| T O P I C R E V I E W |
| MissMaceo |
Posted - 04/21/2006 : 17:41:57
Whiskey for the Holy Ghost right now
but Field Songs and I'll Take Care of You have been in frequent rotation as well.
Seems to me that FB fans might also enjoy this - check him out if you haven't!
This species has amused itself to death. |
| 5 L A T E S T R E P L I E S (Newest First) |
| Carl |
Posted - 12/14/2006 : 19:02:45
http://music.guardian.co.uk/rock/story/0,,1966667,00.html
Bad news boys
Tattoos, drugs, beatings, stalkers, prison, betrayal and years of making great music - could Greg Dulli and Mark Lanegan be any more rock'n'roll? They talk to Paul Lester
Friday December 8, 2006
The Guardian
Light and dark ... Greg Dulli (left) and Mark Lanegan. Photograph: Martin Godwin
Mark Lanegan can make the most benign enquiry sound like a veiled threat. We're backstage at Koko in Camden, north London, waiting for Greg Dulli to finish soundchecking for tonight's Twilight Singers performance, and for some reason the conversation has turned towards the prissy journalist's preference for Diet Coke over the regular full-sugar variety.
"Did you like the taste right off the bat?" wonders the tall and rangy singer, a former member of Queens Of The Stone Age and recent Mercury Prize nominee (for his unlikely collaboration with Isobel Campbell). He squints at me through the smoke of his Marlboro with the mannered menace of an old Hollywood bad guy. "You got hooked on it, huh?" he asks. His voice and intonation are pure Jack Palance.
With his heavily tattooed hands and aura of simmering blue-collar rage, Lanegan really is quite intimidating, even if he is wearing a cheap, nerdy, black anorak that looks like a present an elderly relative bought him from Walmart. He's impossibly guarded, parrying even the gentlest question with sighs, longueurs and barely concealed contempt.
At best, he is laconic, ironic considering the emotionally wrenching nature of his recordings: "Youthful indiscretion," he replies when I ask what the tattoos of stars all over his hands mean. At worst, you suspect he'd like to wring your neck.
Luckily, he has just joined a band, Twilight Singers, fronted by Dulli, a candid and garrulous interviewee. He takes delight in articulating, even poeticising, his partner's monosyllabic grunts.
"I think I had sex in there once," Dulli, the fabled lothario of grunge, nonchalantly informs me, pointing towards a toilet as we negotiate the maze of steps that lead away from the stage area to a quiet dressing room upstairs.
Dulli explains why he and Lanegan will be doing the interview together. "Because if I'm not there to smooth things over," he says, by way of reassurance, "he will eat you alive."
Despite their differences, the pair - who have begun recording together as The Gutter Twins, with a debut album due next year - have much in common. Both were born into dysfunctional working-class families: Lanegan in Ellensburg, Washington, in 1964; Dulli in Hamilton, Ohio, a year later. Both spent the 80s and 90s on the fringes of the Seattle grunge scene with, respectively, Screaming Trees and Afghan Whigs. Both have seen good friends take their lives, unable to cope with fame: Lanegan lost Kurt Cobain in 1994; in 2003 Dulli lost Elliot Smith. Both have suffered life-threatening drug addictions, Lanegan to crack and heroin, Dulli to cocaine. And both have a jaundiced view of love they've spent years expressing in their music, stretching back almost to the moment they met.
"We met at a party in 1989," recalls Dulli, "and it was just, 'Hi, how you doing?' There were no other pleasantries exchanged. Soon after, we had a strange disagreement that kept us ... not friendly for many years. It concerned a young lady. She later confessed that she'd duped us and set us against each other, for her own gain." But what did she hope to gain? "Both of us, probably."
Despite that, they became close. In the past decade and a half, they have shared cities - New Orleans, around the time of Hurricane Katrina - and even a home, in Silverlake, California.
"We lived together for about a year and a half," says Dulli. "We rarely saw each other, though. Everyone assumed we were drug buddies, but we never did drugs together. You can't with heroin and cocaine - you're going to two different places. It's a fork in the road. One guy goes left, the other goes right."
After they moved out, about three years ago, Dulli hit rock bottom. It was Lanegan who saved him.
"It was Mark who prevented my self-destructive tendencies from completing their mission," says Dulli of the time he was trying to finish The Twilight Singers' second album, Blackberry Belle, which came out in 2003. It's a period that informs the murderously intense material on their third, this year's Powder Burns.
"He'd come to record something," Dulli remembers, "and I'd refuse to leave the house till I had some cocaine. I'd lock myself in. Finally, I did go out and record some songs, but two months later, when I heard them, I had no memory of who they were by, who played them or who wrote them.
"I've always suffered from depression, and I think I'd embraced nihilism to the point where I wanted to, you know, take it home to the chariot in the sky. But there came a point - and I'm not ashamed to admit this - where I got scared, and I decided I wanted to get off the horse. It was a nasty episode, but he was the one I called, and he came over and helped me through it. He was a true friend in my hour of need."
Did Lanegan ever make a similar phonecall to Dulli? "I definitely had my ups and downs with addiction over the years, and towards the end Greg was always there, when I was at my lowest," he admits, open for once.
Did Lanegan ever wonder why he chose heroin while Dulli picked cocaine? What did those choices say about them?
"We're fire and ice," Dulli answers for him. "He's the more outgoing one," responds Lanegan. "That's the false promise of cocaine," adds Dulli. "You can power through a couple of dark days and be right back on top of the mountain again. I don't think I even realised I had a problem."
These days, they own separate homes in Los Angeles, but speak, according to Dulli, "at least three or four times a week." Without their friendship, things would have been different.
"Definitely," growls Lanegan. "Greg's been there for me in some of my hardest times. He's my best friend." The same goes for Dulli. "I would not be sitting here with you right now," he says, "if it hadn't been for my friendship with Mark Lanegan."
Dulli couldn't be a shoulder for Lanegan to cry on during his first series of scrapes, simply because they hadn't yet met. Lanegan spent his teenage years in and out of jail for petty thieving and drug offences before nearly dying, aged 20, following road accident involving a tractor. Does he still bear the scars? "I never think about it," he replies, "until somebody brings it up."
Dulli does think about his own, more recent, brush with mortality. In 1998, two nightclub bouncers in Austin, Texas, almost beat him to death.
"There were two black gentlemen in our entourage who these two bouncers referred to repeatedly as 'niggers', and that set me off," he tells me. "I had them pinned down, then asked for them to be ejected from the club. As it turned out, the manager was one of the bouncers' cousin, so he let them back in and they waited for me in the dark. When I came out of the bathroom, they took turns at kicking my ribs in and took a baseball bat to the back of my head. I woke up two days later in the hospital. I'd been in a coma."
Trouble seems to follow Lanegan and Dulli wherever they go. Both, for example, casually drop into the conversation that they have stalkers. Dulli has a restraining order on two over-obsessive female fans. Lanegan has stalkers of both sexes. He's cool about it, though. "Anybody who makes records, regardless of how well-known they are, can have somebody get attached to them like that," he says. What is it about him that attracts such delusional characters? "I have no idea. I think when people hear your music sometimes they get deeply attached to it and think they know something about you, that you're kindred spirits or something. When they're listening to your music all the time, you become part of their life, and some people get obsessed."
Dulli believes the star-fan barrier should remain intact. "I've never really wanted to meet my heroes. I've had opportunities to meet Dylan, Van Morrison and the Stones and I passed on all three, because I'd rather leave them in the imagination."
I ask Lanegan, who has written a song for the Gutter Twins called All Misery, how he imagines he might have dealt with the pressures of fame that destroyed Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley of Alice in Chains.
"That's retarded, man," he says, unimpressed. You think? "Yeah." Why? "Because it's conjecture. That's for you to do. I don't do that. I just see what's in front of me. That's what I'm happy with." Are you happy that you never achieved the sort of super-sized celebrity that Kurt experienced? There is a painfully long pause. "Yup, I'm definitely happy that I'm not super-size."
Perhaps it's their cultish fame that's kept them alive. "I think it's, er, largely due to luck," decides Lanegan, standing up to shake my hand just in case I was intending to stick around. "But it's also about having a drive, or will, to live as well. I think we both have that." Do you have to work at that, or is it in your DNA? "I think it's part of your DNA," he growls his last. "I mean, we definitely don't want to die, you know?"
· The Twilight Singers' A Stitch in Time EP, featuring Mark Lanegan, is out now on One Little Indian. The Gutter Twins will issue their debut album in 2007. |
| MissMaceo |
Posted - 04/24/2006 : 12:52:39
starmekitten, I actually enjoy the other albums more than Bubblegum and I haven't found an album yet I don't enjoy. The one that I should warn about is I'll Be There For You as it is a covers album - so it's very loungey, mellow even for him.
The album with Isobel is truly great - really atmospheric - his work with Greg Dulli in the Gutter Twins is also great - those gravelly voices rubbing up against each other is yummy.
mos I am also loving Screaming Trees! I just got introduced to all this through Queens of the Stone Age, who I also found by accident this last year watching them open up for NIN and I really LOVE it - it's like this huge reservoir of great music, with all the queens albums, and then The Desert Sessions, and then Mark and then the Screaming Trees and it's been great to be excited about a whole 'new' genre
Well, new for me, I know I am late on the 'stoner rock' or 'desert rock' bandwagon.
This species has amused itself to death. |
| Carl |
Posted - 04/21/2006 : 18:54:44
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1758109,00.html
When beauty met the beast
What happened when Isobel Campbell teamed up with the wild man of rock, Mark Lanegan? The result, says Laura Barton, could make her Queen of British Music
Friday April 21, 2006
The Guardian
Worldly wisdom and ripe sensuality ... Isobel Campbell
While the swarm of KT Tunstalls, Katie Meluas and Didos jostle for the title of Queen of British Music, Isobel Campbell has been unassumingly wearing the crown for some while. The shameful public ignorance of her oeuvre is in part because she rose to fame as a member of the Glasgow-based indie pop ensemble Belle and Sebastian, who sang about louvre doors, mousey girls and working in Debenhams, to which Campbell contributed wispy vocals, cello and a demeanour that made bookish boys' hearts beat faster beneath their cardigans. Although she left the band in 2002, after six years of faithful service, it is with them that she is still associated.
This is largely because, until now, she has not strayed far from the familiar B&S paddock. Since her departure, she has released four albums: two, The Green Fields of Foreverland and Swansong For You, under the name The Gentle Waves, one an album of Billie Holliday songs, performed with jazz musician Bill Wells, and finally Amorino, her first album under her own name. Though these were wonderful and critically acclaimed records that shimmied between French pop, strings and bossanova, one suspected Campbell had yet to truly find her niche.
Her latest offering, Ballad of the Broken Seas, finds Campbell blossoming. On this ruffled, bluesy, heartaching record, she shares vocals with the US musician Mark Lanegan. The coupling is a pleasingly unsettling one; Lanegan, the former singer with the Screaming Trees and Queens of the Stone Age, has a reputation that strides before him: heroin addiction, violence, stints in prison and rehab, and a voice that carries the tarry weight of all of it. He is the perfect foil for Campbell's delicate lilt.
From Belle and Sebastian to la belle et la bete is a smart move for Campbell. Pairing innocent young chanteuses with older, raddled ne'er-do-well male vocalists is a tried-and-tested formula in rock music: consider Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot, Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood, Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue. It often frees a female artist, previously known by her lily-white reputation, to confound public perception, and make something of a musical transition. This album bucks the trend a little, in that, bar one track, Ballad of the Broken Seas was written by Campbell, not Lanegan. Still, it displays an earthy sexuality. It is, in short, Campbell's coming of age.
Sitting at a restaurant table today, Campbell is glowing, wholesome, but with a definite impishness subverting the whimsical image of yore. "I sometimes think people might have misunderstood me slightly," she says gently. "Because sometimes I read things - especially what people used to write about me when I was in Belle and Sebastian - and it's a bit strange, I'd kinda go hmmm, who's that? People love their labels and it's a mistake."
The decision to leave the group, and its sugary reputation, was one she stewed over for some while. The band were enjoying a growing commercial success, but Campbell was finding the environment creatively stifling. "They were saying give us more songs, but a song is like a dog or a cat, they've got to have their right home, and I sort of knew that that wasn't it any more." Going solo was, however, "like pulling the rug out from under my own feet".
One of the most immediately striking qualities of the new album is its full-bloomed maturity; Campbell's voice and songwriting appears to have acquired a worldy wisdom and ripe sensuality. "I think I'd grown up a bit," she says, smiling. "Before, my music was quite sad but almost in denial, because it was still really hopeful. But I had a couple of years of coming to terms with lots of things and the world around me. There is a lot of dark stuff on the album, but someone said to me recently they felt it was kind of hopeful at the end ... there are some fun parts."
Ah yes, the whip, for example. Ramblin' Man, one of the album's most distinctive tracks, enjoys a cameo appearance by a rather feisty whip-crack. It was, Campbell laughs, a genuine whip, not a computer sample, which sounded "a bit mimsy".
Though she set out to make a collaborative album, Campbell was completely unfamiliar with Lanegan's early work when she began working on the record. "I was just looking for a low voice," she explains. "Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter, that was almost an inspiration for the record, and the music from that film ... very kind of other-worldly and slightly surreal and a bit kind of erotic." It was a former boyfriend who introduced her to Lanegan's gravelly tones. "His voice sounded painful - he was like a lion with his paw caught in a trap, he was like raaaah! It's funny, when my mum first heard him she said, 'Oh, you can almost touch the pain in his voice'. And my music has real melancholy qualities, so maybe I kind of identified with it."
She sent him a note on the back of a Man Ray postcard and enclosed a half-written song. "I'd never really approached anyone like that," she says, "but a couple of months later he [called] and sang the song down the telephone." So began a curious process of Campbell writing the songs at home in Glasgow and sending them off to Lanegan on the west coast of America. Campbell actively enjoyed working by correspondence. "I'd feel like a little boy waiting for Christmas, waiting for the songs to arrive back. It would just make me feel kind of sparkly and excited. By nature I'm a romantic," she explains. "I'm such a dreamer - I could just sit in my flat and goof off in my head and be anywhere, it's the cheapest thing to do. So it wasn't a problem for me, it was quite exciting - we'd be in touch by email or whenever he came to town."
Campbell knew little of Lanegan's wayward reputation when they first met backstage at one of his shows in Glasgow. "I didn't know what to expect. My boyfriend at the time said, 'Oh, he looks like a marine.' So I took a friend along with me. I was scared - I didn't want to see him after the show. I didn't want to get drawn into anything. But it was lovely. I met him a couple of times before I heard anything about him." Her eyes glint. "Since then, all these little stories have started to crawl out ..."
But in Campbell's dealings with him, Lanegan has remained the perfect gentleman and the perfect complementary musical companion. "Some people in the past in the music world have made presumptions and written me off, but Mark was so positive, so responsive and encouraging. He'd say, 'I think we can make such a beautiful record' and it would spur me on. It made me not want to disappoint him." Indeed, though the two appear total opposites - the innocent Glaswegian daydreamer with the cello and the drug-ravaged grunge emperor, they complement each other in a perverse yet intriguing fashion. "Something just resonated with me," she says. "I identified with him as a unique character - he's a true artist and has a need to just do what he does, and I know that I feel like that sometimes." And there is something downright seductive about hearing two such contradictory voices mingle. Campbell smiles at the suggestion. "Ah, I think it's because Mark's voice has a certain frequency for the ladies. His voice has that same frequency as a bass guitar. It is," she concludes with a husky laugh, "a very exciting frequency for women".
· Honey Child What Can I Do?, Campbell and Lanegan's single is out on April 24. |
| mosleyk |
Posted - 04/21/2006 : 17:57:52
Oh man! I just got Ballad of Broken Seas (Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan). I am really enjoying it. It like listening to old sailor songs. That sounds strange but I just love it.
Also, if you haven't already...get some screaming trees. Grunge music in its prime. |
| starmekitten |
Posted - 04/21/2006 : 17:54:59
I only have bubblegum but it is a rare month that I don't give it at least one spin. I love that album. What's his other stuff like? I haven't had a chance to hear any of it.
forum ebook - "on the road" theme - help wanted |
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