Author: Mark Beaumont

NME

Former Kaiser Chiefs drummer and songwriter Nick Hodgson has spoken to NME about his new band Everyone Says Hi, his songwriting work with the likes of Dua Lipa and how he discovered the lost chord.

Hodgson’s new band, which shares its name with a 2002 David Bowie song, consists of an array of indie rock luminaries including Pete Denton formerly The Kooks, Ben Gordon from The Dead 60s and Glenn Moule of Howling Bells, alongside Leeds guitarist Tom Dawson.

Having signed to Chrysalis, their debut single ‘Brain Freeze’ – a psychedelic lounge rock hinting at recent Arctic Monkeys and Tame Impala influences and featuring a sax solo from The Zutons’ Abi Harding – is out now.

Speaking to NME, Hodgson explained how the lyrics – co-written with Justin Parker (who also co-wrote ‘Video Games’ by Lana Del Rey and ‘Stay’ by Rihanna) – are about going on a recovery mission to Ibiza after “not a relationship so much, just arguments, division, conflict – disagreements that occupy your life sometimes”.

“I love Ibiza as well, so it sounds like I’m dreaming of going to Ibiza and living there,” said said. “I’ve always dreamt of escaping in a camper van and I did go away on my own in a camper van. So maybe it’s got shades of camper van as well.”

Explaining how the track came together, Hodgson said: “I went and stayed in Leeds for a few days at a flat I’ve had for a long time. I don’t know what it is about that place but I always write my favourite songs there. I went twice. I went for three nights, two times. It’s pretty bachelor style – I definitely feel like I’m in my 20 when I’m there. I just record and play this guitar I got when I was 16. Maybe that’s where the magic comes from. It’s this quite beaten up Tanglewood Odyssey.”

He continued: “I write a lot of songs all the time and I’m always using the same sort of chords, the basic chords that you read in the basic chord books. I just thought, ‘I’m gonna do something different’. I figured I’d just play shapes I’d never played before, four of them in a row. I liked the way they sounded, but I don’t even know what any of them are called. They’re just strange shapes. I’ve asked people and there’s still one that nobody knows what it is. So I had these chords and I just started singing and gradually the ideas came out. I like Mac DeMarco as well, I like the wobbly guitar sound he has. These chords, that sound, see what happens. And I discovered the lost chord. Z-minus.”

Hodgson – writer and co-writer of Kaiser Chiefs hits including ‘I Predict A Riot’, ‘Oh My God’ and ‘Ruby’ as well as tracks for Lipa, George Ezra, Holly Humberstone, Duran Duran and You Me At Six – discussed the origins and concept of the band and his hopes or the current rock landscape.

NME: Hi Nick. What have you been doing since your 2018 solo album, ‘Tell Your Friends‘?

Hodgson: “I toured that and did some festivals in the summer of 2018, then we had a baby in September, and I don’t know if you remember COVID? Everything just got put on the back burner in terms of making music because you can’t really go away and do gigs. Just before COVID I did one gig, a little solo thing. I got on stage and I was on my own and played some songs on piano and played the guitar. It was February 2020 and I said to myself, ‘This is it. This is what I love. I love being on stage’.

“Within the month we were locked down. I started doing loads of things. I was doing a lot of co-writing with other people, started a publishing company. Around the end of 2022 I wrote a song and I realised that it was for me. The first one was called ‘Only One’. It just emerged, this chorus, and I knew that that was an album.”

Why did you gather these particular musicians together for Everyone Says Hi?

“I did the solo album, put a song out and Ryan Jarman from The Cribs texted me and said, ‘Do you and your new band want to play to support The Cribs at the Brudenell in Leeds for [annual festive show] Cribsmas?’ I didn’t have a band, it was just me on that record. I said yes and then I got the band together. We played quite a few shows and it was really good.

“On that first album I played all the instruments and everything and then when I got the band in I realised that this was better. I would play stuff in soundcheck, new ideas, and everyone would just start playing straight away. Everyone was so switched on, I was like, ‘If I make another record, I’m going to call them up immediately’. And also Pete the bass player, he lives near me and I bumped into him in the Virgin Active in Crouch End. It’s like an indie gym, The Magic Numbers were in there and loads of others. I used to see him and he was like, ‘Let’s do something together’.”

Did you have any concept for what you wanted it to be?

“I listen to REM a lot, Elliott Smith and lots of American indie. I just thought if I’m gonna make a record it needs to sound like part of my record collection. I don’t want to make something and think, ‘I can’t put it on at night because it’s not good enough or it doesn’t fit’. So that’s my framework. It’s got to be a record that I feel good about putting on amongst this great company.”

The band name is a Bowie song – an intentional tribute?

“I’ve got a list of band names and in my band names list it said ‘Everyone Say Hi’. I thought ‘OK, that’s unusual, I’ll go on Spotify to see if there’s a band already called that’, which is what I always do. Usually there is but this time it just came up with that Bowie song. But the Bowie song is ‘Everyone Says Hi’ and I had Everyone Say Hi and I thought ‘I’ll change it to that because I love David Bowie’. I didn’t know [the song].”

What’s coming next?

“Gigs. We got more singles and then an album. I got signed to Chrysalis, which was very, very great, but also completely unexpected. I thought maybe my ship had sailed in terms of getting record deals, but so it’s a proper release. I think it’s coming out [in] October and there’s going to be touring and we’re just gonna see what happens. I’m very excited about it.”

What are your proudest moments as a backroom songwriter?

“I wrote a song with Dua Lipa a while ago. She’d just got signed to Warners and me and my friend wrote a song with her and that is actually one of my favourite songs. It never came out for Dua, but it came out a few years later with Kygo and Zara Larrson. It went on to be a big pop production, but the demo with Dua singing on it is actually one of the best things I’ve done. It should come out really, one day. Just piano and her singing. It’s great.”

How do you see the landscape for bands now?

“There’s some good stuff. Do you know The Molotovs? I love what they’re doing. They’re only about 15 and they’re playing in these venues full of 15-year-olds and they’re throwing themselves around and getting onstage and joining in. It’s like, ‘So the kids are still excited by bands’. They’re in a scene with a load of other bands, all the same age. You need to think of a title for the scene.”

Everyone Says Hi play their first shows at London’s Camden Assembly on June 5 and Leeds Hyde Park Book Club on June 7. Tickets are available from 9am on Friday May 3 and available here.

The post Meet Everyone Says Hi – a new band made up of ex Kaiser Chiefs, Kooks, Dead 60s and Howling Bells appeared first on NME.

NME

Warpaint have celebrated their 20th anniversary with new one-off single ‘Common Blue’. Check it out below, along with the band telling us about their two “psychedelic” two decades in rock.

It was 20 years ago today (February 14) that the indie quartet first came together on Valentine’s Day on Fairfax Boulevard in Los Angeles. Now to celebrate, they’ve shared new single ‘Common Blue’ along with a nostalgic new music video.

“It feels like an accomplishment,” singer and guitarist Theresa Wayman (aka TT) told NME, reflecting on a career that has seen the Los Angeles band – also featuring singer and guitarist Emily Kokal, bassist and singer Jenny Lee Lindberg and drummer Stella Mozgawa – release four celebrated albums straddling art rock, dream pop and psychedelia.

Lindberg added: “I feel like there’s so many lives lived in the last 20 years. Different scenes, every couple of years something changes up. To look back to 2004, it feels like I’ve lived many lives. And it’s also gone by so quick too that it’s a trip, it’s psychedelic.”

‘Common Blue’, their first new material since 2022’s ‘Radiate Like This’ album, finds the band back on their original UK label Rough Trade after a stint with Virgin Records. They spoke about this reunion, their influence on rock equality and the shock of once being labelled “Satanic” by NME…

Hello Warpaint: The band was born in a small studio on LA’s Fairfax Avenue on Valentine’s Day 2004. Was that a sign?

Wayman: “Yeah, of true love. We were all boyfriendless or dateless and had nothing to do. Obviously something works because we’ve been doing it for so long and haven’t stopped and we’ve only gotten closer. It’s definitely been a four-way marriage. It’s love.”

What have been the highs and lows?

W: “Getting on the cover of NME, that was a fun one. We just were like, ‘What is going on? This is so cool’. We didn’t grow up with the NME, so we didn’t really know what we were getting into. And then all of a sudden we were on the cover, [with the coverline] ‘Satanic Majesties’. It was a really special moment although a little alarming. ‘Satanic? What?’ But that was a reference to something…”

The Rolling Stones.

W: “At first we didn’t get that and we thought we were just being pigeon-holed. Because a lot of people like to put ‘siren, witch, Satanic’…”

Lindberg: “It’s four girls, so they must be witches!”

How have you seen attitudes to women in rock bands change over 20 years?

W: “There are more bands, more women. People are so much more conscious about having that equality, I think. But I felt like we were always welcome when we were doing our thing. I don’t think we ever experienced anything overtly sexist or we were never looked down upon. I feel like we were always given a fair chance and we took ourselves seriously in enough ways that…”

L: “That it leant other people [the chance] to do the same, I think.”

You’ve been pioneering in that sense.

L: “Yeah, like next generation pioneers. It’s so normal now, women in music and all-female bands. It’s just like the new normal, it’s just what’s happening and I think that’s amazing.”

The video for the single highlights live performance and travelling as the two elements you’re celebrating the most. What have been your most memorable shows and adventures?

L: “Going to Iceland was pretty amazing and otherworldly, at least to my eyes. We’ve been around the world many times – at this point, sadly, it feels like normal, a little regular. But Iceland stands out in my mind as being a pretty phenomenal trip. My mind was blown.”

W: “Do you remember that Polish festival we played? We had one of our biggest audiences we’ve ever had, out in the backwoods, in the country in Poland. It was the most raging, amazing show we’ve ever played. We were in this tent and it was incredible because it was at this stage in our career where things just kept getting bigger and bigger and we just didn’t expect that. It seemed like a place where no-one would know us and we got there and we were in this tent and it was just an epic show.

“The audience was so into it and it was loud and fun and we were in a good flow with each other, it was just really great. When you’re travelling so much, you’re just in that gruelling, get from one place to another, trains, planes and automobiles [mode]. It’s those moments on the stages that really, really matter, and going all over the world and having that, it’s really special. Mexico and then South America, certain places are really warm and welcoming.”

Is it fitting to be back on your original UK label Rough Trade for this single?

L: “Yeah. Very full circle.”

W: “Everyone’s really excited about it. We separated and dated…”

L: “We opened the relationship.”

W: “Yeah, we were dating for a little while, now we’re back. It just feels like home and we know everybody, it’s like a lot of the same people all still working there. They have such good relationships with each other that it’s just like the same crew there. And we really have known them for so long so it feels really good, like family.”

The message of ‘Common Blue’ seems to be to make the most of life while you can – is it intended as an inspirational anthem?

W: “That’s definitely what it means. I think the chord progression that started it, I felt inspired by that. I took that over to Jen’s and we started playing it and pretty quickly it came together with a few different parts and we structured it. I don’t even know how the ‘maybe baby’s came about but that definitely feels like some inspirational message. I think it’s just inherent in it and it just evolved that way.”

There are also hints of overcoming hardships as well: “pain will come as advertised” for instance?

W: “It starts off needing to burn something down because you just need to have a new perspective, which can’t always be a comfortable thing. But I think sometimes it takes something extreme like that to be able to move on and maybe do something that you need to do for you. You have to do something extreme for your own personal growth sometimes, or in order to get a different perspective.

“It’s really easy to get into a rut sometimes and it’s hard to change habits. But it’s also referencing being a band for as long as we have. How do you change and evolve while you’re in involved in relationships that have known you for so long and maybe you’ve moved on from how you were 20 years ago?”

How would you describe your evolution over the last 20 years?

W: “We’re more mature. We’re able to communicate better and listen and be compassionate to each other and maybe less ego driven.”

L: “I’d say more open and there’s more calm energy. I guess I could just speak for myself but I feel more calm than I did when we started. More grounded and certain of myself. I feel like we’re all going through that – the forties are a new deal, a good new deal.”

Where are Warpaint at in 2024?

L: “We’ve a tour coming up in May, we’re going to release this song and I feel like we’re probably going to take a little bit of a break. We don’t really have anything on the books for the summer. I think Emily’s going to work on some solo endeavours – it’s kind of ambiguous. We know for the foreseeable future we will be taking some time off, but it’s not like ‘oh, we’re taking a year off or two years off or three years’. After May we know that we won’t be doing anything.”

W: “We’re trying to try to see what’s next for us that’s not the same patterns we’ve been in since 2010, when we signed and started doing album cycles. That was amazing but now things need to shift. So maybe just stepping out of that pattern we’ve been in and seeing what else can we do, like writing songs for the TV show that Stella produced. That kind of thing is a new evolution of what we can do, so just opening the door for that kind of stuff.”

‘Common Blue’ backed by b-side ‘Underneath’ on vinyl on Rough Trade on March 22, 2024. 

The post Warpaint tell us about their “psychedelic” 20 years together and new single ‘Common Blue’ appeared first on NME.

NME

The Jesus & Mary Chain have announced new album ‘Glasgow Eyes’ and shared new single ‘jamcod’. Check out the video first on NME below, along with details of their 2024 UK and European tour and our interview with Jim Reid.

Marking 40 years since the release of their debut single ‘Upside Down’, 2024 will see the hugely influential band – whose debut album ‘Psychocandy’ is considered a pivotal work in the development of alt-rock, noise pop and shoegaze – release their eighth studio album, an autobiography and a documentary, and also begin a world tour.

The 12-track new album was recorded at Mogwai’s Castle Of Doom studio in Glasgow, and finds the band working with electronics and textures that seem to play on the band’s place in a lineage taking in The Velvet Underground and Suicide. However, Reid told NME that this wasn’t an intentional move.

“You go into the studio and you just feel your way around,” he said. “I guess what you’ve been listening to most lately has some sort of impact on the production values – writing, it’s always the same old deal really. I suppose that we were thinking it would be quite good to muck around with some synths and maybe just tweak the sound a bit.”

The album comes previewed by launch single ‘jamcod’, which Reid said came from “remembering painful past issues”.

“It was about the break-up of the band,” he explained. “It was actually about the night in the House of Blues when the band broke up [in 1999]. There’s another song, ‘Chemical Animal’, which is similar but different in as much as I was thinking back to the drug days and what it was like.

“When you get that deep into that whole shit, it’s like everything’s acting on instinct and you become like an animal and it’s all about drugs. It’s your driving force, the thing that gets you from a to b is whether you can score. It was a horrible way to live and I’m glad I don’t do that anymore.”

Check out our interview with Reid below as he tells us about the making of ‘Glasgow Eyes’, their 40th anniversary, and the drug, alcohol and interpersonal issues which dogged the band before their nine-year hiatus of the early 2000s.

NME: Hello, Jim. Listening to the album, the song ‘American Born’ suggests you feel an affinity to US culture. Why is that?

Reid: “William [Reid, brother and bandmate] lives in America so that’s probably got a lot to do with that. When the band started we liked a lot of 20th Century American culture, but by the time that we were talking about it, those very things had gone. When we first went to America it was both wonderfully exciting and hugely disappointing all at once. Just because you were retracing footsteps and going to places where great things had once taken place, but now it was all little guys with backwards baseball caps and shorts on and all that, ‘whooo! Hey man!’. It was like, ‘Fuck, this is not the kind of America that we that we were into’.”

How does it feel for The Jesus & Mary Chain to hit 40?

“It’s a bit surreal really. When you think back to when the band started, just the idea that we would still be making records still be touring the world 40 years later, would have just been unthinkable. But it’s happened and, shit, I’m enjoying it. There’s been a lot of highs and there’s been a lot of lows so it’s good to still be here.”

Considering your legendarily fractious relationship with William, have you learned to live with each other over that time?

“We’ve kinda had to. We’re brothers, and family brings you back together. Also, if we want to be in a band we have to learn how to not wind each other up. In the ‘90s, when the band broke up for that period, we would go out of our way to annoy the fuck out of each other and it isn’t healthy. It wasn’t that simple. It’s not like that’s why the band broke up. There was a lot more to it than that. But we had nine years in the wilderness, broke up for nine years, we got back together and by that time, we’d kinda patched up our relationship.

“But I knew the claustrophobic environment of being in the band together again, it would have to be different from the way it was back in the ‘90s. There are certain things, like he’d say something and if I respond in this way it will cause an explosion and I’m sure that he kind of addressed those issues in a similar way to me. If you want the train to keep on rolling you know what to do what not to do, and that’s where we’re at.”

It’s been six years since the last record ‘Damage & Joy‘, and that was the first one in 17 years – how do you decide it’s time to make a new record now?

“When it kinda feels right. The big gap between ‘Munki’ [1998] and ‘Damage & Joy’ was probably largely to do with me. When the band got back together I thought, ‘Well, this is OK, it’s working’ – but everybody kept saying, ‘Make a record’.  I wasn’t totally against it, but I just kept thinking about how horrific it was, the studio environment for the making of ‘Munki’. I kinda thought, ‘We’re getting on OK now but what happens when we go back into a studio?’ You’re right up against each other then and there are actually things to argue about. It’s not a normal situation.

“I was worried that we were going to go back to that, and it was going to be the breakdown again. Then eventually, years went by and I thought, ‘Well, we’re in this band, do we want to be travelling around just playing old tunes?’ What do bands do? They go out on the road, but they also make records. I thought fuck it, let’s find out. We went and made ‘Damage & Joy’ and as it turns out there were no screaming rows. There were no hatchets being buried in the backs of heads. We got on with making our record and it made us realise that that can be done now.

“As to why it took so long to make another one, I mean, we’re lazy. These days, everything’s on our terms. We tour when we want to ,we make records when we want to, so unfortunately somebody has to get a cattle prod to get us into action.”

Do you look around and see your influence everywhere in music?

“I like to hear other people say it really. It’s not like I sit there checking out new bands going, ‘They’ve been listening to us’. It’s nice when you get name-checked, it’s always nice, it always has been. That was the point of the Mary Chain at the beginning. OK, ‘Psychocandy’, it’s a 1985 record, but we didn’t see it that way at all. At that time, we were listening to things like The Stooges and Suicide and we thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if like 10, 15, 20 years later, people are still listening to ‘Psychocandy’. That was the idea.

“It wasn’t a record for the time it was made in, it was kind of a blueprint for what was achievable, really. We kinda thought it’d be great if little malcontents were sitting in their bedrooms in 30 years with that as their starting point and thinking ‘let’s shake things up a bit’.”

Beyond ‘Psychocandy’, are there moments along the way you’re particularly proud of?

“All of the records, I think, speak for themselves. ‘Psychocandy’ gets talked about a lot so we tend to do it. I don’t mind that people want to talk about ‘Psychcocandy’, I’m still very proud of that record. But I think ‘Munki’ was as good a record as ‘Psychocandy’ but people don’t talk about ‘Munki’ so much. All of the records, to me, still stand up. They still say what they said at the time. They’re still doing it.”

You have an autobiography on the way – what can we expect from that?

“It’s just us talking to Ben Thompson. We just told him our story and he’s editing it all together. It’s just us jabbering on about us as usual. There are a few amusing anecdotes, I guess. If you’re interested in the Mary Chain I’m sure it’ll make good reading.”

And there’s a documentary coming as well?

“That’s very early stages. I’m not really sure how that’s gonna go. We’ve not really filmed anything too much. But again that’s us just working with Ben Unwin who made some of our videos back in the ‘90s. He’s pulling that thing together.”

You’re planning a tour in March and April 2024. Do you enjoy the experience now?

“I do more now, strangely enough, than I ever did. Just because everything seems easier now. Everything’s decided by us, we only tour if we want to, there’s nobody really putting any pressure on us. That makes it much more enjoyable. It’s weird – I’ve been doing it for nearly 40 years and I still get utterly terrified before every gig. That ruins it a bit for me because I tend to get more and more nervous the closer it gets to the show. It doesn’t matter what size the venue is – in fact, I almost get more nervous in smaller clubs than I do in bigger venues. But now the shows seem a lot more in control.

“In the ‘80s and ‘90s I didn’t do a single sober gig, and never had done, because I found the whole experience utterly terrifying. I’m a naturally shy person so the idea of being the frontman in a rock’n’roll band, looking at an audience, I just couldn’t deal with it. The only way I could cope was to get fucked up and I never did a sober gig. The first sober gig I did with the Mary Chain was at Coachella in 2007, and that was terrifying, but once I realised that I could do it sober I started to think, ‘Well, not only can I, but I prefer it’. If you go out there and you’re sober and something goes wrong, instantly you know what it is and you know how to fix it.

“In the old days, you’d be standing there in the middle of the stage totally fucking wasted, you’d hear that something wasn’t right, then you’d be going ‘I don’t know what it is, I don’t know how to fix that, oh fuck’, and then you’d just start smashing things up to cover up for someone’s mistake. Sometimes you can do these things better when you’re thinking clearly.”

‘Glasgow Eyes’ is out March 8, 2024, via Fuzz Club and can be pre-ordered here. Check out the tracklist below.

‘Venal Joy’
‘American Born’
‘Mediterranean X Film’
‘jamcod’
‘Discotheque’
‘Pure Poor’
‘The Eagles and The Beatles’
‘Silver Strings’
‘Chemical Animal
‘Second of June’
‘Girl 71’
‘Hey Lou Reid’

The band will also be hitting the road from March 2024. Fans who pre-order the album before 10am on Friday 1 December will receive priority access to tour tickets. Tickets will be available here.

MARCH
22 – UK, Manchester, Albert Hall
25 – Ireland, Dublin, Olympia
26 – UK, Belfast, Limelight 1
27 – UK, Edinburgh, Usher Hall
30 – UK, London, Roundhouse

APRIL
2 – Denmark, Copenhagen, Amager Bio
3 – Sweden, Gothenburg, Pustervik
5 – Norway, Oslo, Rockefeller
6 – Sweden, Stockholm, Munich Brewery
7 – Sweden, Malmo, Plan B
9 – Germany, Hamburg, Markthalle
11 – Germany, Berlin, Huxleys
12 – Germany, Cologne, Live Music Hall
13 – France, Paris, Elysée Montmartre
15 – Switzerland, Geneva, L’Usine
16 – Switzerland, Winterthur, Salzhaus
17 – Italy, Milan, Alcatraz
19 – Austria, Krems, Donaufestival
20 – Germany, Heidelberg, Halle O2
21 – Netherlands, Tilburg, Roadburn Festival
23 – Belgium, Brussels, AB
24 – Netherlands, The Hague, Paard

The post The Jesus & Mary Chain share single ‘jamcod’ and tell us about new album ‘Glasgow Eyes’ appeared first on NME.

NME

The Jesus & Mary Chain have announced new album ‘Glasgow Eyes’ and shared new single ‘jamcod’. Check out the video first on NME below, along with details of their 2024 UK and European tour and our interview with Jim Reid.

Marking 40 years since the release of their debut single ‘Upside Down’, 2024 will see the hugely influential band – whose debut album ‘Psychocandy’ is considered a pivotal work in the development of alt-rock, noise pop and shoegaze – release their eighth studio album, an autobiography and a documentary, and also begin a world tour.

The 12-track new album was recorded at Mogwai’s Castle Of Doom studio in Glasgow, and finds the band working with electronics and textures that seem to play on the band’s place in a lineage taking in The Velvet Underground and Suicide. However, Reid told NME that this wasn’t an intentional move.

“You go into the studio and you just feel your way around,” he said. “I guess what you’ve been listening to most lately has some sort of impact on the production values – writing, it’s always the same old deal really. I suppose that we were thinking it would be quite good to muck around with some synths and maybe just tweak the sound a bit.”

The album comes previewed by launch single ‘jamcod’, which Reid said came from “remembering painful past issues”.

“It was about the break-up of the band,” he explained. “It was actually about the night in the House of Blues when the band broke up [in 1999]. There’s another song, ‘Chemical Animal’, which is similar but different in as much as I was thinking back to the drug days and what it was like.

“When you get that deep into that whole shit, it’s like everything’s acting on instinct and you become like an animal and it’s all about drugs. It’s your driving force, the thing that gets you from a to b is whether you can score. It was a horrible way to live and I’m glad I don’t do that anymore.”

Check out our interview with Reid below as he tells us about the making of ‘Glasgow Eyes’, their 40th anniversary, and the drug, alcohol and interpersonal issues which dogged the band before their nine-year hiatus of the early 2000s.

NME: Hello, Jim. Listening to the album, the song ‘American Born’ suggests you feel an affinity to US culture. Why is that?

Reid: “William [Reid, brother and bandmate] lives in America so that’s probably got a lot to do with that. When the band started we liked a lot of 20th Century American culture, but by the time that we were talking about it, those very things had gone. When we first went to America it was both wonderfully exciting and hugely disappointing all at once. Just because you were retracing footsteps and going to places where great things had once taken place, but now it was all little guys with backwards baseball caps and shorts on and all that, ‘whooo! Hey man!’. It was like, ‘Fuck, this is not the kind of America that we that we were into’.”

How does it feel for The Jesus & Mary Chain to hit 40?

“It’s a bit surreal really. When you think back to when the band started, just the idea that we would still be making records still be touring the world 40 years later, would have just been unthinkable. But it’s happened and, shit, I’m enjoying it. There’s been a lot of highs and there’s been a lot of lows so it’s good to still be here.”

Considering your legendarily fractious relationship with William, have you learned to live with each other over that time?

“We’ve kinda had to. We’re brothers, and family brings you back together. Also, if we want to be in a band we have to learn how to not wind each other up. In the ‘90s, when the band broke up for that period, we would go out of our way to annoy the fuck out of each other and it isn’t healthy. It wasn’t that simple. It’s not like that’s why the band broke up. There was a lot more to it than that. But we had nine years in the wilderness, broke up for nine years, we got back together and by that time, we’d kinda patched up our relationship.

“But I knew the claustrophobic environment of being in the band together again, it would have to be different from the way it was back in the ‘90s. There are certain things, like he’d say something and if I respond in this way it will cause an explosion and I’m sure that he kind of addressed those issues in a similar way to me. If you want the train to keep on rolling you know what to do what not to do, and that’s where we’re at.”

It’s been six years since the last record ‘Damage & Joy‘, and that was the first one in 17 years – how do you decide it’s time to make a new record now?

“When it kinda feels right. The big gap between ‘Munki’ [1998] and ‘Damage & Joy’ was probably largely to do with me. When the band got back together I thought, ‘Well, this is OK, it’s working’ – but everybody kept saying, ‘Make a record’.  I wasn’t totally against it, but I just kept thinking about how horrific it was, the studio environment for the making of ‘Munki’. I kinda thought, ‘We’re getting on OK now but what happens when we go back into a studio?’ You’re right up against each other then and there are actually things to argue about. It’s not a normal situation.

“I was worried that we were going to go back to that, and it was going to be the breakdown again. Then eventually, years went by and I thought, ‘Well, we’re in this band, do we want to be travelling around just playing old tunes?’ What do bands do? They go out on the road, but they also make records. I thought fuck it, let’s find out. We went and made ‘Damage & Joy’ and as it turns out there were no screaming rows. There were no hatchets being buried in the backs of heads. We got on with making our record and it made us realise that that can be done now.

“As to why it took so long to make another one, I mean, we’re lazy. These days, everything’s on our terms. We tour when we want to ,we make records when we want to, so unfortunately somebody has to get a cattle prod to get us into action.”

Do you look around and see your influence everywhere in music?

“I like to hear other people say it really. It’s not like I sit there checking out new bands going, ‘They’ve been listening to us’. It’s nice when you get name-checked, it’s always nice, it always has been. That was the point of the Mary Chain at the beginning. OK, ‘Psychocandy’, it’s a 1985 record, but we didn’t see it that way at all. At that time, we were listening to things like The Stooges and Suicide and we thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if like 10, 15, 20 years later, people are still listening to ‘Psychocandy’. That was the idea.

“It wasn’t a record for the time it was made in, it was kind of a blueprint for what was achievable, really. We kinda thought it’d be great if little malcontents were sitting in their bedrooms in 30 years with that as their starting point and thinking ‘let’s shake things up a bit’.”

Beyond ‘Psychocandy’, are there moments along the way you’re particularly proud of?

“All of the records, I think, speak for themselves. ‘Psychocandy’ gets talked about a lot so we tend to do it. I don’t mind that people want to talk about ‘Psychcocandy’, I’m still very proud of that record. But I think ‘Munki’ was as good a record as ‘Psychocandy’ but people don’t talk about ‘Munki’ so much. All of the records, to me, still stand up. They still say what they said at the time. They’re still doing it.”

You have an autobiography on the way – what can we expect from that?

“It’s just us talking to Ben Thompson. We just told him our story and he’s editing it all together. It’s just us jabbering on about us as usual. There are a few amusing anecdotes, I guess. If you’re interested in the Mary Chain I’m sure it’ll make good reading.”

And there’s a documentary coming as well?

“That’s very early stages. I’m not really sure how that’s gonna go. We’ve not really filmed anything too much. But again that’s us just working with Ben Unwin who made some of our videos back in the ‘90s. He’s pulling that thing together.”

You’re planning a tour in March and April 2024. Do you enjoy the experience now?

“I do more now, strangely enough, than I ever did. Just because everything seems easier now. Everything’s decided by us, we only tour if we want to, there’s nobody really putting any pressure on us. That makes it much more enjoyable. It’s weird – I’ve been doing it for nearly 40 years and I still get utterly terrified before every gig. That ruins it a bit for me because I tend to get more and more nervous the closer it gets to the show. It doesn’t matter what size the venue is – in fact, I almost get more nervous in smaller clubs than I do in bigger venues. But now the shows seem a lot more in control.

“In the ‘80s and ‘90s I didn’t do a single sober gig, and never had done, because I found the whole experience utterly terrifying. I’m a naturally shy person so the idea of being the frontman in a rock’n’roll band, looking at an audience, I just couldn’t deal with it. The only way I could cope was to get fucked up and I never did a sober gig. The first sober gig I did with the Mary Chain was at Coachella in 2007, and that was terrifying, but once I realised that I could do it sober I started to think, ‘Well, not only can I, but I prefer it’. If you go out there and you’re sober and something goes wrong, instantly you know what it is and you know how to fix it.

“In the old days, you’d be standing there in the middle of the stage totally fucking wasted, you’d hear that something wasn’t right, then you’d be going ‘I don’t know what it is, I don’t know how to fix that, oh fuck’, and then you’d just start smashing things up to cover up for someone’s mistake. Sometimes you can do these things better when you’re thinking clearly.”

‘Glasgow Eyes’ is out March 8, 2024, via Fuzz Club and can be pre-ordered here. Check out the tracklist below.

‘Venal Joy’
‘American Born’
‘Mediterranean X Film’
‘jamcod’
‘Discotheque’
‘Pure Poor’
‘The Eagles and The Beatles’
‘Silver Strings’
‘Chemical Animal
‘Second of June’
‘Girl 71’
‘Hey Lou Reid’

The band will also be hitting the road from March 2024. Fans who pre-order the album before 10am on Friday 1 December will receive priority access to tour tickets. Tickets will be available here.

MARCH
22 – UK, Manchester, Albert Hall
25 – Ireland, Dublin, Olympia
26 – UK, Belfast, Limelight 1
27 – UK, Edinburgh, Usher Hall
30 – UK, London, Roundhouse

APRIL
2 – Denmark, Copenhagen, Amager Bio
3 – Sweden, Gothenburg, Pustervik
5 – Norway, Oslo, Rockefeller
6 – Sweden, Stockholm, Munich Brewery
7 – Sweden, Malmo, Plan B
9 – Germany, Hamburg, Markthalle
11 – Germany, Berlin, Huxleys
12 – Germany, Cologne, Live Music Hall
13 – France, Paris, Elysée Montmartre
15 – Switzerland, Geneva, L’Usine
16 – Switzerland, Winterthur, Salzhaus
17 – Italy, Milan, Alcatraz
19 – Austria, Krems, Donaufestival
20 – Germany, Heidelberg, Halle O2
21 – Netherlands, Tilburg, Roadburn Festival
23 – Belgium, Brussels, AB
24 – Netherlands, The Hague, Paard

The post The Jesus & Mary Chain share single ‘jamcod’ and tell us about new album ‘Glasgow Eyes’ appeared first on NME.

NME

The Lightning Seeds’ Ian Broudie has spoken to NME about the band’s forthcoming greatest gits compilation ‘, their celebrated comeback and his work on the first Zutons album in 16 years.

The 20-track compilation ‘Tomorrow’s Here Today: 35 Years Of The Lightning Seeds’ will be released on October 4, 2024, as a non-chronological collection of the band’s finest moments – taking in huge ‘90s hits such as ‘Pure’, ‘The Life Of Riley’, ‘Sense’, ‘Lucky You’ and ‘Marvellous’, more recent tracks including ‘Emily Smiles’ and choice singles and album tracks such as ‘All I Want’ and ‘The Nearly Man’ from 1990s debut album ‘Cloudcuckooland’ and ‘My Best Day’ from 1993’s ‘Jollification’.

The release will be accompanied by a UK headline tour in November and December 2024, following on from this year’s support tour with Madness which kicks off on December 1.

Meanwhile, Broudie has recently produced the long-awaited new Zutons’ album and released his first book, also called Tomorrow’s Here Today, which explores in anecdotal form his history on Liverpool’s ‘80s underground scene alongside Echo & The Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes, as well as the loss of his brother Robert to suicide in 2006.

“It’s become my favourite time,” Broudie told NME of The Lightning Seeds’ return with last year’s seventh album ‘See You In The Stars’, now with his son Riley as manager and Lightning Seeds guitarist. “I love my band, I love playing live, which I never used to like, and I feel like we’re really good. And then all of a sudden it’s 35 years since ‘Pure’ so we thought that was a milestone.”

He continued: “We’d just got ownership back of the first two albums, which disappeared into the ether, never to get any royalties or anything just after they were made. But we managed to get them back. It just felt like it’d be nice to celebrate 35 years and do a couple of things. Maybe do something for Record Store Day and two or three new tracks and make it a year of celebrating, culminating in the tour and the compilation at the end of next year.”

NME caught up with Broudie to talk marking their legacy, England’s chances in the Euros, and what to expect from this Zutons’ album.

NME: Hello Ian. A Greatest Hits seems a good way to mark your return.

Broudie: “It’s funny because The Lightning Seeds was just me originally, so you can’t ever split up. I feel like we’ve returned but it’s been more of an emotional return rather than arguing with the bass player and throwing your sticks at him. It feels like a great moment that will hopefully go on for the next couple of years, see how I feel.”

Looking back on the songs, were there any tunes you were particularly proud of?

“There was a point with The Lightning Seeds where I felt like it was never going to happen. And then ‘Pure’ was this miracle that changed everything. It’s a song I didn’t finish, I had no record contract, no band, nothing going for it, 100 copies pressed up in Rough Trade, but it changed my life. If I was ever proud of anything, it’s the one I never finished properly. I didn’t get a chance to ruin it totally.”

Were there any hits that surprised you?

“I love the fact that they are these little bubbles, these little moments in time. I feel like music is this puzzle and I’m trying to do this thing that I kinda hear in my head. But as soon as it’s finished, three months later I listen to what I did and think, ‘That’s not it’. So it’s like a puzzle you can never solve, but you’re addicted to playing.

“Then you realise they’re all just these little moments that make a pattern. Even though they’re not what you wanted, they’ve captured a moment in time. And when you see all of them, it’s like ‘wow’. I didn’t think I’d get to this point.”

It’s great to see a lesser-known classic like ‘All I Want’ on there.

“On the first record, ‘Cloudcuckooland’, I was trying to find my voice or be whatever The Lightning Seeds was going to be. They’re all like little experiments but I felt like ‘Pure’ and ‘All I Want’ were it, that’s who I am. I put on a track called ‘The Nearly Man’, just because it was just so odd on that album. It wasn’t really what I needed to be but I’ve always had a lot of affection for it. We’ve never played it live because I don’t think we could, and I’ve never done a song like that again. I think I was trying to write ‘Windmills Of Your Mind’ or something and it just went terribly wrong.

“So I wanted to include that. ‘All I Want’ was funny because ‘Pure’ was the single because it had been out before I got to do the album and I always thought ‘All I Want’ was the second single. I went to America and I got this thing from the record company saying ‘we’ve put ‘All I Want’ on the b-sides single of the single’. I went ‘but that’s supposed to be the second single!’ And I remember them saying ‘just re-record it a bit faster’.”

Do any songs remind you of particular turns in your life?

“They’re kind of like the story of my life. When I look at the canon of work and my life, I definitely had no plan. These days they go to music schools and it’s a career. Everything with me is just blundering from one thing to the next. But now seeing it all it feels almost like there is a plan, it’s just nobody told me.”

How do you feel about your songs being misunderstood as upbeat when they’re often lyrically dark?

“It doesn’t bother me. ‘Three Lions’ is the ultimate example of that. You make your songs and they are what they mean to you. You make these little pieces of whatever music is, little bits of tunes with magic rubbed in that you didn’t know quite how you got there, and it didn’t exist and now it does exist. Then you send them off into the world and people who have nothing in common with you, who might live in Alaska or Argentina hear them and take what they feel is in them, make them their own and take a meaning from them. You get to go and play in Argentina and it’s a bond in common, this song. It’s theirs as much as yours. You can’t control them.

“‘Three Lions’ was a bit like that for me. It was so difficult for me to know whether to play it live or not play it live – it’s the guys singing it, it was a football song and New Order don’t play their football song [‘World In Motion’], should I be playing it? But then everyone in the audience wants you to play it and then you do another gig and they don’t want you to play it – I couldn’t do right for doing wrong.”

Do you have any predictions for the Euros?

“They’ve now nearly done it three or four times and got to the semis and the finals. So just by the virtue of that you think that we’ve probably got a shot. I have a sneaky feeling that we might win this one.”

What were the most difficult parts of your life to put into your book?

“I didn’t approach it like an autobiography. I tried to approach it like I do with my songs, that they all moments. I thought it might be good to just do a book of anecdotes and then as I was doing it, a lot of personal stuff came out around the anecdotes in a way. So I tried to put all the stuff that maybe it’s hard to talk about within a story that’s amusing.”

You worked on the first Zutons album for 19 years, ‘The Big Decider’ How was that?

“I’m not keen on being a producer. Every now and again, I get talked into it. It’s been like that since the Bunnymen – Bill Drummond talked me into [producing Bunnymen albums], I didn’t even want to do that originally. I worked a lot with The Zutons early on and stuff and it wasn’t a great way that we stopped working together. It was a bit weird. Over the years, Sean [Payne, drummer] played in my band for a while and Abi [Harding, sax] played sax and keyboards with us for a year or so and we were friends.

“There was a certain point where they just asked me would I do a couple of tunes with them. Between the relationships with the band, I just felt like it might not get done if I didn’t, and it would have been a real shame. I heard a song called ‘The Big Decider’ – I don’t know if that’s gonna go on the album but I heard a demo of it. I know Dave [McCabe, singer] had turned his life around – he’d just met someone, his sobriety was there and he was fighting to keep that going, so the words of the song, that this is the big decider, this is the moment, it just really touched me. They’re a great band and it would be a shame if they weren’t doing something so I’m really glad that it all came together.”

See more

Tomorrow’s Here Today: 35 Years Of The Lightning Seeds’ will be released on October 4, 2024, before a UK and Ireland headline tour. Tickets go on sale at 10am on Friday November 24 and will be available here.

November 2024
Friday 8 – Sheffield, Leadmill
Saturday 9 – Norwich, Waterfront
Thursday 14 – Nottingham, Rock City
Friday 15 – Cardiff, Tramshed
Thursday 21 – Bristol, O2 Academy
Friday 22 – Oxford, O2 Academy
Saturday 23 – Bexhill, De La Warr Pavilion 
Thursday 28 – Newcastle, Boiler Shop
Friday 29 – Glasgow, Garage
Saturday 30 – Dublin, Academy

December 2024
Sunday 1 – Belfast, Limelight
Thursday 5 – Manchester, Albert Hall
Friday 6 – Leeds, Beckett Students’ Union
Saturday 7 – Liverpool, Olympia
Thursday 12 – Cambridge, Junction
Friday 13 – London, O2 Forum Kentish Town
Saturday 14 – Wolverhampton, The Wulfrun at The Halls

The post The Lightning Seeds talks new greatest hits album and tour: “It’s a year of celebrating” appeared first on NME.

NME

Everything Everything’s Jonathan Higgs has spoken to NME about the fantastical concept behind the band’s upcoming new album ‘Mountainhead’, which serves as a metaphor for “late-stage capitalism”.

The record, set for release on March 1, 2024, takes place in a world where society has created a huge mountain by digging a pit at its foot, and aspires to climb to the mythical mirror at its peak. All the while trying to escape a gigantic golden snake called Creddahornis who lives at the bottom of the pit.

• READ MORE: Everything Everything – ‘Raw Data Feel’ review: A.I. bot’s lyrics outshone by pop gold

“A ‘Mountainhead’ is one who believes the mountain must grow no matter the cost, and no matter how terrible it is to dwell in the great pit,” Higgs explained. “The taller the mountain, the deeper the hole.”

Written and recorded quickly and produced in Stockport by the band’s guitarist Alex Robertshaw, the synthetic pop album was intended to have no plug-ins and effects in reaction to last year’s ‘Raw Data Feel’, for which the band used AI technology to generate lyrics, song titles and artwork.

“It wasn’t a big journey and struggle,” Higgs told NME of the new album. “We wanted to make it quickly to get back on track timing-wise because we’d been in a weird place in terms of the pandemic. We kept putting out albums at the wrong time and missing the festival season. We really needed to get back on schedule and we have these ideas we’d been working on during the touring of ‘Raw Data Feel’ so we just did what we do and put the record together quite quickly.”

What’s behind the cover image this time?

“We came across that partly by accident. I’d just grown my hair back after having a skinhead for a few years and I bleached it and then I thought it could tie into the record if we all did it because we’re supposedly living underground. We had this idea that we were kind of albino or that we hadn’t seen the sun, ever. We found these Japanese cardboard box worker outfits, and it all came together.”

The fundamental metaphor appears to be that of a capitalist society where the wealth disparity has reached an inhumane crisis point.

“It’s one of the many things. There’s a growing sense of questioning what it is that we’re trying to achieve. Sometimes it seems to fly in the face of common sense, particularly the idiocy of Liz Truss’s mantra. I was just watching it go by and thinking what actually is this culture? What is this society? What are we trying to do here? Just grow with seemingly no limit and no forethought, when everything around you seems to be going the opposite way, telling you the opposite thing.

“I read this book Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher which is a sort of diatribe about late-stage capitalism… I wanted something core and large for the centre of it because it controls all of our lives and we forget how we got here and why we’re even in the system. It has always been this and will always be. Increasingly as I get older I think about what life would be like without it. It’s not just capitalism, it’s more the endless attempt to expand that humans do. They have a tendency to spread out and consume everything and then move on.”

Are all the songs linked by the concept?

“Probably two-thirds of them are and there’s maybe a third that aren’t. We never go the whole hog with concept albums, I think it gets a bit tiresome. There’s things that will occur in our lives that don’t have anything to do with it. The whole thing about having a concept that spreads across multiple songs is that you vaguely fall within the shadow of that idea, and in this case, it’s life from within this world. None of it is baked beans reality.”

Is the recurring image of the “hellkite priest” intended to add a religious aspect to it?

“It is, yeah. It’s the idea of people encouraging this world. It is like a religion and a hellkite priest will be someone who’s very into it and tries to manipulate others into following this mantra. I was actually thinking about the likes of… not quite Andrew Tate but that sort of figure. The crypto wankers who think that money is all you should ever need – you don’t need to be a human as long as you can get money.”

You’re talking about celebrities and influencers as these sorts of figures as well?

“Yeah, exactly. The whole of our culture holds up success in how much money you’ve made, rather than almost anything else. It seems like that being weird is completely forgotten.”

What do you mean by the symbolism of the mirror at the top of the mountain?

“The idea is purposefully framed as a rumour, so the people who want to get to the top don’t know if it’s true or not. It may not even be there, but I wanted something that essentially means that when you’ve got it all, what have you really got? You’re just looking back at yourself, it’s just a big monument to the self. And it keeps on going and keeps repeating, which is a kind of individualistic prize. There you are, there’s nothing else there. But it’s also like what have we got collectively at the top of our mountain? Really it’s just another story about us, which is all we ever had or will ever have. If we conquer the universe, what will we put in the middle of it? it’ll probably just be a big statue of a man and a woman holding hands.”

There’s a golden snake at the bottom of the pit representing the fear of the common man – where did idea that come from?

“There was a toy snake in my house when I was growing up that lost an eye. It was still knocking around when my nephew picked it up a few years ago. For some reason when he was about four, he named it Creddahornis. I’ve always thought that was an amazing name. It represents the animal within us. That’s supposedly the thing that these mountainheads want to get away from, humanity knowing their animal-ness. That’s the propellor at the bottom of the hole. You’ve got to get away from Creddahornis, you’ve got to climb this mountain and get away from being a human. That’s something that appears a lot in our songs, this conflict between history and modern life. The whole thing fascinates me and it always has, where you draw the line between animal and man.”

Among a colourful array of images, what’s the “enormous high-born moth” in opener ‘Wild Guess’?

“A dark master, basically. It’s not necessarily anyone in particular, but I like to play with the idea of hereditary power and monarchy because it’s something I find pretty repellent that we still have. It’s a byword for injustice in my book. It’s being ruled by dark forces.”

Eating away at the fabric of society?

“Indeed.”

Who’s ‘End Of The Contender’ about?

“Do you remember the viral video about Ronnie Pickering? About 10 years ago there was a cyclist with a camera on his head and he got in some kind of road rage thing with an older chap who started to rage again and again, ‘Do you know who I am? I’m Ronnie Pickering’. It was pretty funny and I laughed along with everybody else, but the more I thought about it and looked into this guy, because other people have, it had a different feel to me. He was an amateur boxer in the ’70s and there probably was a time when everyone knew who Ronnie Pickering was. And then he was just a man out of time.

“I think that’s a huge thing that’s happened over the last 15 years, since MeToo, cancel culture, whatever you want to call it has come in, there’s a whole generation of people, particularly men, who just don’t know what the hell’s going on and a lot of them are quite angry about it. It’s what caused Brexit, it’s what caused Trump, it’s one of these things that has become a bit of a joke, but it’s real. [Pickering] struck me as… I wouldn’t say a sympathetic character, but I felt as though he represented something to me in the way he was ridiculed for demanding for people to know who he was. It seemed like a perfect nugget to describe what’s occurred in this small subsection of our society.”

Are we all mountainheads now?

“Yeah, unfortunately, apart from people who try to get off the grid or try to destroy everything. Obviously a lot of it is great, of course it is. I’m glad I can go to hospital when I’ve got a lump in my head, but there’s a lot of bad stuff about it. Which is why it’s interesting to think about, it’s not very clear-cut at all. Also I enjoy playing a role within the record. You don’t really know if I’m in support of it or against it because I’m not really talking about it in emotional terms. I’m actually talking about it in factual terms. This is what’s happening. I’m not saying, ‘Look how bad this thing is’, which I found much more interesting to do.”

The final song, ‘The Witness’, seems to predict this system will end in apocalypse.

“We usually end up that way. Haha!”

Is that our inevitable course?

“Yes, but I couldn’t tell you and it wouldn’t happen all over the place. But I can’t see much good in the future right now. That song is really about seeing somebody go through a very intense psychological [event] and seeing it almost like a religious experience. So it’s got this flavour of holiness. That’s a song I haven’t done much analysing of because it makes me a bit emotional to listen back to it, just because of certain circumstances around the time we recorded it. I’ll answer that in a couple of years, probably.”

Everything Everything’s ‘Mountainhead’ is out on March 1, 2024, and is available to pre-save/pre-order here. The band will embark on a UK headline tour in the spring – you can find ticket information here. 

The post Everything Everything on their apocalyptic new album: “I can’t see much good in the future” appeared first on NME.

NME

The Kills have spoken to NME about ‘00s tabloid infamy, indie sleaze, working with Beck and the need to push guitar music forward.

Seven years on from 2016’s ‘Ash & Ice‘, the duo’s forthcoming sixth album ‘God Games’ marks an exciting evolution for the duo of Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince. It was the first they began writing on a $100 keyboard rather than guitar, and the experimentation involved resulted in a very contemporary and organic rebirth record – exploring everything from gruesome hip-hop, future-Siouxsie voodoo, insidious gospel, flamenco noir, junk store balladry and beyond.

“It changed everything about my songwriting,” Mosshart told NME. “We could do rhythms that were completely different, I was vocalising in a different way, melodies were coming to me that I don’t think would if I was just strumming away on an acoustic guitar. All of a sudden, I could be playing a grand piano and I’m like, ‘How cool. This is awesome. I can get in that headspace now’.

“It really freed up writing for us both. Once we realised that was happening, then that’s when it becomes intentional and you’re like, ‘OK, let’s keep going with this crappy little keyboard because it’s totally working.”

We caught up with Mosshart and Hince to talk about their new direction, famous friends, indie sleaze and their legacy.

NME: Hello Jamie and Alison. Does it feel like guitars are a bit old hat now?

Mosshart: “I don’t think guitars are old hat. Electric guitar is my favourite sound on Earth. But I think for writing it was good that we didn’t use it. Jamie, for the first time, didn’t start on guitar either. And in fact, didn’t put any guitar on the record until the very end. It was almost like doing the vocal. It just sounds really great and it’s very alive.”

Hince: “I did feel like that when we started. I felt like it was an albatross. I was listening to Dean Blunt and MF Doom and Kanye production and all this stuff and the guitar did seem like this old wooden thing. I kinda fell out of love with it because we’d been doing festivals where we’d turn up at noon, we’d be playing at 10 and we didn’t hear a guitar all day. You just start to feel like people didn’t give a shit about the guitar. That’s really why I wanted to start without it. Then I absolutely fell in love with it again, I think it’s vital.”

M: “I’m really enjoying seeing that lots of young bands are playing electric guitar again. It’s very exciting to me.”

H: “I think it’s helping that a lot more girls are playing guitar, because they don’t have that fiddly-diddly-widdly thing which is not my vibe at all. There seem to be a lot of girl players that are making it making it fresher.”

What are the ‘God Games’?

H: “I wrote the song ‘God Games’ and it’s just something that came out of my mouth. It just came out and I liked it because it was during the pandemic and it did feel like some kind of higher power, something in the universe was fucking with us. Religious or not, atheist or not, everyone had that feeling that the universe was turning on them. I Googled it because I loved it so much I wanted to know where it had come from. And I found out that it’s a sub-genre of video games where you play god, basically.”

M: “Which neither of us have ever played.”

H: “It fit into everything. I love that thing where you have one idea and you open the lid on that and then a thousand more come out. What does it mean? Everything.”

You worked with Beck on album closer ‘Better Days’?

H: “We started a few ideas with Beck, because he lives so close to me. We asked him to pick a couple of songs to work on and that was one of them. He was really obsessed with ‘Better Days’. So it made me suddenly have confidence in it. We only did a week and then he went on tour. We just needed someone to loosen the lid on the jam jar a bit, and then we’d get going. He kept saying it was flamenco Calypso, which I liked. Every time I see him now the first thing he says is ,‘We’ve got to finish ‘Better Days’. It’s the song that Keith Richards wishes he’d written!’. I’ve got a feeling he’s said that to a lot of artists.”

‘Wasterpiece’ appears to be about the experience of stardom, or being very near it: “You’re VIP in the hall of fame, I’m RIP on the walk of shame”?

M: “It’s about cliches.”

H: “I was in quite an unbalanced relationship in that way, in my past [Jamie was the partner of Kate Moss from 2007 and the pair were married between 2011 and 2016], so that’s kind of what that’s getting at. Being in that fucking world.”

How do you look back at your tabloid days?

H: “I can’t remember to be honest. I’m glad to be out of them. I love being really honest about everything but I don’t want to explain that song. That one’s for me.”

How does it feel to be one of the few ’00s survivors still evolving your music?

M: “I’m really proud, but when we started we decided to make this band into our lives, and our lives into this band. We just believed that it would always happen. Very seriously, and we believed it was very possible because there was just two of us, we could do anything artistically that we wanted to do. This band could become anything, change on a dime, or whatever we wanted to do. We were not gonna restrict it. So I’m not surprised but I’m very proud of us that we’ve made it this far and we love it this much still. As an artist, it’s a soulful thing to want to constantly reinvent.”

H: “When you’ve been a guitar band for 10 years or more, you’ve seen how it was flatlining at one point and it seemed like it might be over, it might be like jazz. We were really trying to push it forward. The hip-hop production that’s so inspiring to me – why should that be future-forward and guitar music always be looking back to the ‘70s or the ‘90s? The [Arctic] Monkeys are like that, where they just feel like they want to find a new space age way of doing it.”

What do you make of indie sleaze?

M: “I don’t know what it meant. Alexa Chung asked me to write something for the Financial Times or something about it and I was like, ‘Alexa, what does it mean and why am I part of it?’”

H: “Somebody forwarded me a post a couple of years ago and it was a picture of us and because I’m older I thought it was one of those piss-take things. ‘Indie sleaze? What the fuck is this?’”

M: “I must’ve been asleep during that whole time. I don’t think it’s a great presentation of a time that I was actually there for and remember.”

H: “I’m interested why they put sleaze on the end of it. Maybe post-iPhone it’s trying to be symbolic of a time when not everything was captured on fucking camera. It was pretty grim, people were doing things because it was being done in secret, maybe that’s where the sleaze thing comes from. Drugs.”

M: “I think we’re just defining teenagers and young adults who were just having a good time. I feel like there’s a lot of incredible, smart, hard-working people in this scene that we’re talking about that took it really fucking seriously. I think of it in such positive and exciting terms, not in a waster, fucked up way. It was so serious. I took this music, this band, so seriously.”

 

What do you remember about those days?

M: “They were the most exciting thing ever because everything was a first. We were spending a lot of time in New York living at the Chelsea Hotel and it just doesn’t get better than that.”

H: “We loved it at the Chelsea Hotel so much that when Rough Trade were trying to sign us in America. We said we’d only do it if they got their office at the Chelsea Hotel, and they fucking did it! They started their office at room 103, next to my room at the Chelsea Hotel.”

M: “We had a really short commute.”

H: “It was literally next door. Opposite Sid and Nancy’s room.”

M: “I would not have spent my life in any other way. I was pumped at all times. I remember all these people offering me a place to stay, all the friends putting on shows for you if you were coming through town and you needed a stop, everybody getting together, showing up. Your whole audience would just be bands, a lot of ‘em.”

H: “There were about 35 people at our show in Detroit.”

All artists?

M: “The White Stripes, The Detroit Cobras, The Soledad Brothers. I was thinking the other day about this time we were driving through the country in the Saturn on our very first tour and there was a big massive three-lane highway with a big ravine in the middle of it. Jamie was driving and he was driving very fast.”

H: “There was a cop coming the other way and she went, ‘Slow down, slow down!’ And I went , ‘Why? They can’t do anything?’ She said, ‘He’ll have a radar’, and I said ‘They can’t do that with a radar gun coming the other way’. They fucking could.”

M: “So they went through the ravine, down the other side, and started chasing us. Jamie decided to run away! All the things I’m saying no to, you’re doing. We pulled off the highway onto a dirt road in Ohio, going through cornfield, cornfield, cornfield, dust, we couldn’t see anything behind us. I was filming all this and we’re all kind of excited. Finally we stopped because we think there’s no way, they’re gone. Then BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG on the window…”

H: “Took me to jail. But there were so many beautiful moments that aren’t really stories, like the first time we were doing things. We didn’t even drink then.”

What’s The Kills’ legacy?

M: “We have so much more to do.”

H: “Art was the most important thing, the most life-changing thing for us. That’s what we wanted to encapsulate and be involved in. I hope that’s what we embraced and that’s the kind of legacy we leave.”

The Kills release ‘God Games’ on October 27 on Domino Records. The band will also play a special Halloween album launch show at PRYZM in Kingston, London, before a lengthy 2024 US tour. 

The post The Kills: “Why should hip-hop be future-forward and guitar music always looking back?” appeared first on NME.

NME

The Kills have spoken to NME about ‘00s tabloid infamy, indie sleaze, working with Beck and the need to push guitar music forward.

Seven years on from 2016’s ‘Ash & Ice‘, the duo’s forthcoming sixth album ‘God Games’ marks an exciting evolution for the duo of Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince. It was the first they began writing on a $100 keyboard rather than guitar, and the experimentation involved resulted in a very contemporary and organic rebirth record – exploring everything from gruesome hip-hop, future-Siouxsie voodoo, insidious gospel, flamenco noir, junk store balladry and beyond.

“It changed everything about my songwriting,” Mosshart told NME. “We could do rhythms that were completely different, I was vocalising in a different way, melodies were coming to me that I don’t think would if I was just strumming away on an acoustic guitar. All of a sudden, I could be playing a grand piano and I’m like, ‘How cool. This is awesome. I can get in that headspace now’.

“It really freed up writing for us both. Once we realised that was happening, then that’s when it becomes intentional and you’re like, ‘OK, let’s keep going with this crappy little keyboard because it’s totally working.”

We caught up with Mosshart and Hince to talk about their new direction, famous friends, indie sleaze and their legacy.

NME: Hello Jamie and Alison. Does it feel like guitars are a bit old hat now?

Mosshart: “I don’t think guitars are old hat. Electric guitar is my favourite sound on Earth. But I think for writing it was good that we didn’t use it. Jamie, for the first time, didn’t start on guitar either. And in fact, didn’t put any guitar on the record until the very end. It was almost like doing the vocal. It just sounds really great and it’s very alive.”

Hince: “I did feel like that when we started. I felt like it was an albatross. I was listening to Dean Blunt and MF Doom and Kanye production and all this stuff and the guitar did seem like this old wooden thing. I kinda fell out of love with it because we’d been doing festivals where we’d turn up at noon, we’d be playing at 10 and we didn’t hear a guitar all day. You just start to feel like people didn’t give a shit about the guitar. That’s really why I wanted to start without it. Then I absolutely fell in love with it again, I think it’s vital.”

M: “I’m really enjoying seeing that lots of young bands are playing electric guitar again. It’s very exciting to me.”

H: “I think it’s helping that a lot more girls are playing guitar, because they don’t have that fiddly-diddly-widdly thing which is not my vibe at all. There seem to be a lot of girl players that are making it making it fresher.”

What are the ‘God Games’?

H: “I wrote the song ‘God Games’ and it’s just something that came out of my mouth. It just came out and I liked it because it was during the pandemic and it did feel like some kind of higher power, something in the universe was fucking with us. Religious or not, atheist or not, everyone had that feeling that the universe was turning on them. I Googled it because I loved it so much I wanted to know where it had come from. And I found out that it’s a sub-genre of video games where you play god, basically.”

M: “Which neither of us have ever played.”

H: “It fit into everything. I love that thing where you have one idea and you open the lid on that and then a thousand more come out. What does it mean? Everything.”

You worked with Beck on album closer ‘Better Days’?

H: “We started a few ideas with Beck, because he lives so close to me. We asked him to pick a couple of songs to work on and that was one of them. He was really obsessed with ‘Better Days’. So it made me suddenly have confidence in it. We only did a week and then he went on tour. We just needed someone to loosen the lid on the jam jar a bit, and then we’d get going. He kept saying it was flamenco Calypso, which I liked. Every time I see him now the first thing he says is ,‘We’ve got to finish ‘Better Days’. It’s the song that Keith Richards wishes he’d written!’. I’ve got a feeling he’s said that to a lot of artists.”

‘Wasterpiece’ appears to be about the experience of stardom, or being very near it: “You’re VIP in the hall of fame, I’m RIP on the walk of shame”?

M: “It’s about cliches.”

H: “I was in quite an unbalanced relationship in that way, in my past [Jamie was the partner of Kate Moss from 2007 and the pair were married between 2011 and 2016], so that’s kind of what that’s getting at. Being in that fucking world.”

How do you look back at your tabloid days?

H: “I can’t remember to be honest. I’m glad to be out of them. I love being really honest about everything but I don’t want to explain that song. That one’s for me.”

How does it feel to be one of the few ’00s survivors still evolving your music?

M: “I’m really proud, but when we started we decided to make this band into our lives, and our lives into this band. We just believed that it would always happen. Very seriously, and we believed it was very possible because there was just two of us, we could do anything artistically that we wanted to do. This band could become anything, change on a dime, or whatever we wanted to do. We were not gonna restrict it. So I’m not surprised but I’m very proud of us that we’ve made it this far and we love it this much still. As an artist, it’s a soulful thing to want to constantly reinvent.”

H: “When you’ve been a guitar band for 10 years or more, you’ve seen how it was flatlining at one point and it seemed like it might be over, it might be like jazz. We were really trying to push it forward. The hip-hop production that’s so inspiring to me – why should that be future-forward and guitar music always be looking back to the ‘70s or the ‘90s? The [Arctic] Monkeys are like that, where they just feel like they want to find a new space age way of doing it.”

What do you make of indie sleaze?

M: “I don’t know what it meant. Alexa Chung asked me to write something for the Financial Times or something about it and I was like, ‘Alexa, what does it mean and why am I part of it?’”

H: “Somebody forwarded me a post a couple of years ago and it was a picture of us and because I’m older I thought it was one of those piss-take things. ‘Indie sleaze? What the fuck is this?’”

M: “I must’ve been asleep during that whole time. I don’t think it’s a great presentation of a time that I was actually there for and remember.”

H: “I’m interested why they put sleaze on the end of it. Maybe post-iPhone it’s trying to be symbolic of a time when not everything was captured on fucking camera. It was pretty grim, people were doing things because it was being done in secret, maybe that’s where the sleaze thing comes from. Drugs.”

M: “I think we’re just defining teenagers and young adults who were just having a good time. I feel like there’s a lot of incredible, smart, hard-working people in this scene that we’re talking about that took it really fucking seriously. I think of it in such positive and exciting terms, not in a waster, fucked up way. It was so serious. I took this music, this band, so seriously.”

 

What do you remember about those days?

M: “They were the most exciting thing ever because everything was a first. We were spending a lot of time in New York living at the Chelsea Hotel and it just doesn’t get better than that.”

H: “We loved it at the Chelsea Hotel so much that when Rough Trade were trying to sign us in America. We said we’d only do it if they got their office at the Chelsea Hotel, and they fucking did it! They started their office at room 103, next to my room at the Chelsea Hotel.”

M: “We had a really short commute.”

H: “It was literally next door. Opposite Sid and Nancy’s room.”

M: “I would not have spent my life in any other way. I was pumped at all times. I remember all these people offering me a place to stay, all the friends putting on shows for you if you were coming through town and you needed a stop, everybody getting together, showing up. Your whole audience would just be bands, a lot of ‘em.”

H: “There were about 35 people at our show in Detroit.”

All artists?

M: “The White Stripes, The Detroit Cobras, The Soledad Brothers. I was thinking the other day about this time we were driving through the country in the Saturn on our very first tour and there was a big massive three-lane highway with a big ravine in the middle of it. Jamie was driving and he was driving very fast.”

H: “There was a cop coming the other way and she went, ‘Slow down, slow down!’ And I went , ‘Why? They can’t do anything?’ She said, ‘He’ll have a radar’, and I said ‘They can’t do that with a radar gun coming the other way’. They fucking could.”

M: “So they went through the ravine, down the other side, and started chasing us. Jamie decided to run away! All the things I’m saying no to, you’re doing. We pulled off the highway onto a dirt road in Ohio, going through cornfield, cornfield, cornfield, dust, we couldn’t see anything behind us. I was filming all this and we’re all kind of excited. Finally we stopped because we think there’s no way, they’re gone. Then BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG on the window…”

H: “Took me to jail. But there were so many beautiful moments that aren’t really stories, like the first time we were doing things. We didn’t even drink then.”

What’s The Kills’ legacy?

M: “We have so much more to do.”

H: “Art was the most important thing, the most life-changing thing for us. That’s what we wanted to encapsulate and be involved in. I hope that’s what we embraced and that’s the kind of legacy we leave.”

The Kills release ‘God Games’ on October 27 on Domino Records. The band will also play a special Halloween album launch show at PRYZM in Kingston, London, before a lengthy 2024 US tour. 

The post The Kills: “Why should hip-hop be future-forward and guitar music always looking back?” appeared first on NME.