of Byron Bay with absolutely nothing prepared. The album would be built from scratch, predominantly by the pair…

N 1980, AMERICA’S GUN-VIOLENCE EPIDEMIC HIT close to home for ROLLING STONE, when John Lennon was gunned down by Mark David Chapman. For the magazine’s founder, the slaying in New York sparked a now-four-decade commitment on the gun issue. “It all started with Lennon,” says Jann S. Wenner. “That tragedy. Trying to make sense of it. Or make something good come out of it.” Within months, Wenner had launched the Foundation on Violence in America, a nonprofit that began a public-education campaign, including PSAs starring Oprah Winfrey and Walter Cronkite. But momentum quickly stalled. “It became obvious that the beginning and end of this was the NRA,” Wenner says. Exposing the National Rifle Association’s influence has been a mainstay of ROLLING STONE’s political coverage ever since. In his 1981 exposé,…

Some time last year, Ghana-born hip-hop artist Citizen Kay (real name Kojo Ansah) dropped a big secret on his management after a long period of silence: not only was he working on a new album, but it was almost completely finished. “No-one knew I was writing the album until it was pretty much done, which was very intentional,” says Ansah. “I didn’t tell anyone, and then I was like, ‘Hey, by the way, I’ve been really quiet this past year because of THIS!’ Everything was really organic – there was no pressure, no deadlines. That was important.” Having recently signed with Illy’s OneTwo label, Ansah is ready to unleash Belly of the Beast, an LP he began work on the same week his ARIA-nominated 2015 debut album With the People…

The last time the mass public got a glimpse of Beck, it was at the end of the 2015 Grammys and Prince was handing him an Album of the Year award for his LP Morning Phase. Before Beck could even open his mouth to register his shock, Kanye West walked onstage briefly to protest Beyoncé’s loss. “I’ve had some trippy things happen in my life,” Beck says today. “But that was up there, for sure.” Few people knew, but at the time Beck was already two years into work on his follow-up album, Colors, a euphoric blast of experimental pop he crafted with producer Greg Kurstin, best known for his work with Adele, Kelly Clarkson and Sia. Colors is finally coming out in October, after one of the longest gestation…

Classic Songs for the Resistance Rundgren just released White Knight, his 27th solo album, and is touring this year with Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band. The Fixx “Stand or Fall” This is about what’s happening to the planet and how doing nothing is to lose. It has a bleak sound, which adds urgency. Red Rider “Lunatic Fringe” The undercurrent of indigence and violence and hate, as evidenced by the election of Trump, makes this an evergreen song. But now the lunatic fringe is no longer the fringe. The Call “The Walls Came Down” This became an anthem about having a party and fighting the powers that be. It’s got this great celebratory hoot at the end. Elvis Costello and the Attractions “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding” He’s angry…

Yusuf The Laughing Apple Decca/Universal ★★★ ½ We’ve seen that apple tree before, on the cover of Tea For the Tillerman nearly 40 years go. “How I’d love to be a child,” the former Cat Stevens sighs on “Mighty Peace”, his tone beyond wistful, the fragile acoustic riff a heartbroken echo of “Where Do the Children Play?”. As it happens, “Mighty Peace” hails from further back still, half-finished during his apprenticeship on London’s mid-Sixties folk circuit and remembered here in between new songs and very old. Four of them, including the opener “Blackness of the Night”, the parable-like title track and the eerie “Northern Wind”, are rescued from the over-egged production of the Cat’s second album of ’67. Two more, “Grandsons” and “Mary and the Little Lamb”, have languished…

Angus & Julia Stone Snow EMI ★★★ ½ Rick Rubin’s hirsute shadow still looms large over the Stones, who have decided to keep rolling since splitting up on the down-low in 2012. The super producer was the catalyst for their 2014 reunion after hearing them at a party and inviting them into his Malibu studio to reconnect and record. It resulted in their self-titled third album – their finest yet – and Rubin’s trick wasn’t just that dry Seventies drum sound. He insisted the siblings write in the same room together, and it’s a process they’ve stuck to for their fourth album, which was self-produced in Angus’ Byron Bay studio. It seems fitting that they open proceedings with the call-and-response of “Snow”, which sees the pair swap verses like…

“I might have to legit chop my leg off. If I show up in Australia and I’ve got one leg, you know why.” The last time I went to a Lakers game Last season. My brother bought me tickets for my birthday, Lakers versus Celtics. We had really great seats and the Lakers got destroyed. [Laughs] But we had so much fun. I like talking shit. I like yelling at the players. I like starting awkward chants that make people uncomfortable. I’m a big fan of the experience! The last thing I regretted eating Ive only had food poisoning once, and that was in the UK. I went to this sketchy kebab place, and I got this chicken kebab and it’s like, fucking pink. I’m not wired to really inspect…