Recent journalism
Minutemen feature, for MOJO
Mike Watt: “We knew genres were gulags, fuckin’ ‘Berlin Wall’ shit. We’d play what we wanted, we didn’t pay attention to any constraints. Punk taught us music was about expression. D was picking ideas up from R’n’B, making room for the drums and bass by playing this trebly, staccato, clipped guitar, like Curtis Mayfield, like John Fogerty, like Scotty Moore. Our lyrics were us thinking out loud.”
Cassie Kinoshi profile, for MOJO
“Jazz in the UK had become divided by class, it wasn’t very accessible. The music now enjoys a better platform, the space to become a social music again. It’s no longer centred around elitism and passive listening, its more about community and dancing and togetherness, about sharing a message.”
Grandaddy album review, for The Guardian
Lytle leavens the sorrow with flashes of humour, such as when he pretends he’s a malevolent jukebox demanding “more credits … or I’ll play way more songs”, a knowing wink that perhaps these pervading miseries could overwhelm. In truth, his crestfallen songs – sung in plaintive sigh suggesting Brian Wilson channelling Charlie Brown’s existential angst – are a seductive joy, and getting lost in his soft-focus happy-sadness is an addictive pleasure all its own.
Think-piece, for The Independent
It isn’t just the old white male rock heroes benefitting from these purges of the archives. Joni Mitchell’s genius was underestimated in her day by a misogynist rock media. But her subsequent critical renaissance has prompted an ongoing series of Archives box-sets, uncovering priceless treasures like her original 1963 audition tape for Saskatchewan radio. Alice Coltrane was disregarded by much of the jazz press when she pursued her own fearless career in the wake of husband John’s 1967 death, but recent years have witnessed a reappraisal of her exhilaratingly challenging output, kickstarted by Luaka Bop’s excavation of her 1980s devotional music.
Sonic Youth feature, for The Independent
“Sonic Youth always had a lot of luck – an ability to be in the right place at the right time,” says guitarist-singer Lee Ranaldo. “We were pretty skint. But we knew we had something special. We were getting very little traction in the US.” American music magazines like Rolling Stone were mainstream-focused and paid little attention to groups like Sonic Youth. “But the UK had all these weekly music papers looking for stuff to write about. We had to get there. So, we made it happen.”
Brittany Howard profile, for The Independent
“I just came out of the womb different. I was a late bloomer; I was tall; I had kinky, curly hair, and no one else I knew did. It all just made me really resilient. People say I seem really confident, but they don’t understand what I’ve been through. I’m like a piece of hot metal that’s been strengthened by being thrust into cold water. I’ve been tempered by life.”
Sault live review, for The Guardian
All this mystery would be meaningless were the music not so consistently remarkable. Their eclecticism is dazzling but grounded in substance, their anthems aiming at the feet and the heart with equal accuracy: the choir-led symphonics of Time is Precious; Simz’ writhing, irresistible Fear No Man; the fearsomely in-the-pocket Warrior. It’s a lot. Given the buzz that’s built around Sault these last four years – and the £100 ticket price – it had to be. But this immersive, eclectic, astonishing three hours posit Cover and collaborators as time-travellers traversing Afro-legacy and Afro-future, masked visionaries cycling between humility and audacity.
Madness profile, for Record Collector
The sort of golden ticket you’d build a time-machine to experience, the 2 Tone tour was a travelling showcase for the Specials’ label, traversing the UK across 40 dates, beginning at Brighton’s Top Rank on October 19, 1979. “The Specials were the best live band I ever saw,” remembers Suggs. “We’d hang out and watch them every night, dancing about on top of the speakers. It was fucking maniacal – the balconies in those old theatres looked like they were about to collapse with everyone jumping up and down. On the tourbus you had the people who drank up the front, the people who puffed down the back and the people with speed in the middle. And we were running up and down the aisle of that bus, not quite sure what bit we wanted to be in. How young we all were… like kids. A tremendous time.”
The Kills profile, for The Independent
When Covid hit, Hince retreated to his home in LA and lost himself in projects. “I had a manic episode for two years, and I loved it,” he grins. “I lived like a cat – I’d just continue working and making things, fall asleep for a couple of hours and then wake up and start again. Time didn't matter. I'd open a bottle of wine at seven in the morning! I was learning to embroider, I bought an old photo booth, I started making my own trousers...”
Meat Puppets profile, for MOJO
“When we first heard the term ‘hardcore’, we thought it referred to Neil Young – the real shit, as opposed to Black Oak Arkansas. But it meant that skinhead shit. And we were longhairs wearing overalls and smoking grass.”
Young Fathers live review, for The Guardian
“The group jitter on to the unadorned stage like unstable elements, casting vast shadows of their endlessly dancing bodies on a grimy canvas backdrop. It evokes Talking Heads’ concert movie Stop Making Sense, and Young Fathers are similarly all energy and ecstasy.”
Thurston Moore interview, for The Quietus
“Sonic Youth no longer existing was defined by Kim and I getting divorced – like, 'We broke up, has the band broken up as well?' That became the narrative, though there was never anything official announced. In that sense, it's like we never broke up. And I kind of like that. By calling the final album The Eternal, it allowed for it to be this 'POOF!' into the magic universe of foreverness.”
Blonde Redhead interview, for The Guardian
“Once Misery was finished, I hated it,” says Makino. But she soon made her peace with what would become the group’s most acclaimed release. “I hate music that is simply pretty. But Serge Gainsbourg wrote insanely beautiful music that was brutal at the same time, because of his suffering.” Blonde Redhead’s new sound was similarly affecting, the cacophony of their earlier records now absent, but their signature longing, introspection and anguish hauntingly intact.
Elephant 6 interview, for The Guardian
“We were building a universe that was lo-fi, personalised and highly experimental. We worshipped Brian Wilson, Brian Eno and Yoko Ono. We mashed-up psychedelia and pop and punk and experimentalism. And we had each other to buoy us, so we didn’t need the rest of the world’s approval.”
Slowcore feature, for The Guardian
“We started breaking things down, exorcising these nasty qualities coming from grunge. I wanted – needed – to say things one could easily feel embarrassed about, and the countervailing mechanism was restraint. Our songs sounded better slow and stripped down, when we tried to say more with less.”
Ben Howard interview, for The Guardian
“A flood of anxiety came with the first attack – it felt like a falling apart. But the second time, I knew what was happening. For an hour, I just existed in a world of confusion, light, sound and feelings. I was able to sit and wonder about this rogue thing, this brief glimpse into something really strange and surreal.”
billy woods interview, for The Guardian
“The business ground to a halt. An important personal relationship ended. A decade of incremental progress seemed to culminate in crushing defeat. It was like, ‘the plane’s crashed, you’re either gonna drown or you’re gonna swim. It’s on you’. To rescue myself, I was forced to swim.”
Billy Valentine interview, for The Guardian
“The Reagan years saw poorer communities suffer. Taxes were rising on us, and the rich were getting richer, and Black people were being oppressed by law enforcement … Something needed to be said, and I tapped into the social commentary of the 60s, of the Last Poets, of Donny Hathaway.”
Laraaji interview, for The Guardian
“The music – this wafting sea of harmonics – had a trance-inducing, spellbinding effect. Yes, it went against the grain of the environment, the hustle and bustle. But it allowed people to just be, to chill and reflect.”
Young Fathers interview, for The Guardian
“Filing White Men Are Black Men Too under hip-hop would have miscommunicated the music inside. We’re more than that. We know the rules of hip-hop. And our music is hip-hop without the rules, just like it’s rock without the guitars.”
Brainiac interview, for The Guardian
“Tim was such a great musician, he could go far out on a limb and not worry about everything falling apart. And he was willing to do anything to entertain. He’d walk offstage with bruises in the shape of his effects pedals all up his back.”
Roy Montgomery interview, for The Guardian
Scenes from the South Island was “about being away from your home country. I’ve never tired of the imagery that generated the album, and those landscapes are still places I go to, physically or in my mind. Those visions of space and atmosphere – the absence of busy, human life – populate a lot of what I do. It’s regenerative, an existential thing.”
Lora Logic interview, for The Guardian
Logic relocated to a squat in Stoke Newington. “There was no kitchen, no bathroom,” she says, laughing. “We’d bathe at the Victorian bathhouse in Ladbroke Grove. There wasn’t much electricity. We’d build fires to keep warm, live off bread and cheese. And there was a DJ on the floor below who played loud funk and reggae all hours. I loved it.”
Mimi Parker obituary, for The Guardian
On ‘In Metal’, she used the practice of bronzing a baby’s booties as a metaphor for the intense vulnerability that follows having a child – the fear they may come to harm, the sensation that parenthood itself is a fleeting experience, quickly ebbing away – singing ‘Partly hate to see you grow / And just like your baby shoes / Wish I could keep your little body / In metal’. The song was a study in Low’s ability to create music that is both beautiful and unsettling at the same time.
Big Joanie interview, for The Guardian
“People call us a lot of things, but we’re still punk. Because, for me, ‘punk’ means freedom. It’s open, and constantly growing. When I was a teenager, I wanted to sing along with music but I was very shy. But now I sing all the time. To be able to put that noise and anxiety and energy out into the world – that’s the release I always needed.”
Gilla Band interview, for The Guardian
Duggan says they wanted to channel the elastic surreality of the dreamspace. “Reality gets distorted in a dream. An elephant might walk past you and say: ‘How are you?’ and you just accept it.” That surrealism is most present in Kiely’s lyrics. His characteristic unsettling absurdist imagery and dark wordplay abound, with recurring motifs of decaying teeth, sea creatures and balding barbers.
Feature on the influence of Star Wars’ Cantina Band, for The Guardian
“Our conversation with Björk was really inspirational, imagining music in another world. Like, what would music sound like without any contact with jazz? It’s been a reference point for our work ever since – writing music for some other place, imagining a world where music would sound like the music we make.”
Arab Strap interview, for The Guardian
“Every single song in Arab Strap’s first 10 years, except one, was autobiographical. I had rules that everything had to be true and honest, and I stuck to them pretty rigidly until we reformed. The truth is, life gets less interesting as you get older. I don’t want to write songs about the school run or having a nap.”
Herbie Hancock interview, for The Guardian
“ I’m working a lot with younger people. They are the future, and I’m always looking forward. Musicians from the generations before me helped and encouraged me, and showed me mistakes in my thinking about the structure of a song. I’m at that point in my life where it’s time for me to pass the baton on to younger musicians. But I’m not ready to leave just yet.”
They Hate Change interview, for The Quietus
“At a certain point I felt like I didn’t want to write sad songs about my gender fluidity, because I don’t want to be sad about it – it is not a thing that is sad. And I shouldn't be sad about it, you know? I’m going to talk about it in a very real way, and that doesn’t just mean being sad about it. Some days I’m really charged-up, some days I’m really feeling myself, just like everybody else. And some days I might feel a little bit lower, just because, but some days I got a ‘S’ up on my chest, like I say on ‘Some Days I Hate My Voice’. It’s like, Yo, let me talk my shit right.”
Mahalia Jackson profile, for The Guardian
At Jackson’s urging, King delivered the greatest speech of his career. “Listen back to it,” urges Fana Hues. “His intonation was like he was singing.” Jackson had once patterned her singing on “the way the preacher would preach in a cry, in a moan”; now the nation’s most famous preacher was following her lead.
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard interview, for The Guardian
The 18-minute krautrock rollercoaster The Dripping Tap had existed as a soundcheck jam before the pandemic, but had been sidelined by lockdown. “I knew, as soon as we could get together and jam again, that was the first thing we’d record,” says Mackenzie. When that blessed day finally arrived, in June 2021, he remembers feeling “weirdly nervous” as the group gathered at their new HQ in the Melbourne suburbs. “We had to hug and just shoot the shit for a bit, cos we hadn’t interacted much with the outside world. But what we really wanted to do was just make loud music together. It was so pure, like a Jackson Pollock painting. It was everything we’d missed so much for all those months: the interplay, our synapses connecting, that ephemeral aspect of improvisation.”
Sault album review, for The Guardian
Dean Josiah Cover’s considerable ambitions peak on the epic Solar. Across 13 riveting minutes, it draws into its orbit repetitive synth arpeggios and inventive choral work suggesting Terry Riley’s A Rainbow in Curved Air and North Star-era Philip Glass; soprano voices singing melodies that evoke John Coltrane’s Naima; and passages of star-gazing orchestral music that recall the sublime, soulful gospel of Donny Hathaway’s I Love the Lord, He Heard My Cry. This fusion of unlikely elements creates an earthy pocket-concerto that’s cerebral and creatively adventurous while harbouring potent emotional power. It’s a trick Air pulls off again and again.
Taylor Hawkins obituary, for The Guardian
Grohl himself had always seemed the goofy, sunshine element amid the darkness of his previous group, Nirvana. Now, in Hawkins, he’d located his own Dave Grohl figure for Foo Fighters. “Taylor and I are like brothers,” he said, years later. “The two of us are best friends. You only find so many best friends in a lifetime. Taylor and I wound up being separated at birth.”
John Colpitts, profiled for The Quietus
“We became our own inspiration. Oneida can't really copy anything, we just don't have the ability. We're not skilled, we're not chameleons. So we would have an idea, an aspiration, and just attempt it, and it would become something else, something that was just ours. Nobody is psychedelic like Oneida. Some of the records sound more classically psychedelic, but we don't sit there and jam with a wah-wah and echo. Our sound just became more ‘us’. And that just came from playing together a lot, and being open and recording a lot. Can and Sonic Youth had their own studios, they would go there regularly and record everything they did, and we had that too. That's how that voice came out.”
Mark Lanegan obituary, for The Guardian
“It was the end of a nightmare that had lasted for years and years. Nobody likes to believe they need anybody’s help in anything, and the smarter you are – and I’m not smart – or the tougher you are – and I thought I was pretty tough – the more trouble you have. The smartest guys I ever met are not around any more because they thought they could think their way out of an unthinkable situation, and the tough guys have to just be beaten up repeatedly. And some guys just never do make it out.”
James Smith of Yard Act, profiled for The Guardian Saturday magazine
“The state of this country, and the world,
can quickly get you into a spiral of Everything Is Bad. But it’s not. The good moments don’t exist without the bleak shit. We can’t eradicate misery and depression, we’ve got to coexist with it.”
Ethan Miller of Howlin’ Rain, interviewed for The Quietus
“There’s a whole other album’s worth of Field Recordings From The Sun-style music out there somewhere. But when we listened back to the full thing, we chopped it down to barely an album’s length. We were like, ‘Dude, that’s enough’. It’s a complete nuclear meltdown. Like, there’s nothing left but scorched earth after those 36 minutes. That’s the statement.”
Fania feature for The Guardian
“Fania’s music was urban. You could hear taxi cabs, the dizzying harshness of the concrete jungle. It was the sound of New York City.”
Summer Of Soul feature for The Guardian
“Joy is an element that gets lost too often in the narrative of Black America,” ?uestlove says. “You see the bloodshed, the pain, the tears and the struggle – you learn that we got tased, we got bit by dogs, we got shot. But Black joy is a legit entry in our story. It’s where our creativity comes from, our Afros, our fashion and our music. It’s important to show Black joy as well.”
Low, interviewed for Loose Lips Sink Ships
“It seems like it’s just normal now, with Twitter, to tell someone ‘You suck!’ or ‘Fuck you!’, to send that energy out there. I could definitely tell, when we got done, that there were people who were really… not into it. I was picking up my gear and could hear people yelling at me. Something’s creeping into American culture… I guess it’s afterbirth from the last several elections just being so hateful…”
Part Chimp, reviewed for the Guardian
Purveyors of bone-simple dirges and fearless explorers of the higher reaches of volume, they provoked as much grinning as helpless headbanging at the All Tomorrow’s Parties festivals where they found a natural home, and revelled in conceptual gestures such as delivering terrace chants over a noise like Black Sabbath wading though creosote.
The Offspring, interviewed for the Guardian
Noodles’ faith in the Offspring’s newfound success was shaky enough that he was reluctant to quit his day-job as custodian at an elementary school in Anaheim. “We had a video on heavy rotation on MTV, and I’d be sweeping up trash out back of the school, and kids would walk past and be like, ‘Man, what are you doing here? I saw you on MTV this morning!’ I ended up asking for a three-year leave of absence – I was worried that if the band flopped I’d have to start my career at the bottom rung of the ladder again.”
Adam Sherburne of Consolidated, interviewed for the Quietus
“Every night I was surrounded by often-drunk and possibly armed skinheads who wanted to take me to task, or recruit me, or ask me if I was gay or whatever. I had to deal with all these bizarre cavemen behind the bus after the show, to de-escalate and find a human agreement point, to break off from motherfuckers who were very aggro.”
Dinosaur Jr remember their turbulent early years, for MOJO
“We were obsessed. We wanted to make good music, and that was all that mattered. We weren’t some buddy movie, drinking beers and rocking out. We weren’t friends. We loved the Minutemen, Husker Du and the Meat Puppets, and our ambition was to tour like they did and sign to SST Records, the label they were on. That was our goal. ”
MF Doom obituary, for the Guardian
“In a genre where ego was all, Dumile remained laid back but still dominated as he broke tempos and rules. His lines dripped black humour and stoner-friendly cultural references, but the mind assembling them was wicked sharp, stacking up multiple rhymes like Super Mario power-ups, and fond of meta-textual intrigue.”
Lee Thompson discusses Madness’s Absolutely, for GQ
“Embarrassment was about my sister having a mixed-race baby and how various members of my family reacted to it. I wanted it to be right. I didn’t want to upset her or my relatives, because most of them were positive about her baby. But some of them were like, ‘Woah! This is taboo. What have you gone and done?’”
The RZA and Sharleen Spiteri on their friendship, for the Guardian
“We had to find a different studio to finish the track the next day, as this wee engineer banned us from Quad Studios. Our management called and were like, ‘What the fuck went on last night? Apparently there were people all over the studio and youse were all high.’ And I was like, ‘We were making a record!’”
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, profiled for MOJO
“I’m a sci-fi dork at heart. Nowadays, I can sit through a movie about relationships or whatever, but years ago I connected better to fantasy. I find sci-fi a useful writing tool – it’s fun to world-build. Like, I can’t write another love song – they’ve all been written. But creating my own interconnected world… That’s just so much fun.”
Omar Rodriguez-Lopez on the music that made him, for the Quietus
“‘Los Ejes De Mi Carreta’ is a classic, and it's played all around the world, and my dad played this on guitar all the time, at parties, on birthdays, just sitting around drinking. According to him, when my mother was pregnant with me, he would hug her like Patrick Swayze hugging Demi Moore in Ghost, from behind, putting the guitar on her belly and playing it. I literally heard the reverberations of this song while I was in her belly.”
Run The Jewels, interviewed for MOJO
“Our scene wasn’t about money or pop hooks - it was purist, avant-garde. We weren’t fantasising about houses, cash or cars. We were fantasising about being dragons spitting flames out of our eyeballs.”
Bob Mould, profiled for the Guardian
“The words on this album are blunt. This is no time to be oblique or allegorical. This evil resonated so clearly through my body, I had to write to cancel that resonance out. It’s like when my tinnitus is really bad, I have to go the beach, because the only thing louder than my tinnitus is the ocean.”
Looking back on the Fania Allstars’ breakthrough, for the Guardian
“Gast communicated that salsa was the music of the people via Ismael Miranda singing with Orquesta Harlow at a bustling impromptu block-party, Ray Barretto serving cones of freshly shaved ice to kids, and a bloody, stomach-turning cockfight down a back alley.”
Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, interviewed for the Guardian
“People think of our songs as really sunny, driving-to-the-coast-with-your-elbows-in-the-breeze music. But Hope Downs is all about claustrophobia and bewilderment. The album’s named after this huge mine in Western Australia, this massive hole in the ground. And 2016 was this year where you felt like you were standing on the edge of this great abyss wondering, ‘What next? Where are we going?’”
On whether or not Wind Of Change was a CIA plot, for the Guide
“The CIA saw rock music as a cultural weapon in the cold war. Wind Of Change was released a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and became this anthem for the end of communism and reunification of Germany. It had this soft-power message that the intelligence service wanted to promote.’”
On the new wave of TV cookery stars on YouTube, for the Guardian