In musical terms, Iceland is probably still best known for its 1980s export, the Sugarcubes, featuring pop oddity Bjork. In recent years, Sigur Rós (pronounced See’er Rose) have been adding their name to the list of famous Icelandic exports with their freaky trip rock featuring songs with lyrics comprised of a language they made up themselves. While this might not leap out as a PR and marketing man’s dream job, add in the fact that the songs seldom fall short of the 6 or 7minute mark, making any radio plugging tasks nothing short of a nightmare.

Nightmare is a word I stumbled upon more than a few times while doing my research before we met Sigur Rós. They are notoriously monosyllabic and extremely introverted in their approach to selling themselves. Interviews often degenerate into yes/no sessions. As I pondered what to ask, it dawned on me that with my reasonably strong west coast Scottish accent where people often misunderstand me was I really the best person to interview Sigur Rós? Probably not, but interesting, well, hopefully it would be….

From the bare-footed stage performances to the fact the ‘Jonsi’ (singer/guitarist) plays the guitar using a violin bow, nothing seemed remotely standard about Sigur Rós. The violin bow had me thinking of Led Zeppelin but there is no standard guitar rock to be found. The eccentric singing style and tripped out whale like sounds had me thinking Radiohead but it’s typically slightly less intense and, as Liam Gallagher one described Thom Yorke as a “googly eyed little fucker”, with Sigur Rós, thankfully there are no “googly eyes” on display.

As you can imagine, the amount of contradiction with an act this untypical is quite impressive, relentless in their refusal to change or play the corporate rock game, they are actually signed to a major label. Even more impressive is the dismissiveness about their collective output. “Our songs are about nothing,” they proclaim. The complete lack of desire to succeed has seen them cut their touring from the long gruelling schedules normally associated with bands at this level down to 3 and 6 week stints. Commercial success, or fringe amounts of it, found its way to Sigur Rós with their most accessible album to date, Takk. While many bigger names in music are waxing lyrical about the genius in their soundscapes – supposedly Chris Martin of Coldplay had their records playing in the background while wife Gwyneth Paltrow gave birth – the commercial radio station still seemed nothing short of sceptical.

After many years of making music, there was perhaps a definite intention to make the 2005 ‘Takk’ album more accessible if not commercial, Sigur Rós disagreed choosing to employ the ‘natural progression’ argument. They later followed up with the 2008 ‘Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust’ which was well received. Currently we eagerly await the release, reportedly sometime next year, of their latest effort which they announced at the end of May had finished recording.

We met up with Sigur Rós to discuss life on the road, life off the road, imploding band stories, flirtations with fame and a desire to be awkward in the face of stardom. Here is what they had to say…

Eddie Leonard: Seeing as you’re far better known now than when you started out, is there more pressure to make an album a specific way. Is there a difference in being popular from trying to become popular?
Sigur Rós: No not really. Who do you mean from?

Is there more from yourselves, pressure in the group?
No, no, not really

What about pressure from major labels. You do have a major label deal in the USA?
No, no, we wouldn’t have signed for this label if that were the case. EMI knew what they were going into with us, so it’s just the same.

In previous years you seemed to have spent a long time touring compared to now, although you say it’s because of people having families. Is there also an element of not being too close together for too long to minimise tension in the band?
All about the families, yes. We try to keep it as short as we can, but still economically ok.

Yeah, short touring becomes more costly, how do you balance this?
We just try to make it all work out?

So you have a large merchandising stall, then?
Ha ha, yes yes, we try…

Does the shorter touring help keep you settled into life in Iceland? It must be very different from the quiet life when you’re on the road?
Yeah, eh, on the road there is the lifestyle, we just try to get into it, other times we just relax and don’t do anything, you know?

How do you combat the radio play problem? Would you do shorter songs?
Now is the first time we’re getting radio play actually, mainly in the UK, but not too much. Yeah we have problems but you can’t think about that too much….

Is it deliberately anti-commercial?
No no we just do the music like it is. Be adventurous.

So have you ever tried to make a 3-minute pop song?
No no we don’t really try to do anything. We just see what happens.

Do you still say that your songs “are about nothing”?
I like the idea that people connect to the music and think about things but no, the songs are not about this; we all have our own ideas.

What about people’s perceptions of the songs? Do you ever laugh at what some people think the songs are about?
No ‘cus they are about nothing, so it is only people’s ideas.

Do you ever write negative or angry songs then?
No, no we just always see what happens. I think when we write music we have to get into a certain state of mind you know? It’s very hard to pinpoint an exact emotion, it’s always open.

You are quite famous for one-word answers, so if you could choose one word what would it be after a bad interview?
Probably ‘tired’ you know?

What about after a good show, how would you sum that up in one word?
Oh, energetic probably, ‘good’.

What about people leaving your show early, what word would you have for them?
I don’t know, eh…

Do you wonder what they think?
I don’t really see anything. I’m concentrating.

More info www.sigur-ros.co.uk | www.myspace.com/sigurros

Yarah Bravo probably has best been discovered in recent years as member of One Self alongside Dj Vadim and Mc Blu Rum. She also works as the sometimes front woman for ‘The Soundcatcher Soundsystem’ and live group ‘The Russian Percussion’. The daughter of South American freedom fighters she has circumnavigated the world twice, speaks 4 languages and exudes a streetwise cool.  UPFRONT Online caught up with the cutesy Mc and level headed owner of Mothergrain [a record label, clothing label, and studio].

So, how did she start out on the road to becoming Yarah Bravo the charismatic hip hop artist? “I started off writing poetry in school, my teachers encouraged me, and it became some sort of escape for me. But I didn’t know what hip hop was at the time… I was still fairly young, and I guess I listened to mostly Brazilian music as it’s what was playing in my household. As well as some Bob Marley, Beatles, Grace Jones, and stuff my parents listened to… you know!”

Around the age of 10 she got hold a mixtape from a friend’s older brother and fell in love. “It had Public Enemy on it, as well as A Tribe Called Quest, Big Daddy Kane, Biz Markie, 2 Live Crew. So yeah! I pretty much fell in love.  I also realised that my poetry wasn’t too dissimilar to what these cats were doing, but they were doing it over beats, while mine was just on paper.”

Finding inspiration in the mixtape Yarah took to reciting her poetry over music that was in the house at that time. That was until she had the money to buy her own vinyl – with b-side instrumentals, “I would straight up just rhyme on top of Total, SWV beats. At the time I guess I was like 15-16. That was back in the days when we also had YO MTV RAPS; I would record every single episode. I remember watching Grand Puba and Mary J Blige for the first time, freestyling in the studio, and yeah she was rapping… I looooved me some Mary J!”

Nothing like a typical day in the life of Yarah Bravo? “Yarah Bravo ain’t your typical girl”. Describing it as “organised chaos” every day presents something different, outside of course the showering, vitamin intake, email checks and stopping to breathe in the sun. On the road the story’s the same but as she stresses, “you get kicked outta hotel rooms, all airports look the same to me now, and yeah when I do shows I party hard. I am a narcoleptic insomniac, so I rarely sleep, but I could pass out in the middle of a conversation if you ain’t stimulating me.” Those in Luxembourg hoping for a reception with Yarah should take heed and prep up on stuff outside idle chit chat.

Wishing to be defined within Hip Hop culture as a lass “doing her own thang”, she sees herself as a worldwide hip hop nomad with the universe as her playground. Speaking about the male dominated sector of Hip Hop, Yarah sees her role as a way to inspire younger girls to make music as well. She wants to promote that it is about feeling it. It’s not the only option; to strip of their clothes, as perhaps mainstream Hip Hop culture suggests. She wants to set the record straight; that there is a different side to hip hop then what is shown in that mainstream. “I think that is important for the younger girls for sure!”

Speaking out about the lack of prominent woman in Hip Hop culture Yarah states, “it as an Evil Circle, cause if you have no one to look up to as a role model, a lot of the times you don’t realise your own potential to do certain things within certain fields.  If all you see are dudes doing hip hop, a lot of girls might not want to step into that arena.” Yet, she goes on to say that there are many amazing talented woman out there, hence the reason behind the UNITY project / stage for Hip Hop Kemp (The biggest Hip Hop festival in Europe, if not the World). She wanted to showcase the wide range of talented female Mcs from all over the world. Headlining were “legends” Roxanne Shante and Bahamadia and a showcase of talent “holding it down today” like, Invincible, Eternia, Stacy Epps. Also invited to take the stage were emerging talents Mauikai, Eyeris, Shania D, Badcat etc. “It was very successful! Hopefully it inspired people to create more of a balance within our hip hop community. Women have strong opinions and are able to offer a different perspective; some just need to be shown the way.  If I can help, I am more than happy to do so.”

Having been a member of and always toured with groups Yarah is stepping out on her own and enjoying the creative control, “I do it all myself, I set up my show, and use all my ideas.” Following suit with her self-imposed ethos, “Follow your heart. Don’t do shit if it don’t feel right!”

Speaking about the writing process Yarah says, “usually it just comes to me, I’ll feel an urge to write and create, although when there’s a block, if there’s a song that’s gotta be finished then inspiration is sought from the things around, TV, music, a good walk!” She goes on to say that writing lyrically is in a way a therapeutic process, “I have a vision in my head of a song. It’s like a painting, and I slowly lay it out. There are moments when it is frustrating, if what you have in your head sounds nothing like what you’re laying down.”

For Yarah though it is the performance she enjoys most. This is the opportunity to get her points across and get ‘that’ release.

Stating Janelle Monae, Kid Kudi, J*Davey, Chromeo amongst her current musical inspiration, she also listens a lot to early 90’s R&B like Total, Xcape, SWV, Keith Sweat “and shit”. She has worked with and shared the stage with some notables of not just the Hip Hop scene e.g.: Talib Kweli, Manu Chao, Grand Master Flash, Mos Def, Roots Manuva, De La Soul, The Herbaliser, The Gotan Project to name drop a few. “Rocking with Method Man and Redman was definitely an experience, especially having them call me out during their set saying “yoooo are you Yarah Bravo?!”"

Yarah had previously said, “The European scene is flourishing, it is so dope! Because the acts out here are doing the music for the love of it, and not for the cash, not for the cars, nor the bling. If I dare to say, I even feel that hip hop at this time is even more “real” out here.” Asked which artists from the European sector has got her attention she mentions Waxolutionists, Mapei, Cleo, Mestiza, Loop Troop, Foreign Beggars, Lady Lykez, Big Red and Ty as some of the stand-outs! “But, always check my MySpace page as I promote peoples there too.”

Right now her desert island collaboration would be Timbaland “I think he is the ill’est producer out there. And it would be a dream to work with him, or The Neptunes. But even with more unknown producers, who can create that heavy sound. For me it ain’t really about the brand, the name. But the actual product, the bass, and the heaviness of the shit they create!!! Not sure about being stuck with Timbaland on a deserted island though? but Pharell is hot!”

Reflecting on her career thus far Yarah is proud of all her musical babies, “it’s like I gotta love them all, even if they make me cringe.” But right now she is most happy with her newer stuff. “The stuff I’m working on now is what I most proud off, as I’ve grown a lot as a song writer, and I’m focusing on making good songs and not just good raps like I used to think. Although this latest stuff is not released yet.” Yarah goes on to say, “In fact I am probably currently most proud of a song I did in Spanish, ’cause I kinda wrote it on a plane, and when I got off I went to perform it in front of 2000 people in New York city, opening up for Manu Chao, I liked that challenge a lot, as it was he who asked me if I could write a song in Spanish to open up his show… And I did!”

So what’s the future hold for Yarah Bravo? She’s on the same wave length as hard pressed UPFRONT bloggers, “World domination!!! or buying an island and retiring, hahahaa!”

Yarah Bravo plays Verso in Luxembourg on the 18th April. Make sure you catch her! Tickets on the door [NO PRESALE].

More info: www.myspace.com/yarahbravo

QUICKFIRE for those intimate things you’ve always wanted to know about Yarah Bravo.

One life changing moment?
When my best friend in life got cancer.

Worst job you’ve ever had?
Working at a cruise company.

Worst bad habit?
Falling asleep on my computer.

Most treasured possession?
Someone’s heart, and my super rare pair of Adidas

Desirable superpower?
Flying

Words to live by…?
“Make dreams come true”

Does your musical style influence your underwear?
Yes that’s why all my underwear is FRESH

Plugged in…All the time…and surfing the wave of cultural diffusion 

A little background information…
Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky was born in 1970 in Washington DC, to academic parents. Following his college years spent amidst the ‘whispering pines’ of Bowdoin College, Main, and having picked up degrees in French literature and philosophy, Spooky began writing science fiction. In the mid-nineties he began his recording career with a series of singles and the ’96 album, ‘Songs of a Dead Dreamer’.

Described as a fusion between electronica and hip hop, it marked the beginning of a prolific career which, apart from a not inconsiderable output as a recording artist would include, composer of film scores, author/editor, multimedia/performance artist, producer, professor of music and political activist. Oh yeah, and did I mention that he’s partial to doing a bit of DJ-ing on the side.

If anything characterises his output to date it would seem, at least on the surface, to be its diversity. That much, at least, is true of the wide range of people whom he has chosen to collaborate and work with. Everyone from avant-jazz collectives, to Dave Lombardo of Slayer, to most recently Yoko Ono. If there is an over-riding philosophy behind everything that Spooky does and which allows him to move and shift effortlessly within and between one area and another it is the idea of collage. The idea of mixing and juxtaposing given materials, sounds, cultures and disciplines to create something new. Indeed, you could think of his entire professional persona as a kind of collage, with all the fragments going to make the whole.

When we met at the Philharmonie last summer we managed to have a few words in between a very officious waitress taking orders and Spooky checking his emails on his palm-top. Always connected, you couldn’t help but feel that if he himself had a USB port you could plug the guy in and he’d download you a finished article whilst polishing off his salad. Unfortunately, he didn’t, and anyway I’m analog, so we did it the old-fashioned way.

We started by talking a little about the ‘New York is Now’ project, a video portrait which uses found footage and jazz music to create a vision of the city ‘as a structure made of many rhythms, some local, some global, – all syncopated to a collage based aesthetic.’

We took the scenic route.

 ‘It was a project I did for the Venice biennial. That was a project where I went to Angola in West Africa for six weeks. It was amazing because they were soviet Africa and the U.S. had tried to assassinate and destabilise and destroy a lot of the leaders in that region. At one point Fidel Castro had thirty thousand Cubans in the middle of Angola fighting U.S. sponsored warlords. The U.S. you know, we know how to pick ‘em. We always sponsor some twisted tyrant or dictator or something.

So anyway, to make a long story short, I wanted to go down to this country and check it out. They had an art event called the Luanda Triennial. So I ended up hanging out in Angola for four to six weeks, something like that. It was amazing because I got a chance to really see how Africa responds to all these different situations.

So for example, they’ve got gold, oil and diamonds. So now there’s thirty thousand Chinese in the middle of downtown Luanda, which you would never guess. The Chinese are there because of the oil. Or there’s a lot of Swedish because of the Ericsson company. They’ve discovered this new metal that allows you to have a weird cell phone.

But anyway, I spent time there and checked out African rhythms, because I was very curious about… If you look at Brazil… Brazil is basically a lot of Angolan music because the Portuguese took the slaves from Angola and took them to Brazil. So if you go to Bahia in the north of Brazil, or if you go to Sao Paulo or Rio, a lot of the main styles there, you could take the exact same style and you would be in Luanda. There’s even a martial arts style called Capoeira, it’s like the west African martial arts form. It’s like a dancing and fighting movement. I’ve been to Africa a couple of times before. Mainly Senegal, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Egypt. For this project for the Venice Biennial, I recorded a lot of what I was doing when I was in Angola, and then used it at the opening of the Venice Biennial.’

Visually, (for the New York is Now project) the idea is to apply DJ techniques to film. So I found a lot of early ‘art’ films, and remixed them. I applied sampling, cut and scratch all that kinda stuff. This year I have my first film coming out in November, so I did the Venice Biennial project as a kind of  first step. It was a really beautiful opening. We had thousands of people come out for the Biennial opening. All sorts of people from all over the world were hanging out.

A lot of the ’Art World’ types got a chance to see that DJ-ing isn’t just music, it’s about collage and it’s about certain kinds of historical art forms that have migrated to digital media.’

And it’s that last idea which forms the bigger picture of what DJ Spooky is about.

I started out mainly as a writer and artist and DJ-ing was meant to be a hobby, but the art world being what it is, DJ-ing was very lucrative (chuckles), and it was low stress. You could just show up. I produced my own tracks and I made my own rhythms and beats. In the mid-nineties, there was me, DJ Shadow, DJ Crush, Coldcut was a little bit earlier than everybody… but we all started dropping more instrumental hip hop albums and we started getting a lot of attention. It just took off in its own way. I’ve played with lyrics and vocals. But for my albums, a lot of the time, they’re instrumental.

Curious, you might think, given that Miller is also a writer. DJ Spooky has, of course, also been heavily involved in mixing, remixing and producing other peoples work. The eclectic list includes amongst many others, Korn, Nick Cave and the aforementioned Yoko Ono. I was curious to know how these relationships came about. Did these people, generally, seek him out?

Yeah, pretty much. People either call up or they send an email to the website saying ’We’d like you to do a remix’. I’ve worked with all sorts of people. I’ve done film soundtracks; I’ve worked with string quartets. My new album is with Kronos quartet. They’re an amazing string ensemble and they’re doing the sound track for my film. The whole film is ‘remix-able’.  The motto for the project is ‘Director as DJ’. You can choose any scene in the film and remix it, and Kronos play all these string arrangements so you can take say, some kind of Russian string sounds and mix it with dancehall reggae or hip hop. It’s a long story. It’s a lot of editing; you stay at the computer for hours.  

I suggest that Yoko isn’t someone who, to put it mildly, has enjoyed very favourable reviews lately.

No. Yoko, she broke up The Beatles c’mon! (laughs). Her new album’s slammin’. She’s seventy years old and she’s funky! I did her first hip hop tracks. She’s an old friend. Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth played guitar on the track. My style is never one style. I think every DJ, to keep their ears fresh, really should listen to many styles. The problem about hip hop or house or techno is people just get into one thing. I listen to Hong Kong film soundtracks. I listen to Brazilian funk. I listen to crazy sounds from Angola, Egypt… I think a good artist, period, not just DJ not just producer, should keep their mind open. The problem with American music is that it’s an ignorant culture. I’ll say it straight out. People just listen to pop radio or MTV and think that’s the world. I really think that it’s a problem, that people take the easy route. They don’t do research, they just listen to what everybody always says is popular. I think it’s incredibly important to say that ‘it’s a big world’ y’know. Why not check out all sorts of styles? Even though it’s easy, people still just listen to just their main, one style. I couldn’t listen to normal hip hop all day, every day. I would be bored out of my mind. But there’s some great music coming out of India, out of Japan, out of Luxembourg, Switzerland, wherever…
Keep it fun.

In a interview relating to the piece, Miller said that he constructed the persona ‘DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid‘, to give him his full title, as a conceptual art project. As the project developed he came to see it as the opportunity for what he describes as “coding a generative syntax for new languages of creativity.” I felt this might require a little clarification. For myself, you understand.

Let’s put it this way. Beats and rhythms are about permutation. Every culture on the planet has some kind of relationship to a drum. Whether it’s Irish bodhrans, Swiss guys playing on the mountains. Who knows?
But with sampling and electronic music, what ended up happening was that all those traditions became the archive. If you go back to the origins of hip hop and house music and techno, everybody was sampling old records because that was all they had. Then drum machines really kicked in and then the software kicked in, and people had a lot more options. I remember in the mid-nineties I made my first album with an Akai 3000 sampler, and it was a big deal to have 32 megabytes of memory. Now, my film is five gigabytes or eight gigabytes, I mean it’s ridiculous. The reason I was talking about this idea of ‘new languages’ is to simply say that sampling has opened all these different doors into how people think about rhythm. The main problem about music right now, is that it’s all 4/4 beats. I’m surprised that people are not more playful with rhythm.
But to cut a long story short, collage means that anything goes.  

In his critical book on modern art, ‘The Painted Word’, the journalist, author Tom Wolfe once illustrated the idea of conceptual art by recounting, more or less, the following story; A penniless artist goes into a café and sits at the bar with a glass of water. In a moment of inspiration he has an idea for a truly original work of art. He grabs a napkin, dabs his finger in the glass of water and documents the idea. He then keels over and dies. The water evaporates. Is this a great work of art? He asks. A conceptualist would argue that it is. For in conceptualism the idea is hero and the object, zero. I was interested to know if DJ Spooky had read the book/heard the story and in what way had his own work embraced conceptualism thus defined.

No, but that’s a great title. Ideas are the currency of the twenty first century. If you look back at the twentieth century, you had mass culture , the production of mass objects, mass everything. The model T Ford car, the first wave of computers, and so on. The twenty first century is about mass customisation. You can change and transform almost any tiny bit of software information. You can make a software building, you can make the building a symphony, you can make the symphony a satellite or a cell phone. The concept for a lot of this comes from the point of viewing it as the language of creativity. How you put together a language is by building blocks of meaning. So rhythm for me, is just one layer and so is sequencing, and how you put together the, for lack of a better word, linear or non-linear quality of a piece.

You are looking at analog versus digital, cause the twentieth century was analog and most of the music that most people hear is from recordings that were done with analog and not digital processes. At this point my laptop is my studio. I can make art pieces with it, I’ve done movies on it, I’ve done sound pieces. I did a home mini-studio session in Angola, working on the film. This is just the beginning. Within the next ten years as memory gets cheaper, you’re gonna be having cell phone movies or iPod symphonies. Miniaturisation and the ability to interact with software are really gonna open up, literally, the entire creative process to making an entire world culture. One where the older forms from any culture or race; India, Africa, Asia, everybody’s gonna be able to exchange, and probably will exchange, because who wants to hear the same stuff over and over.

This ties in with another of Millers ideas, though to be fair it’s hardly original, that with the advent of cheap hardware and the ubiquitous presence of the internet, the end of big media is at hand. Is it time to put the pennies on the eyes of all those mega news organisations? I mean shucks, it just seems like yesterday that they got to go 24/7.

Well, I mean, it’s the Youtube generation at this point. How much people are getting from the news in the U.S. is a joke. A lot of Americans don’t even know where Iraq is, never mind what’s going on there. It’s the most televised war in human history and nobody has any idea where it is. It’s a real problem with the U.S.
The bulk of the population doesn’t have a passport and doesn’t even travel. I mean Bush is from one of the wealthiest families in the U.S. and before he was president, he’d only left the country maybe twice, and one of those times was to go to Mexico to get a taco. America’s really fucked up, but anyway I travel a lot and I want that to be part of my artwork, and not just be an ignorant American listening to Brittany Spears.

Given that the technology allows more people to do more things, and presupposing an even passing familiarity with Youtube or mySpace, you’d have to ask yourself is it necessarily going to be any better?

That doesn’t mean that every track you hear is a good track either, with music, or that every symphony you hear is a good symphony, or every book is a good book. It just means that, I think, democratisation of culture is what technology really leads to. Because on the one hand, anybody can create, but that doesn’t mean that you’re gonna listen to everything or read every book. I mean, you could basically say that ninety per cent of everything out there is shit. I don’t read every tabloid newspaper, I don’t read every newspaper. I don’t read every website. You can’t. But with whatever your focus is or whatever style you’re into, you’ll probably be able to find enough information that gives you emotional and intellectual satisfaction. Playlists, blogs, all that stuff is about people trying to surf this huge amount of information. DJ’s, we’re surfers already, cause we’re already riding this huge volume of music, trying to check out all the different styles and pull good styles out of the crap. DJ’s, we’re quality control!

An invitation to select tracks for a compilation album from the archives of Jamaican label Trojan (In Fine Style: DJ Spooky Presents 50,000 Volts of Trojan Records), presented Miller with another opportunity to exercise his quality control faculties. The expression, ‘like a kid in a candy store’ came to mind.

Jamaica. My name for it is ‘The Loudest Island in the World’. They crank out so much music, I have no idea how they do it because it’s a small island. It’s been hugely influential. It was amazing to go thorough their archives because they have so many artists like, Bob Marley, Lee Scratch Perry, Barrington Levy, Michael Rose from Black Uhuru. All these guy did at least one or two songs with Trojan records over the last forty years. They were the Jamaican version of Motown or Def Jam, a label that was hugely influential. Anyway, they gave me access to their archive and I could pick any songs from it. I thought, damn, I don’t even know where to start, ‘cause there was so much. But it was beautiful. I got a chance to listen to a lot of old Jamaican 45’s.
The next person in the series was Jonny Greenwood, the guitarist from Radiohead, he (also) did selections from Trojan, and the next one up is Fat Boy Slim. They’re making a series.

Miller‘s book, ‘Rhythm Science’ published in 2004, has been described as a kind of manifesto for many of the ideas he was developing and I wondered if the kind of people who where going to read it and see his installations, the so-called high art, might not have listened to hip hop or that sort of music before.

The whole division of high and low culture and all that, is a real problem because a lot of people from differing scenes might not be literate in the other culture. So how can somebody from a university say that this (hip hop) is low culture or primitive, if they can’t even understand it? Or how can somebody from a hip hop or electronic background dis classical or academic music which they don‘t understand? And each one becomes reactionary. I like a lot of styles. I just think the whole thing of the playlist on the iPod has changed and destabilised everybody’s categories. It’s very rare that you like an entire album. You might like one or two songs. You put that on a list and you make a totally different style. You put that on the iPod and put it into shuffle and it’ll change everybody’s albums. I make music now that’s respecting the playlist mentality. It’s about going away from albums back to the single. It’s the same thing with my books and the same thing with my film. It’s about the selection of fragments. So my texts, you can read them as an entire book or you can read just one fragment. 

To come full circle, I was curious to know what it had been like growing up in Washington DC| and how this had affected his worldview and work.

DC is an imperial capital. It’s got all the paradoxes of American culture, the twistedness, the celebration of violence. My dad was Dean of Harvard University Law School, my mother was an academic as well, so I grew up in a house of professors basically. We travelled a lot. We used to go to Jamaica every summer and we also travelled to Europe and Africa… So I didn’t grow up in a normal American way. For that, I can only thank my mother. She was like…‘You can’t grow up in a normal American environment’. She refused to let that happen.

Miller seems also to be following the family tradition, and is himself a professor of music mediated art at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

It’s fun. I like ideas. I like talking about ideas with artists, to writers, to people who are into culture. Saas is in the middle of the remote Swiss alps and I like the idea of just taking a break from all the music and art and stuff… and the people who teach there are amazing. I’m usually there for about two weeks in the summer.

DJ Spooky or Paul Miller for that matter shows no sign of slowing down. In finishing, he mentions a new movie which he’s working on and also a new book to which he has contributed and edited, Sound Unbound. It is a collection of writings in the fields of sound art, digital media, and contemporary composition including contributions by numerous luminaries, amongst them Brian Eno, Chuck D, Steve Reich and Moby.

www.djspooky.com

www.myspace.com/djspooky

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‘The term sucks. The only element of the audience I want to get rid of is the shirtless, sweaty, maxi-mullet jock dudes. We want sex to bleed into the music. At our shows, we want to see half boys and half girls in a utopian world, dancing and drinking.’ Josh Homme

Well, not much has changed in ten years. That’s still the goal and the band clearly went some way to achieving it at this years Rock a Field where, if not exactly a Utopia, there was no scarcity of boys and girls drinking and dancing. If the Queens had some difficulties in getting to the field, it was as nothing compared with getting into the backstage area for journos. However, Upfront is nothing if not persistent, and persist we did. We managed to track down Queens guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen to ask him about new album ‘Era Vulgaris‘, working with ‘guests’, competition on the road and the importance of twiddling.

The critical reception for ‘Era Vulgaris’, the Queens fifth studio album, mentioned a change of direction and was almost universally glowing. Something much appreciated by the band.

TVL
“It feels good and we try not to let it colour what we do too much. It is nice to have people like what you do… Sure, I think we are always changing. That’s my favourite thing about some of the artists that inspire me; they’re always able to reinvent themselves. There’s certain cases like say AC/DC who have never re-invented themselves and are still ‘bad-ass’. I like that idea, but with the Queens it’s supposed to morph and evolve, expand and adapt. With this record especially we didn’t’t have anything written when we went into the studio, we gave ourselves the chance to fail and figure things out, to push some buttons and stretch some boundaries.”

Word was that the Queens had changed their working method for this album, and that the band had assembled beforehand with the instruction to bring some source of inspiration which might jog the creative process.

“Well, we always sort of do that, movies, maybe art, books of art. Any kind of vinyl. We had an extra room set up where we just watch movies. Full Metal Jacket, Scarface, especially Kubrick movies, music is a big key to it. I don’t know what it is called but we watched this great Captain Beefheart documentary. We’d watch stuff and then we’d go out and play and work stuff out. It’s not all easy for us, there‘s got to be a struggle there, I think we all understand that.”

Not having anything written before entering the studio meant the recording process for the album took much longer than normal, a year in fact.

“I never thought I would spend a year recording a record in the studio and going there every day. I can’t say I loved every minute of it, but I loved most of it. You know it’s a lot of waiting and figuring and sound wise there’s a lot of experimenting going on and sometimes it takes time to find it and sometimes you don’t find it. Jamming or messing with the gear you know… what we call tweaking.”

Or twiddling!

“I like twiddling. Tweaking has a different connotation to it.”

Moving away from tweaking and twiddling for a moment, rumour had it that the album was inspired, at least lyrically or thematically by regular drives through Hollywood.

“Well, all of us are out of the epicentre of Hollywood. Myself and Josh moved to a place called ‘The Valley’. It is a very suburban area of Hollywood. You’re spending a lot of time in your car and everyday you come out of there listening to what you did. And it’s normally about 5 or 6 in the morning and there’s all the stragglers from bars, street cleaners and other dark life that happens when everyone else is in bed. So yeah, I would say that is correct.”

The albums cartoon cover almost generated as much chatter as its title, ‘Era Vulgaris’.

“It’s definitely a topic of conversation that we like. It’s never been that way for Queens record covers and artworks, (which) have always been pretty basic. It sort of came about when we were thinking how we going to sell this thing? And you know we are looking at this era of advertising of the 50s and 60s and cartoon characters were selling products like alcohol and cigarettes. Fred Flintstone selling Camel cigarettes. So we figured we’d like somebody like that to sell our record and that’s where Bulby and Patchy the Pirate came in.”

Though the reviews for ‘Vulgaris’, were overwhelmingly good, critics seemed to be divided about the overall sound of the album.

“I think it is a dirty record. I really wanted it to sound big and well produced and Josh really wanted it trashy, and I think we captured both. You can definitely see the dirt in some of it. The single ‘Sick, Sick, Sick’, was one of the first songs we tracked and we didn’t even have the right drum mics up. Julian Casablancas, he came in later and sung on it too. At first a lot of people didn’t realise that was him singing and he also plays really good guitar too. It fits in the song, it serves the song, and that’s all we are trying to do. We usually have guests, you know and we try and provide a comfortable environment for people that we respect. I love The Strokes and like Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. I think we are all learning something from it. I like different elements and chemistry. I would love to see Jimmy Page do something with us. Tom Waites is a big influence and Bowie would be a great collaborator.”

Given their fearlessness in casting around for guests, no-one would be surprised if the band did something completely off the wall and invited say, Britney, to do a spot on the next album.

“Yeah… I’m not afraid…maybe Justin Timberlake, he’s got a great voice. He’s a great talent. I admire that.”

Following their poor show at Rock am Ring in Germany 2001, Homme, Nick Oliveri, and on/off singer Mark Lanegan had the date and start time for the gig tattooed on their ribs, so as never to forget it. Serious about giving good shows then, and not above a bit of competition.

“I’d say we are pretty lucky. For example, I like playing with bands that give you a run for your money. Like The Hives, they are a great live band, that gives us the chance to say, ‘Yeah, great, fine, we are going to try and outdo you guys.’ I like playing with bands like that. I hope to do more of that, perhaps a double headline tour with The Hives or The White Stripes.”

“There’s nothing like playing to your own crowd and getting back that energy, but there is something about getting out there and trying to reach more people too. It’s a bit of a challenge.”
 
With so many comings and goings and side projects all running along simultaneously it can be difficult keeping up with what the Queens will do next, and who’ll be doing it. More a musical collective almost than a band in the conventional sense, they’ve been referred to as “musical misfits”…

“Musical misfits… I think that’s great, sure. Yes I’m happy with that let’s just call ourselves musical misfits.”

Who twiddle!

“Who twiddle a lot, yes.”
 

More info: www.qotsa.com

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Principal members Maxi Jazz, Sister Bliss and Rollo have been concocting a combination of politically infused electronica/trip-hop for what will be 12 years this coming October.  5 albums and 4 compilations later and despite speculation of a split, Faithless are as strong as ever headlining several Festivals throughout Europe this summer.  UPFRONT caught up with Maxi Jazz whilst he was in a car on his way to a gig in Norwich (UK).

During their twelve years Faithless have despite being very prevalent in the mainstream managed to avoid becoming overtly commercial. Although their first release ‘Salva Mea (Save Me)’, on its 1st release, achieved nominal success it was 2nd release ‘Insomnia’ that propelled them into the limelight. It is still considered by many as one of the greatest dance tracks of all time. Initially played in clubs across Europe Maxi explains, “It seems to me the fact that people were so in love with Insomnia,” having discovered it on the European club scene, “that they bought it in their droves when they came home from their summer holidays, by then it was actually a year after we’d put it out”. Insomnia was again released in 2005, almost 10 years after, to notable success, which just goes to show that it is still the classics that get you grooving.

“After that initial flash of attention we went on to the second album ‘Sunday 8PM‘, but always said that nobody was going to go and buy it and it was just an aberration. Then, well everybody went and bought that as well, and it was just shocking to us, really properly shocking, we were scratching our heads and said what is going on?  So we went back on tour for another two years, on the road everyone was telling us we were fantastic and we’re thinking, “are they mad?” Then the third album and you’d think we actually had had our half an hour of success, we’d had a good 15 minutes more than we were due, so we said we’ll keep our feet on the ground, nobody’s going to buy the third album, let’s just be cool. And you know what? They went and bought the third album (Outrospective) and forced us out on the road again for another two years and so that’s how it’s been carrying on…”

Asking whether Maxi likes the touring aspect, he responds with a little revulsion, “No. I really can’t bear touring. I really love doing gigs.  What with the travelling and being away from your family and your friends and doing the normal stuff that makes you a normal person, it’s very tedious and tends to put you off after a while.  If you want the absolute truth! Living out of a suitcase for three months at a time, you know… When we put out an album with exception to this time, but previously, when an album has been released, about a week to two weeks later you’ll get your itinerary for the up-coming tour and it’s 18 months long. So there you are in September 2004 and you’ve got everywhere you’re going to be over the next 18 months till June 2006 and you can look at that and think – when you first do it, obviously the first time, you look at that itinerary and you think fantastic!  You think these countries that you’re going to visit, amazing cities that you’ve only ever previously read about or seen on the telly, and you think amazing. But of course you’re only there for about 15 hours.  And when you get there you’re totally knackered and you want to save all your energy for the show so you don’t see shit.  After a while you say, I’m bored with it.”  Interjecting, surely the comfort level has got better over the years; Maxi continues, “Oh that’s undeniably true.  The first time we went on tour, sure, we were 10 years younger and full of adrenaline and wonder and marvel and sure, after you’ve been doing it for a few years and you’ve got a few more years under your belt, they can’t fob you off, nice hotel room thank you very much, three star . . . make sure that everything is cool. It is very tiresome after a while, when you’ve been on the road for three months, it can be extremely tedious and hard on the body, especially if you’re doing a lot of airplane flights, so it actually makes sense to look after yourself because you won’t get to the end of the tour with all the energy that you need and I personally have a real bad feeling about playing 80% of the show to people who’ve paid 100% of hard earned money to come and see it. So that’s another reason why we try and take things a little easy too” Needless to say that doesn’t mean that there’s no parties when I asked, Maxi adding “I wouldn’t say that that’s exactly true, perhaps not as much hard core partying!”

In 2005 Faithless released their first compilation of own material. Forever Faithless – The Greatest Hits which went on to be the best selling dance album of 2005. Asking how comfortable they were putting out an album under the ‘Greatest Hit’s’ label Maxi responds positively, “Well it’s interesting. The record company wanted us to put that record out the year before. They said, “You know, house is not selling any more, and rap and R&B is the new house music and we’re not entirely sure that we could sell an album of yours so how about we do a greatest hits?” And Blissy was just like, “over my dead body. We have untold things left to say and we will do another album and you’re going to bloody well like it”, and Dave [I imagine record company exec] said, “Oh OK then”, so we put out No Roots. After that we then said fine, and we put out the greatest hits record. You have no idea really, but because all the singles were going to be on it, you think it should do reasonably well, but for it to do as well as it did… that’s was incredible. I not a big numbers man but what I do remember was it was the best selling record of that year” Maxi adding humorously, “but we are really old and boring and out of date!”

Moving onto the subject of criticism Maxi interjects with a tale about a Dubai journalist he was doing an interview with who’d read a Guardian article which had said something along the lines that Maxi was, “becoming a parody  of himself and was nothing more than a newspaper seller impersonating Victor Meldrew”.

The last album ‘To All New Arrivals’ released in November 2006 was not well received in a majority of circles, how does the band react to this type of criticism, Maxi responds “Well, as a band, all different, I couldn’t give a toss, actually I agree with a lot of what was said. We were totally lied to by our record company, plus Blissy was pregnant, so we had two deadlines, and they both had to be met, and it therefore didn’t really give us as much time. We would normally like to sit with something, generally to make something great, there’s really a lot of downtime where you sit with what you’ve done and you put it away for two weeks and you come back to it and you listen to it and you say oh, shit! Change this, this, this, this and this.  We just didn’t have the time to do that. There is a lot of good stuff on the album, but a lot of good stuff is not on it that would’ve been there had we had another two or three months. There is stuff that is on it that would’ve been used, I think, had we had another couple of weeks to just sit with it.  10 years ago we were being told that we were the most important band in the country since Primal Scream, I thought what a load of toss, and now I’m being told that I’m likening myself to Victor Meldrew, which is just as much bollocks as the previous statement. The thing is that you never, ever, ever make music for anybody other than yourself, when you write it, that’s when you feel you need to play it to somebody else.  So, given that we’ve been lucky enough that people have liked what we’ve been doing for the last 11 years, if we’ve managed to bring out a record that people don’t like particularly, or don’t like as much, what do you want? I’m not going to fall down and beg for it. “There is certainly no want or need on Maxi’s part to have to defend it. “Personally would’ve really liked it a lot more, I think, had we had more time.  There are bits of that record that I find are not nearly where we could’ve taken it, and that’s hurtful on a personal level.  You telling me that you think it’s shit won’t affect me at all, you could just as easily think it’s brilliant, but I still have my own opinion of it and that’s not gonna change no matter what anybody says. So as far as I’m concerned, people can say what they like, say it’s my style of rapping, whatever it is, if that’s your opinion, that’s cool.  I know when it’s good and when it ain’t.  It’s not a bad record but it isn’t where we could’ve been, so for me that’s just where that is. We had a deadline; we had to get the record finished before Sister gave birth. We managed it, but you know, I think that things do suffer if you rush them, it was a definite rush job.”

Renowned for being politically outspoken Maxi considers his views more topical then political, stating that he doesn’t believe politics are a force of change rather that it’s up to the attitudes of people changing. Quoting Maxi himself he’d once said, “the biggest problem that humanity faces is that individual people don’t know who and what they are” explaining he continues “That’s exactly the truth, nothing more or less than that, don’t even talk to me about climate change, global warming or any of the big issues, endangered species, that are facing the planet right now. Because, while mankind can’t recognise himself, then there’s absolutely nothing to be done in saving the planet. Mankind has to save himself first and then realise that he is part of the environment; in fact, the environment wouldn’t exist were there not life to put within it. That really is the equation.”

It is a deep rooted belief for Maxi, “the joy that you get as a human being from just giving your time to other human beings, is a joy that actually you can’t get anywhere else.” Asking whether he feels he is doing this through his music Maxi responds, “yes is the simple answer to that, and I think that the proof rather than being just my opinion is the fact that here we are 10 years later and 10 years older and I believe with all my heart that if two years from now, without having put out a single record or a note of music, that if we were to announce a tour, that within days the whole thing would be sold out.  I think it’s because of what people get from the experience of the ‘Faithless vibe’. When you go to a gig and you are moved to just scream, throw your head back and throw your arms in the air and just let go with joy, the reason is because you’re watching somebody being creative right in front of you, and in the same way that somebody who’s in a good mood stimulates your good mood, somebody who’s being creative right in front of you stimulates your creativity, and creativity feels nice. It’s that that makes you want to scream and throw your head back and go yeah!”

The Faithless live show is big on reputation and they can certainly credit some of their fans as ‘collections’ from stray festival goers, stumbling upon the shows. Credited with an electrifying stage presence what’s the secret? “We work very hard on the music and on the presentation of the music, quite a lot of the songs that we do are very, very much, very heavily reworked from the album version because we want to – well they’re two different arenas and we want to try and use what works on stage. I mean, if it doesn’t work on stage then basically people are going to get bored, we work very, very hard to make sure that the dynamics of each individual song and then further than that, the dynamic of the entire set, is powerful and strong and functional.”

At around this point a Ford Escort Mark I in racing colours flies past the vehicle he’s a passenger off and Maxi gushes with excitement, “God that was beautiful! Did you see that?”  A “car freak” in his own words Maxi races Porches for fun. Not something that had immediately come to mind whilst talking for the past half hour. Nevertheless, cars and all, Maxi is an astute honest individual and before parting we speak briefly about the Bombs video, which had caused some minor controversy, yet is worthy of a mention to all you MTVers as you may not have seen it and it is nothing short of superb, before descending into the uselessness of politicians, the questionable reality of democracy in our day and age and then a minor reflection in a far from positive manner of celebrity based media like Heat magazine (UK). Trip-hopper or not there is plenty to soak up from Maxi’s lyricism and if nothing else this interview proved it’s all heart.

More info: www.faithless.co.uk

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Sometimes, just sometimes in Luxembourg you find yourself left with an impossible dilemma. On a bright sunny day at the end of May, such a dilemma occurred.

What to do when one of the most talked about bands in years comes to play in your neck-of-the-woods, and your head is telling you that you may never get the chance to see them in such an intimate venue again, or what your heart is telling you, and you know to be true, to go to see the other lot who you already know are the real deal.

Rarer still, in such situations, was my decision to follow my head. Predictably enough, it was a decision I lived to regret. The bands in question were, of course, The Arctic Monkeys and The Drones. One playing in the sold out Atelier (LU) and the other in, as it turned out, an embarrassingly empty Kulturfabrik (LU). When I spoke to Drones front man Gareth Liddiard, after an early sound check, he seemed resigned, and a bit pissed off, to have had the bad luck to be involved in such a fixture clash.

To take his mind of things, we started by talking about his time in that remote part of Australia, Perth, where The Drones story began in 2001.
Perth is in the middle of no-where and it’s kinda got a pop thing, a really saccharine kinda pop thing, and we really didn’t fit in at all. It was hard to get gigs, there was nowhere to play. To tour Australia from Perth is really expensive; it’s cheaper to go to Bali. So we decided to get out of there and Melbourne is where it’s at in Australia today. They have two community radio stations and a big national station there. There are tons of venues, tons of bands. Perth is just a desert, there’s nothing there really except University of Western Australia, but that’s the only claim to fame, I think! Most of the people that I knew, that played in bands, have since moved to Melbourne as well.

Remote, as it is, from the rest of Australia one might imagine that growing up there, in itself, might have shaped the band in some way.
Yeah it did. There’s a sort of ’no rush’ policy. You’ve got all the time in the world. We’ve had so many line-ups that have come and gone over three or four years. There was never any stress. If someone left it was never in a bad way it was always very relaxed, nothing was happening anyway… You get to figure out what you want to do, and all you think about is the music. I mean, by the time we had any measure of success I would have been 27. I was, I wouldn’t say a fully grown man, but my ideas about success was pretty much set then, and that was just to play good music, do the best you can and it had nothing to do with playing to big crowds or selling lots of records. I don’t rate success like that. We don’t have to ‘work’ now, we tour the world. We haven’t had jobs for a few years, and that for me is success.     

Having escaped the parochial and remote restrictions of life in Perth, Liddiard and guitarist Rui Pereira set off via Sydney and a stint living in the back of a van, to set up sticks in a caravan park in Victoria. I’d guessed it might have sounded more romantic and bohemian than it actually was, in truth, according to Liddiard’s description, it seemed more like a scene from Mad Max.
It was really bad. It was the only caravan park that would have dogs. We’d brought our dogs with us. It was a nightmare. It was a big round area, and everyone’s caravan was in a circle, overlooking this sort of common area where they had washing lines and barbeques and crap like that. It was on a par with somewhere like Newcastle in England, a really rough place. Just depressing and horrible, really industrial, really barren. Everybody was sort of facing each other all the time, so there was always tension. There was a bunch of old bikers and people who’d just got out of prison and whenever they got drunk they’d just kick the shit out of each other, in the middle, in full view of everybody. There was a big row of caravans for guys who were on probation. They probably had no family, nowhere to go and they’d stick them in there. All they could do was drink because they can’t get in fights or stuff like that, but they would certainly encourage the violence because it gave them something to watch. Just before we got there there’d been a drive-by so the main fence at the front was all shot up, someone got stabbed while we were there, it was just a fucking horrible situation.

We were applying for (house) rentals all the time and when we finally got the call that our application had gone through, it was like, one of the best days of my life, it was like winning the lotto.

Having survived the experience and having, no doubt, picked up source material for a sack load of future songs, Liddiard and Pereira recruited bass player Fiona Kitschin, and drummer, Christian Strybosch, got into the studio and recorded their debut ‘Here Come The Lies’, which was released to not much acclaim in 2002.

Second album, the pithily titled ‘Wait Long By The River and the Bodies of Your Enemies Will Float By’, was a different story. Recorded in 2004, the albums release was delayed for a year due to legal problems which were only resolved when influential Australian indie label, In-fidelity, stepped in and agreed to put the album out. It finally saw the light of day in 2005 and was greeted by enthusiastic reviews which saw it nominated for the Triple J Radio station’s J Award for Australian album of the year, (which was finally won by Wolfmother, but more of them later). As you might expect, Liddiard, while grateful, is pretty unimpressed about the value of such awards.
Yeah, they just had an awards thing and they nominated us for that. Wolfmother won that. They’re just another shit award system really. The more records you sell the more likely you are to win it. It certainly helped us. Every week they’d announce a new nominee and stuff like that with a lot of hoopla on the station, and a lot of promotion.

The band then won the more prestigious Australian Music Prize in 2006.
That was pretty good. We were away when we got nominated for that. We were touring in Europe and too busy to give a fuck about what it was. We never heard of it, it was new, the first year so we didn’t even inquire (about it), and then we won it. The prize money was A$25,000, which is pretty good. So you also get A$25,000 extra in promo, which is pretty fucking cool. It’s based on the Mercury awards, but what are the English gonna think (about it), I mean we’re a fucking colony, it’s not gonna affect their view of us. They’re not gonna go, “Oh you won The Australian Music Prize”. If anything they’ll just go “It must mean you suck even more than everybody else in Australia”.

With the latest album ‘Gala Mill‘ the band again shirked recording in the conventional studio setting, opting instead for a farm in remote Tasmania. The album was said to resonate with a sense of the place where it was recorded.
We had nothing to do and Mike (Noga), our drummer, had just joined. We wanted to show him a good time. I had about ten songs that were just half-finished, just chords and words. So we figured fuck it, lets make a holiday and recording session in one, and if it’s bad, if the recording session comes out bad, we’ll shelve it, not worry about it, put it down to demos. So we made the decision to go and four days later we were there, it happened really fast. So it flew together too quick to have any preconceived idea. When we got there, it was really more a happy accident. It did suit. If we’d gone to record in a big city, if we’d gone to record in New York, the album would sound completely different; it would be faster, heavier. Tasmania is like Ireland, like Europe, big rolling hills with that sense of space and a relaxed feeling.

‘Gala Mill’ was again lauded by critics, with some now describing The Drones as the most important band in Australia.
What’s that? What does that mean? Australia has a real poor sense of itself, it doesn’t really have a grasp of what it is. It’s only been around for 270 years, and it’s confusing as hell. If you read the short history of it, the European history, it’s just a bunch of crazy Irishmen, the beginning of the IRA and all that just getting shipped out, and that’s pretty much it. Then there’s the little chimney sweep who stole a loaf of bread, that’s another myth. There’s the genocide of the Aborigines. So is it a European country, or is it the indigenous peoples, is their history the valid history? No-one has a clue who they are, or what they are, or what they’re meant to be doing in Australia.

I mention the referendums about independence.
Yeah, most people just go shopping and try and forget about that. I guess in a cultural sense it’s gotta be helpful if we make something, it’s an Australian album, which isn’t necessarily a deliberate thing on our part. Australians try to be everybody else and not themselves.

Gala Mill features two songs which could almost be described as folk songs, at least in theme. ‘Words from the Executioner to Alexander Pearce’, deals with the cannibalism by said Pearce of his fellow convicts, whilst on the run in Tasmania in the early 19th Century. ‘Sixteen Straws’ draws on the tradition of Australian storytelling, taking the first verse from an old traditional song ‘Moreton Bay’, which told the story of a suicide pact amongst a group of convicts. One journalist had said of ‘Gala Mill’, that the great thing about the album was that it said, ‘This is who we are’. Were The Drones therefore setting out to claim or furnish their identity, their Australian identity?
I think we just don’t avoid it, that’s it. There’s no, sort of grand plan. All that stuff, that history is there. It’s just interesting, blood-curdling stuff. On a juvenile level it’s fascinating. In school they didn’t teach you about that stuff, so a lot of people were just disinterested in history. They just taught you about fucking politicians, which is a valid thing, but it’s not the whole story. I mean, the rest, people were killing each other and eating each other, that’s pretty cool. I mean if they taught you that…

There’d be a lot more kids in history class.
Exactly! I mean take Flann O’Brien, the Irish writer, one of my favourites it’s the most ridiculous, hilarious stuff. If they started you off on that rather than Shakespeare, you’d read a lot more, you know.

Finally, playing the devils advocate, I wondered if he might be hanging around town to have a beer with compatriots Wolfmother, when they hit town a couple of days later.
No, eh, no, no. I don’t know those guys. There’s a thing, one of the main problems with being a musician, if you ask anybody who’s been in the industry for a long time, they’ll all say, you get the odd band that pops up, that’s shit. You say “Oh that is fucking shit, listen to that. That is the worst shit you’ve ever heard.”, then you meet them, and they’re just sweethearts, you know what I mean. Then it becomes really hard, so when the next record comes out, you go, “It’s pretty cool”, because you know ’em, and you like ‘em. But with Wolfmother I’ve heard no-one would have any problems disliking their stuff because apparently the singer is just the biggest tosser …ever. I wouldn’t hang and watch Wolfmother, I don’t think. I mean that guy takes it seriously. I don’t mind somebody ripping off Black Sabbath ’cause it’s fun to play, but this guy takes it so seriously and actually thinks he’s a wizard.

It’s not the real world mate. There are no wizards, there are no unicorns.

More info: www.thedrones.com.au

© UPFRONT Online – ALL COPYRIGHT REMAINS WITH THE AUTHOR. YOU CANNOT REPRODUCE WITHOUT EXPRESS PERMISSION FROM THEM – YOU’VE BEEN WARNED!

You‘re starting to enjoy success at this point, how has it been getting to this point on the journey?

Matt      It feels quite natural really. We basically started about 8 years ago. Things happen. It doesn’t feel like such a big deal because there’s always something good coming along. My girlfriend says I should get more excited. I’m like yeah, I am, and she’s like, well show it.

David    But also, we’re sort of busy planning shows or the next record. We don’t, you know, type our name in Google and see what comes up. Obviously when we play shows, and there’s people there, I can see if they like us or not. But I’m not monitoring what people are saying about us, so I’m sort of unaware of how well it’s going, or how badly. I don’t want to know.

It’s all been really recent?

Matt      Yeah it feels like that.

I know that you’ve been working a long time on this album. But I read that you just gave up on your day jobs before going to the US recently.

David    Yeah, in February. That was obviously the best thing…

So the album ‘Transparent Things’, can you tell me about the process, the development, how you decided its direction. [The previous album was "mongy"]

David    We’ve only just stumbled across it, really, it was more like when we started playing live, we didn’t want to bore people, and first it was just me and him.

I read that you thought that your live show sucked because it was just two guys running a laptop. 

David    No, no, we were aware that that is what it could be. So we were very adamant that we didn’t want that to happen, because that is one of the worst things to watch. Unless you’ve got great visuals, which we didn’t have. So when we started playing live, when we saw people dance and stuff it was pretty good. And also when we first started, we were really into electronica at that time, you know? And Aphex Twin, which we still like. But before them, personally, I really liked Bowie and more sort of, fun music, and soul. We had the sounds but we didn’t have the songs, so we decided to make some songs up to go with the sounds, and speed it up a bit, and voila, here we are.

The recording period for this album has been quite long, hasn‘t it? Because you released Collarbone in 2005. 

David    Yeah, but in terms of days, probably not, because we were working fulltime

Matt      It took hours.

David    Really quick but it was just stretched over 5 years. But in that time before Matt joined, we worked with two other guys and we played some shows with them. That kinda took us on a little bit of a tangent, and then they left and then Matt joined. But me and him were just sitting around thinking, “Why is nothing happening? Oh, we haven’t released a record in five years, that’s what.”

Were you never tempted at any stage just to get the sack and work on the music while on the dole for six weeks or whatever?

David    I’ve been on the dole before. I did more when I worked for Fujiya & Miyagi than I did when I was on the dole. It’s all right, (but) all your mates are working, you’ve got no money…

In the UK it‘s terrible, I think.

David    Yeah, I did it for about a year but it didn’t really help us.

For me, the album you have now is more accessible to a wider audience. Was that on purpose?

David    No.

It was just a natural progression?

David    Yeah, I think we got better at writing songs. Or we decided we wanted to write songs rather than mumblings over bleeps.

Matt      I think it’s the nature of the songs, the songs have got choruses. 

David    But no, it obviously wasn’t deliberate, I think if you try and make something palatable you’re gonna sound rubbish and no one’s gonna like it. So it was a bit of a shock, God people like us, that sort of thing.

What about your fans from your previous albums? 

David    All five of them? They’re fine with it.

Matt      Yeah, they’re still there. 

David    Besides what’s the point of doing the same thing again, do you know what I mean? It’s not like oh this isn’t working, what shall we do?  It’s a long period in between the first and the second, hopefully the next one won’t sound like this one

So you mention Can, Aphex Twin, David Bowie, Roxy Music, Iggy Pop and the Stooges. What influences from the current day would you include?

David    Personally not a lot. I think more production-wise, maybe Steve’s more influenced by hip-hop or house records, how they sound. I try to write new music. The only new music I really like is Joanna Newsome and Smog and stuff I don’t feel any kinship with, say, groups. I like old stuff like Serge Gainsbourg and Can, it just sounds better to me. You get a bit jaded because you think, oh, I’ve heard that before. I mean, I can’t remember the last time I heard something new and I thought, wow! 

Steve    Actually, we played with a band called Au Revoir Simone in America, and we liked the record before we played with them. Then we played with them and we watched them every night, they sounded amazing. So that’s quite special. And there’s a band called Half Cousin on Gronland Records.

David    I really like Emperor Machine. I really like that kinda stuff, the dance floor stuff. But I’ve started to get more into songs now as well. Although we keep the electronics going, we’re all quite into songs now.

And what about dodgy stuff? Do you listen to dodgy stuff and say, actually, I could take that and make that? Something like Britney Spears?

Matt      She’s doing all right on her own actually. 

David    I dunno. I like pop songs. I like R Kelly ‘Trapped in the Closet’. You know that album? Oh you’ve got to, it’s the most amazing – it’s the shittest – and the most amazing album ever. It’s a whole concept album. Get R Kelly ‘Trapped in the Closet,’ there’s ten songs, all exactly the same. And it’s just the story about how he gets trapped in the closet with this woman. He goes back and then her husband walks in, and then he goes back to his wife’s house and there’s a dwarf there, because the dwarf’s doing his wife, it’s amazing.

Matt      The dwarf’s hiding in the kitchen cupboard, there’s many layers to this.

David    You’ve gotta listen to this. He opens up the cupboard and he goes “there’s a midget, midget, midget,” you know that R&B thing.

Matt      It’s a rap opera.

David    So that’s pretty cool. We couldn’t have done that any better than him probably.

Or any worse.

David    Oh yeah. It’s amazing. But yeah, I dunno, I like the songs, I wouldn’t call them dodgy but there’s some R&B and pop songs that come out every now and again, like that ‘Crazy in Love’ by Beyonce a few years ago. That’s easily the best song of the year. So we’re not really snobby and they don’t have to be German for us to like them.

How do the live shows differ from your recorded material? What extra elements can we expect?

David    I think it’s probably more dynamic, because we’re quite stripped down, obviously we all get a little bit bored and we want to do different things.

Steve    We all sing – or whisper – so that gives it dynamics. 

David    We haven’t got a drummer.

Matt      Like the Temptations with instruments.

David    Yeah. 

Steve    Are we?

David    No, we’re not. We’ve got really bad dancing. But, I dunno, we like it. We don’t just stand there like scared rabbits.

Matt      Playing lots of gigs recently improves stuff as well.

Have you had any bad gigs?

David    Oh lots.

Steve    Yeah, always.

Any weird moments with the audience?

Matt      We have a fantastic fan who sings in New York, he’s always at the front dancing and kind of miming the lyrics.

Steve    He wears white lycra shorts and a headband.

So have you got any famous fans that you know of at the moment?

Steve    No. A bit disappointed really.

David    Has anyone contacted you?

Steve    I received an email from – I don’t know – Kevin Rhodes. 

David    No, you want someone like Dale Winton [UK TV personality] to like you or someone really odd.

Or Julian Clarey!

David    Julian Clarey, yeah.

Maybe you‘ve got closet fans.

Steve    Yeah, trapped in the closet.

Did you send R Kelly a CD?

David    No.

Steve    He should’ve bought one, he’s got enough money.

David    Yeah. Like the great R Kelly knows who we are. 

So what‘s next for you guys, just to wrap up?

Steve    UK tour.  We get back to Brighton tomorrow and Tuesday we’ve got a two week UK tour starting in Cardiff.

Are you doing any festivals?

David    Yeah, we’re playing a festival in September in the Isle of Wight, Electric Picnic in Ireland, with Jarvis Cocker and Beastie Boys playing there, Björk as well. Playing a few, Secret Garden in Huntingdon, near Cambridge, Bloom, Route de Rock in France, Leicester, we’re doing a lot basically. Plus one in London, Lovebox. We play the same day as Sly and the Family Stone. Which is pretty good, I reckon. Whether he turns up or not, I’m not sure.

And next? Are you writing at the moment?

Steve    Yeah, just been doing that the last couple of weeks actually. We try and fit it in through the summer, but we probably won’t have it finished until January/February. We’re going to stop gigging completely and then concentrate on doing it.

David    We’re going to get it done as soon as we can. We’re about half way through.

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So as a band what do you think are your biggest strengths?
Joe   One of our biggest strengths is our live show and the party we are trying to create when we are on stage. We are very dynamic I think, we run around, Tom, Dave and myself are singing backings. That gives an impact!

David   We also try to mix-in a lot of stuff… I think our strength is we have powerful songs but there not always aggressive.

Who or what has had the most impact on your life?
Joe   You mean the band that had the most impact? Or a certain record that makes us feel something or what inspires us?

Dave   I think we’ve taken our inspiration from all over the place whether it’s from people, school, work. Like all bands it’s from everywhere

Pit   Me it is System Of A Down after the album Toxic City, I decided then to play guitar. It was my first step into the world of music

Joe   for me then, it has to be Smashing Pumpkins… always!

Dave   Dr Dog.

David   Nirvana.

Tom  for me Queen.

What is about your favourite records is it the song writing, the music?
Joe    Just now as you say it I’m thinking “what is my favourite record, I was like ‘oh my god’ what is my favourite record?” It always depends sometimes it is the lyrics, or the singing, sometimes it is just the sound, sometimes when the songs are not even that innovative it is in the producing there’s a sound that they make in the production that can have so many nice elements in it. It also really depends on your mood.

What has given you the best advice?
Joe   I think it is from Dave’s dad.

All   yeah yeah yeah

David   He gave us a lot of advice.

Dave   I don’t remember everything, he came to our rehearsal rooms at the beginning he showed us how to write a song, how to use different elements in songs, how to produce and to play the songs as it is supposed to be. He is a musician, he’s been playing for like 35 years now and he has played in a lot of bands he has gained a lot of experience.

Joe   Sometimes when he gives you advice he’ll talk to you about life and about experiences in life and then you’ll suddenly recognise that he is actually telling you something about the way you should write your music. It is very inspiring…

If you could trade places with anyone who would it be?
David   I would say something evil… I would change places with George W Bush and end all the wars!

Tom   I would change places with you (David) and wouldn’t let you do that…

Pit    Hmmm I don’t know…

A day in the life of…?
Pit    Gwen Stefani

All   Laughter

Joe   Yeah, I would trade places with a girl find out what a girl’s life is like.

Dave   I don’t fucking know.

Joe    It would be interesting to change places with someone who has big influences on the world, the economy and everything. To change stuff… but, I don’t know who, or what to change. Perhaps someone from within the Luxembourg Economy, everything here is going down hill, it is getting way too expensive. But, then saying that we are not really a political band.

David    We try to avoid getting into all that. Each one of us has different politics and views on religion and stuff we try to keep that out of the band.

Joe    The music is about having a party, about providing a good time.

Pit     We don’t want to give advice, we don’t need to, we just want to make music.

So don’t mix politics with music?
Joe   There are a lot of things going on in everyone’s life, we just want to give people a good time. Sometimes it is so nice to forget about everything around you.

David   It is not that we don’t care about it, we just don’t want to make it part of our music

Tom   Music for us is about entertainment, it is not a lesson.

Joe   It’s what people in the scene say to us, those that are part of the underground or have a more political nature about them, they say to us “you are just a ‘fashion band’ you are just about entertainment and you have no message at all”, but we do have messages its just they are not political. It’s just ‘enjoy your self and your life’

Do you think there are a lot of bands in Luxembourg that just want to be political?
All    Yeah

Joe   Many, many, many, and some of them do it well

Why do you think there are so many?
Pit   Because they all want to say something and they can only say it through their music. No one listens otherwise.

Joe   People are angry!

Pit    So they do their music and they try to get a message across, but it’s not like they are doing music only for that.

Joe   Some bands do it very good, some not so good. I guess it is always easy to project your hate through music and to reach people who are just focusing on that hate. That’s not our thing – we are about dancing and have fun.

David   All that political stuff has been said already 100s of times, its not being heard anymore.

Currently, David is at music school in France, Tom is a social worker. Joe & Pit are studying to be social workers and Dave works in and office. How soon would you quit if things were to work out with the band?
All   As soon as we can. Straightaway!!!

Dave   If there is a real chance we will grab that chance

Joe   We will of course try to stay in this world with both feet on the ground but if there is a real chance…

David  That it is also difficult in Luxembourg, to give up everything just to do music, there is an attitude, “but how are you going to support yourself”.

Joe   People in Luxembourg have this mentality… I call it a ‘banker country’, everybody just wants to get as much money as they can and work for the state, nobody takes a risk!

Pit   They are afraid to loose something or to be poor or are afraid of having a bad life.

Joe   My parents for example they always told me “you can’t just do music you have to gain something… it has to be secure what will you do when you don’t have money, Joe come-on”. I guess most households are like that and people are stressed about doing something different. From an early age its like “go to school, go to work for the state, get a good job”.

Pit   “Buy a house, get a wife, get two cars, have a kid.”

Are you looking to break that mould?
Joe   it is something we often talk about.

David  No Luxembourgish band or football player or whatever really got out and made it in a professional way.

There are some in the Classic Music and Jazz scenes!
Dave   Yeah that is the classic music scene.

Joe  They get a lot more support from the state.

Dave  David Laborier, he is one of the best jazz musicians here and practically gets paid by the state to tour and stuff.

David   There is a status in some countries like Germany for instance that if you do a certain amount of concerts in a year you get a musician status, you get money.

Joe   Paid artists, Thierry Van Werveke is doing that here, if he does so many plays, theatre or movies he gets paid by the State.

Tom   Luxembourg deep down hasn’t really thought that we could be professional.

So on the slack about not being so hardcore not so screamo…
Joe   In the beginning we were getting very angry about it but then we were like ‘fuck it’ it is music… just let everyone do their own thing. It is still an art whether you scream or not, and now we are like whatever, we don’t care anymore… most of those things are born from jealousy. We are just going to go on doing our thing.

David   The people that talked that way about us don’t really know us. We were part of ‘that’ stuff 3 years ago and we listened to that music just as much as we listened to Justin Timberlake. There should be no boundaries in music… it is just music. We are just trying to create our songs with the things we like, maybe part of that is underground or maybe it’s pop music.

Joe   It’s who we are. We jump around we want to make a show, we play our music, we also dance, scream whatever… many people like it, but there are still people who are like “what are they doing, what is this entertainment, it is so fake”. It’s not fake we are having fun. These are the sort of people that will go to the Atelier and pay 20 euros to see an American band and then just stand there not moving [I reminisce about the fine comment made by someone after the Rolling Stones gig here back in 95 “it was like playing to the Japanese clay soldiers] what is the point in paying for this… people have this ‘thing’ in front of their head… “You are a Luxembourgish band you can’t do that”.

David   like stay little, stay small…
So you’re planning to tour a lot during the summer? You got a van?
Dave   We have, but we can’t legalise it

All   Laughter

David   We bought it in Germany and we are trying to get it licensed here in Luxembourg, but we don’t have all the papers. I mean we bought it legally but it was a case of a guy bought it from another guy who brought it from another guy and…

Joe   yeah there are no official papers they aren’t all there.

So extended time on the road what are each others annoying habits?
Joe    We don’t have any annoying habits. We laugh all the time we’ve never had a fight the whole time we were together.

Tom   We’ll put a playstation in the van and we won’t care.

All  Laughter

The new release comes out at the end of the month; what does it sound like?
Joe   We are pleased with it.

Dave   People have been waiting for it for a long time, there is a lot of expectation, they looking forward to something big…

David   We have been working on that record for so long personally we can’t say if it is good or it is bad. I can say I hope people like it… we’ll see…

And so finally Printemps du Bourges?
Joe   We are excited to go there and have our chance and to do our best there.

Pit   …and to get the money

All  Laughter

David   We have been so busy with the record and everything around that that we’ve not really had time to think what it means for the band… It is not the same thing as it was years ago, the level is much lower. If it had happened 10 years ago it would have been a big big big chance but now…

Joe   it’s a good chance! We’ll probably be a bit nervous but we’ll try not to think about what could happen and just do the best we can and take the opportunity to show who we are and have, well, just have fun…

Eternal Tango are releasing the new album ‘Last Round at the Sissi Cafe’ in April (2007).

More info: www.myspace.com/eternaltangoband, http://blog.eternaltango.net

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