Rush - Live Capitol Theatre 1976

 Rush - Live Capitol Theatre 1976 - Part 1

 

 Rush - Live Capitol Theatre 1976 - Part 2

 

Alex Lifeson is on the phone, calling from his Toronto home, thinking back to the time between Rush's third and fourth albums in the winter of 1975 and 1976. It's difficult to believe now, some 40-odd million albums sold later, but the Canadian rock trio was at a crossroads then. After a pair of decently received albums, 1974's Rush and 1975's Fly By Night, follow-up Caress of Steel floundered both commercially and critically. Morale between guitarist Lifeson, bassist/singer Geddy Lee and drummer Neil Peart was low, and the pressure was on from American label Mercury Records to put out something as "relatable" as early hits "Working Man" and "Finding My Way." The writing was on the wall: Album number four was either going to break the band, or, well, break the band. "I remember thinking," Lifeson says candidly, "'I had eight years of playing rock in a band, and it's awesome, I love it, and I don't want to compromise. If this will be the end, I dunno, I'll go back to working with my dad plumbing, or go back to school, or something else.' To me it was impossible to take a step backwards and do something we'd already done just to please a record company."
The story is the stuff of legend. Rush stubbornly stuck to their plan, following up an album that had an ambitious 20-minute conceptual piece with an album with an even more ambitious 20-minute conceptual piece. Structurally 2112 was very much similar to Caress of Steel, only the band's vision was clearer, their musical chops were stronger, the songwriting was more advanced. Best of all, they sounded grown up. "'What are we going to do next?'" Lifeson remembers thinking. "'Are we going to do what they want us to do, which is basically the first album again? Or are we just going to say, 'Screw you, we're going to do what we want to do?' This was us giving them the finger. That's the way we looked at it right from the beginning. And then of course it turned into something else, something grander. We just wanted to let them know that they couldn't push us around."
For the first time Rush sounded truly assertive on record, like a band ready to conquer the rock world. Forty years after its April 1, 1976 release, 2112 is widely regarded as a classic album, a major influence on hard rock, progressive rock and heavy metal. Featuring the spellbinding sci-fi storytelling of the masterpiece title track and its five eclectic deep cuts that range from fun to introspective to ferocious, it was also the breakthrough Rush was so desperately in need of. "My first reaction was, 'This is like a futuristic prog rock spaceship ride,'" says Timothy Tiernan, a shipyard worker in Newport, R.I. who was a pre-teen when he first heard 2112 in 1978. "It was like rock and roll storytelling. The more you listened, the more you tried to find hidden messages. The album tempo would be a roller coaster ride. One song would be mellow, and the next would blow your face off. Just the way they would tie three songs together was like nothing the fans had heard. I was hooked from the jump."
In late 1975, Rush was convinced it had struck paydirt with Caress of Steel; Lee, Lifeson and Peart emerging from the sessions with producer Terry Brown immensely proud of what they had done. In retrospect, the album has it's moments, such as the bracing heavy metal of "Bastille Day" and the more wistful tones of "Lakeside Park," but for all the admirable spirit of the 12-and-a-half-minute "The Necromancer" and the 20-minute "The Fountain of Lamneth," both tracks are bogged down by dense songwriting, not to mention some outrageously lofty fantasy lyrics courtesy of Peart. "For me it sounds like the early experimental time for us, which is exactly what it was," Lifeson says. "Neil had just joined the band, we wanted to do something with a little more substance to it after Fly By Night, how he was writing lyrics, his contribution to what Geddy and I felt naturally, and the whole idea of us doing a concept 'side.' 'The Necromancer' was kind of a mini concept too, we broke it down into parts. With 'The Fountain of Lamneth,' it was a much meatier project. I think for us it was very satisfying on an artistic level. Obviously it wasn't a great success."
Critics had agreed. "I played the latest (and admittedly rather derivative) Rush album Caress of Steel in the office the other day, and unfortunately it received howls of derision," wrote influential British critic Geoff Barton in his review Sounds magazine. To this day Caress of Steel remains one of the only Rush albums not to be certified platinum in America, having taken nearly 20 years to achieve gold status. "2112 was a response to the indifference that greeted Caress of Steel," Lifeson says. I think we were at a point where we were evolving. We were becoming better musicians, we were playing better, we were working towards having more of a signature Rush sound. When we got to 2112, we were all set for that.
As was the norm in the '70s, if a young band was energetic and willing to work, record companies had them crank out new music at an alarming rate by today's standards. The bulk of 2112, which required meticulous attention to detail, especially on the title track, was written during the fall and winter of 1975, while the band was touring. "I recall writing in arenas, in dressing rooms, in the car," Lifeson reminisces. "We were playing in between 220 and 250 shows a year. We didn't have the luxury we would have later on where we would go somewhere for a month and just concentrate on writing. It was all written on the fly. So it had quite a different feel to it in its construction and in the way we developed it. We already had all the pieces written, we'd rehearsed them at sound checks, we knew the album, we knew all the material."
The storyline is a simple one, refreshingly linear compared to such bloated rock operas as The Who's Tommy and Genesis's The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway: In the year 2112 the world is under totalitarian rule of the Solar Federation, and all art and culture is controlled by the priests from "The Temples of Syrinx." A young man discovers an ancient guitar, learns to play it and suggests to the priests that its music would greatly benefit humanity. Citing the guitar and the music it yielded as a reason the previous civilization failed, the priests destroy the guitar. Distraught, the young man kills himself as chaos reigns, an ominous booming overhead: "Attention all planets of the Solar Federation: We have assumed control."
"'2112' took you somewhere; you can see it all playing out in your mind's eye," writes Vancouver-based music writer Rob Hughes. "It's the stuff of a million bad student screenplays. I always interpreted the '2112' suite's ending as destruction preceding renewal. Sure, the hero has died, but his transgression has sparked anarchy, which in turn has signaled the elder race — the ones who escaped the planet to build an enlightened society — to return to claim their former home. The voice that announces, 'We have assumed control,' comes from neither the priests nor the hero. It's the voice of hope."
Essentially a seven-part suite comprised of song fragments and reprised musical themes, what sets "2112" apart from Rush's earlier epic-length experimentation like "The Fountain of Lamneth" and Fly By Night's "By-Tor and the Snow Dog" is its accessibility. The exploration of dynamics, atmospherics and program music was a huge creative breakthrough for Rush, and the ambition and synthesis of styles would help the album appeal to a wider audience, one that could appreciate both the technical chops and the pop hooks. "I love that Rush combines total prog-nerd wankery with music that's actually catchy," writes Amanda Falke, a musician and software engineer based in Portland, OR. "Rush may sound nerdy, but at heart they're pop musicians. There is a warmth and presence to their music that very few bands have."
In the title suite's third chapter, "Discovery," the listener hears the babbling sound of a stream, as well as the protagonist picking up the old guitar. Lifeson plucks and strums awkwardly, completely out of tune, and gradually tunes the acoustic guitar ("How does he tune the guitar and learn to play it so fast?" Lifeson jokes), ultimately working his way to a pretty chord sequence. "What can this strange device be?" Lee sings plaintively. "When I touch it, it gives forth a sound." "We wanted it to feel like we were in a cave," Lifeson explains. "It's not a rock delivery. Sonically there's lots of reverb, there's the water trickling down the creek that's inside the cave. It became more visual, cinematic in a way, and that stuck with us for a long time. Now we had a structure that was working for us, that we felt confident with and were interested in."
It has been stated of more than one young rock musician that the two essential attributes are ignorance and arrogance. At the age of 22, Lifeson and his bandmates had learned to ditch convention in favor of experimentation. Gone was the overt Cream worship of the first album. In its place on 2112 was supreme self-assurance as well as youthful bravado. Coupled with the restraint and discipline that comes with artistic maturation, it was a perfect combination. "We'd been touring so much, we really felt comfortable in our skin as a band," Lifeson recalls. "If I listen to '2112' now, playing it on the last number of tours, there are some really interesting musical parts. There's lots of bluesy stuff on that, and maybe because of that there's a purity about it that grabs you. It's not too heady. It's a little more from the gut. With that record as well, there was the economy of it. That was important. It's more approachable than Caress of Steel."
"When it comes to space-age nerdy prog rock with massive compositions, Rush did it first, and they did it best on 2112," Falke writes. But she insists there's something more to Rush than technical innovation and sci-fi concepts: "Rush also has something most heavy bands today lack: vulnerability. The ending of '2112' (the song) is incredibly triumphant, and you only get that with the dynamics that result from total vulnerability in your music. That's so inspiring."
Lifeson says the band pulled from many sources on the way to finding its own sound. "We were all fans of Genesis, Yes, King Crimson. Pink Floyd as well. But we really wanted to do our own thing. We've found a lot of inspiration in a lot of different areas, from reggae, to country, to pop, to heavy metal. And that's always been a cool thing about us. We haven't been truly an overly progressive metal type band. We mix things up there, lots of ups and downs, lots of dynamics. We don't always play balls to the wall. We don't always try to make everything super complicated."
For an album that's been embraced as a "classic," the flipside of 2112 never gets as much attention as the song "2112" itself. You have the proto-stoner rock of "A Passage to Bangkok," the surreal, startlingly refined "Twilight Zone," Lifeson's wistful "Lessons" and Lee's melancholy "Tears" and the raucous "Something For Nothing," which reprises the individualist sentiment of the title track. "'Twilight Zone' was a difficult one," Lifeson muses. "There are a lot of weird time changes in it. The positioning of the guitar was awkward and uncomfortable. It wasn't as easy to do as some of the other things. 'Bangkok' is a really fun song for us to do, it's our homage to smoking pot around the world, finding the best that you can."
Following its release, attention to 2112 grew slowly. Eventually it charted as high as No. 61 on Billboard's album chart. But although the momentum was slow initially, it started to snowball to the point where the band would be an upper-tier arena and stadium act for the rest of their career. Every Rush album released since has charted higher — after 1980, every studio album but one has peaked in the chart's top 20. "Everything was slow but steady," Lifeson says, but "2112 bought us our independence. Mercury never, ever bothered us with material or studio work. They just left it up to us. They figured, 'Okay, they know what they're doing, and it works for them. As long as we're popping the cash register open, we're happy.'"
The album has continued to win new fans. Drummer Taylor Hawkins of the band Foo Fighters, who played with Rush on stage when the band was finally inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2013, says he came to the band as an adolescent half a decade after 2112 was released, and began working his way backward through its discography. "The overture grabbed me," he says. "I liked the fact that it was really hard rock. I loved Yes and Genesis when I was 10 or 12, but most of those prog bands were not really heavy. Not like 2112, which mixed heavy metal with technical stuff. It's so clear that they were such a huge influence on Metallica, that kind of technical metal at the time. I just loved that. It was as hard as Sabbath or Zeppelin, but the technicality was on a whole other level. That was the first time they put it all together."
Canadian illustrator Danille Gauvin, who has made artwork for nearly two dozen metal albums since 2009, describes 2112, which she encountered in 2005, as "an enabling factor for a hungry mind fascinated by horror, science fiction or fantasy." The fact that the band was also a homegrown was a bonus. "I cannot stress enough how the Canadian midwest can be very isolating for anyone growing up admiring the visual masterpieces of designers Roger Dean, Rodney Matthews, Richard Corben," she writes. "It was a place that did not take seriously the pursuit of art and design as anything but a childish fancy. 2112 did what great rock, and indeed great art, continually does in an infectious quality. It persuades you from feeling alone in your strangeness, and to celebrate it by making your own work."
Looking back on the album 40 years after its release, Lifeson says, "I'm very happy with it. Of course, I want to re-do the whole thing, just like all our records. When I go back and listen to the original record, I feel really proud of it. I can still remember how I felt at the time we were making it, and how important it seemed, and how satisfied we all were when it came together. We felt we played really well on it, and the recording experience was fantastic. We were such a real team holed up in that studio of Terry's. "When other bands cite us as an inspiration or an influence, the theme of 2112 is what they're talking about, more than anything. I've often read when we're mentioned as an influence for a band they'll say, 'We're big Rush fans, because they did it on their own, they did it their own way, and that told me that I could do the same thing. If I stick with it, persevere, I can do things the way I want them to be.'"  From: https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2016/04/30/476268876/all-the-gifts-of-life-40-years-of-rushs-2112

 

PJ Harvey - Live at The Forum, London 1993

This article originally appeared in the August 1993 issue of SPIN.
Polly Harvey is standing in the rain, in the middle of a generic English small-town shopping street. The 23-year-old singer is wearing a plush fake leopard-skin coat, her usual Olive Oyl bun let loose into barely restrained curly waves. She is bone-tired, fed up with interviews and photo sessions, sick of being the latest fixation in the music press’s neurotic search for new blood. Although she leads me to a local tea house, Harvey looks like she’d rather be getting a tetanus shot. I’m deeply flattered.
Harvey and her band, PJ Harvey, released one of the most talked-about debuts of last year, Dry, and have just issued the ballyhooed follow-up, Rid of Me. Critics have wet themselves over her striking image and her “female” lyrics, and rock stars from Jon Bon Jovi to Steven Tyler to Tanya Donelly have professed their admiration. Harvey is emblematic of a new breed of female musicians: She’s articulate and angry; she’s reluctant to align herself with feminism, yet the female body constantly asserts itself in her music with scalding ferocity. She wants to buy into rock history—her heroes are nearly all men—but only on her own terms.
Harvey is the kind of charismatic, Garboesque character whose contradictions are endlessly fascinating; she strips herself bare in her music while steadfastly refusing to “reveal” herself in interviews. “I don’t think I give away much of me in any interview,” she explains, smiling ruefully the second time I meet her, in a luminously cozy pub in a seaside town. She has the sallow look of someone who doesn’t eat or sleep enough. Unlike our first, stilted encounter, though, she seems animated and friendly this time. But her attitude to strangers still stands. “I think I give the most to people when I say very little, and actually I don’t talk that much to people that are close to me. You don’t need to.”
She has no desire to be framed, to play the industry game. Because her music seems very personal, we think we know her. “The biggest protection you can have,” she says, “is if people think they’ve got you and they haven’t got you at all.” But what’s most affecting about PJ Harvey’s music are the unclassifiable moments that seep silently into our memories, like soft dark bruises we don’t remember receiving.
Though you wouldn’t know it from its press clips, PJ Harvey isn’t just a person but a band. Drummer Rob Ellis and bassist Steve Vaughan are an unassuming pair, seemingly unfazed by the media attention (not that they get much). The band’s publicist warns me, “This is the kind of band that leaves a hotel room cleaner than it was when they got there.” Not suited to the rock’n’roll lifestyle, both Harvey and Ellis tried living in London, but neither lasted more than six months. When the city brought Harvey to the verge of a breakdown, she returned home to her parents in rural Dorset. The band clearly thrives on the anonymity of country life. “The nice thing about living ’round here,” says Ellis, “is it really is way away from all the people who are interested in PJ Harvey. They’re more interested in sheep and cattle around here. And rightly so.”
1992’s Dry was a gawky but beautiful album, oscillating between pale fragility and sulphurous abandon. I say abandon, but actually, it never really let rip. “Go, go, go,” Harvey moans repeatedly on “O Stella,” feverish with longing and frustration, unable to take her head off, torn every which way in the battle between body and brain.  Rid of Me, however, is a truly savage record, full of torrid obsession and untethered rage. It has a dynamic range as wide as the Grand Canyon, clots of noise, and Harvey’s achy, hemorrhaging vocals. The title track is a Fatal Attraction scenario, with Harvey alternately begging, “Don’t leave me,” and taunting, “Don’t you wish you’d never met her?” “Rub ‘Till It Bleeds” starts with gentle acoustic guitar and dulcet vocals, then mutates into a hungry rock’n’roll beast as voracious and thunderous as Led Zeppelin. “Dry,” an early song that didn’t make it onto the first LP, is plaintive and parched, pivoting around the ultimate male ego-puncturing accusation: “You leave me dry.”
Harvey’s choice of producer—Steve Albini (Nirvana, Pixies), formerly of Big Black and Rapeman—surprised many. Albini, synonymous with an ultra-masculine doctrine, would seem to jar with Harvey’s intricate, intimate brand of music. Still, Rid of Me works—largely because so much of its subtext is Harvey’s grappling with masculinity: simultaneously repelled by and impressed with its swagger. The irony of songs about machismo sung by Harvey and filtered through Albini’s hardcore aesthetic seems to have escaped them both. In fact, they claim to be the closest of friends, soulmates. He calls Harvey a genius, and her face lights up with pure delight at the mention of his name. “What did he say about me?” she demands, only half-joking.
Originally, Albini was underwhelmed by PJ Harvey’s live sound (“I sort of felt they’d rather be having a bowl of soup than rocking”) but agreed to produce the LP because “I thought her guitar playing was cool.” He’s notorious for his hatred of the human voice, but she convinced him that vocals were important to her, and in turn he wowed her with his studio tricks (like filtering her voice through a guitar amp so that she sounds bound and gagged on songs such as “Hook” and “Yuri-G”). The result is wrenching. Albini’s production doesn’t efface the “feminine” side of Harvey, but it does make her gasp for air. “We were both equally offended by the way women are treated in the music industry,” says Albini, “coddled and treated as if they’re incapable of making their own decisions.” When I mention this to Harvey, she nods her head, then points out that Albini fell prey to the same syndrome. “It was funny because, in the studio, Steve found himself treating me like that and he got really angry with himself. I think that made him feel a bit uncomfortable.” Which is one explanation for why the Albini-Harvey relationship worked: Rid of Me feeds on discomfort.
“Cheer up, luv.” This is addressed not to Polly Harvey—who, in person, is sweet and nowhere as dour as she likes to look in photos—but to me. I’m sitting on a stool in that pub near Harvey’s secret beach hideaway, waiting for her to finish talking to her publicist. The conversation is getting increasingly heated as Harvey asserts control over her destiny. I begin to squirm, wondering how her mood will affect our interview, when a funny old geezer launches the patronizing line on me: “Why don’t you smile, luv?” Women exist only to prettify the world, so I grin weakly as he explains that only yesterday he’d been responsible for putting five dogs to sleep. “I had to do it, but they were living, breathing creatures, you know… Ah, everything’s always all right in the end.” Just as I’m beginning to lose hope, Harvey is magically ready to talk. I never find out why those dogs had to die.
When I suggest to Harvey that her songs seem to flit very easily between male and female personas, she says, matter-of-factly, “I hardly ever give a lot of thought—particularly when I’m involved in making music or writing—to whether I’m male or female. I feel neither one nor the other.” Harvey absolutely refuses to believe her sex has anything to do with her music, but I can’t help wondering if she’s in denial as she fills me in on her life story. Following in the footsteps of her beloved older brother, she became a true tomboy, wearing a crew cut and boys’ clothes up to the age of 14.
“I used to pee backwards, all the classic symptoms.” She smiles as church bells toll outside. “I was devastated when I started growing breasts, it was horrible. Didn’t want them at all. They’re still growing now, actually,” she giggles. “I think I’m a very late developer! I can remember when I was younger my mum really wanting me to wear dresses. And I’d wear them and I’d just sit in one position all day and look really sulky with my lip hanging out until I was allowed to put my trousers back on again.” Why did you give up? “I got older and I realized that if I didn’t, then people would carry on thinking I was a boy and I’d carry on getting told off for going in the ladies’ toilets!” When I compliment her on her gorgeous, unruly mane of inky-black hair, she blanches a little. “It’s too beautiful and pretty. I’m still a tomboy at heart. That’s why I hardly ever wear it down, ’cause I feel too…girly.”
The funny thing is, for a girl who spent her early life trying to pass for a boy, she seems driven to shove her female body in everyone’s face. She’s bared her breasts for the jacket of Dry and the cover of the U.K.’s NME. How did she ever manage to expose her body to public scrutiny?  “It’s something you get used to, like interviews…” she says, giving me the practiced reply. Then she scrunches her face up in a funny, awkward grin. “But I have a complex about my body! I don’t feel comfortable with how I look at all… I think that I like to turn it on myself and make myself feel more ridiculous as a way of dealing with it.” When the band goes on tour this summer, Harvey will be ditching the androgynous look and playing with a more “feminine” persona—letting her hair down literally and figuratively. The video for “50 Ft Queenie,” Rid of Me‘s first single, is the first hint of an image change: Harvey’s decked out as a larger-than-life glam queen with attitude to spare. 50 Ft Queenie “stomps around in platform gold sandals and shakes her hair around a lot,” says Harvey. “She’s big ’cause she feasts on men and that’s a good form of protein.”
Queenie is a great alter ego for Harvey, since what’s so striking about her music is its physicality. Her songs escalate from simmering tension to outright combat, and her guitar playing is startlingly aggressive. She seems to gouge out riffs, and hack at rhythm chords. Surprisingly, Harvey says she finds “singing much more directly physical than playing the guitar. It’s coming straight from you, you’ve got to use your whole body weight to do it.” She’s very earnest about improving her voice: She’s taking Italian opera classes at home, and is considering bringing another guitarist on board to free her to focus on singing. “There’s endless possibilities there, which I think Diamanda Galás is doing already. She turns everything upside down by the way she sings. She directly makes you feel nauseous or makes you feel horrified or ridiculous just by her voice. I think that’s an incredible power.”
Listening to Rid of Me the very first time made me think of something Galás once said: “Women need to think of themselves as predators rather than prey.” Harvey agrees completely. “I read something the other day about whether all women are prone to liking sado-masochism ’cause of being the penetrated and not the penetrator. Then again, you can look at it from the other point of view where the man might think he gets swallowed whole.” Such ambivalences—love-hate, attraction-repulsion, domination-submission—are Harvey’s prime terrain, as in the line from “Legs” that goes, “I might as well be dead / But I could kill you instead.” It’s pure impulse and adrenaline, like not knowing whether you want to kill your lover or fuck. “I like to feel uncomfortable and not in control because so much of the rest of the time I’m trying to be on top of everything. So when you’re at a loss like that, that’s really exciting.” Have you ever thought about killing someone? “Although I may have a head full of anger, I don’t think it’d be very easy to kill someone unless I had a large shotgun or a can of gasoline and a match,” she laughs. “I would love to be able to fire a gun, I’ve often thought that.”
Harvey consistently rejects any approach that smacks of gender, but when I mention the idea that men take out their anger on others, while women inflict it on themselves, a flicker of recognition lights up her eyes. “It’s very occasionally that I’ll let it out and then shout at someone else…That’s why you get ill, that’s why your shoulders hurt, that’s why you bite the skin off your nails, off your lips—because there’s all this aggression you just turn in on yourself all the time. I’m finding other ways of getting it out now like drumming. And singing…I was shouting and screaming at myself in the bath last night and it was wonderful. And then I could go to sleep, which I probably couldn’t have done otherwise.”
Courtney Love, frontwoman for Hole and last year’s winner of the “women in rock” sweepstakes, is a huge fan of Harvey’s. “I envy Harvey in a way,” she says. “She wears pants, keeps her hair off her face, wears a big guitar to gird herself, doesn’t ‘ask for it’ in any way.” Unlike Love, who is happy to articulate her place as a woman in rock, Harvey has no agenda. In fact, she doesn’t even believe in gender, let alone want to align herself with feminism. But Love is right: Harvey is making a quiet spectacle of herself, exposing the underbelly of femininity in a way that’s so subtle you can almost see how she’d miss it herself. “In her own way, she presents challenges,” Love suggests. “Maybe she can be a kind of crossroads, a bridge. Some women have an ideology of ‘I’m gonna be as good as a guy’—I understand that, and I wish I was smart enough to do that. I always open up my mouth. But I’ve watched the rock mantle being passed from one guy to another all my life; if she has the chance to change that, I think that’s amazing.”
Ironically, much of PJ Harvey’s aesthetic seems born of Harvey’s admiration for the bad-boy rebels of rock (Nick Cave, Tom Waits, Captain Beefheart), art (Andres Serrano), and literature (William S. Burroughs). They cover Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited” on the LP and blues legend Willie Dixon’s “Wang Dang Doodle” on a session for John Peel’s show. I suggest to Harvey that a lot of male rebellion stems from the need to escape women and domesticity. “Yeah,” she nods, “it’s escape from claustrophobia, from suffocating, which you feel a lot in the country. Particularly if you’re very ambitious and know you’ve got a lot to get out—you do feel like you’re suffocating and being strangled by your parents.” But you seem so settled. Don’t you like your house and family? Harvey responds in clipped tones, stressing every syllable: “I love and hate my house and my family.” Masculinity is a dark thread running through Rid of Me—from the ironic “Me-Jane” (“Tarzan, I’m bleeding / Stop your fucking screaming”) and “50 Ft Queenie” (“Come and measure me / I’m 20 inches long”) to “Man-Size,” in which Harvey’s grandiose protagonist is “man-size…got my leather boots on.” A lot of her songs seem both to identify with and recoil from machismo.
“I’d say it’s more anger with myself—it’s not against any machismo operation. But it’s not just anger, it’s humiliation. I want to humiliate myself, which I think I do very well on those songs,” she explains primly. “I like to humiliate myself and make the listener feel uncomfortable. That would be the ideal package.” We laugh at this idea of mass marketing shame and horror. “I’m not satisfied with Rid of Me, it’s nowhere near achieving that…there’s a long way to go before it gets as direct as I would like. I think it’s very tame at the moment.” Wriggling in my seat, I try to imagine what a totally unleashed PJ Harvey would sound like. The mind reels.  From: https://www.spin.com/2021/11/pj-harvey-really-the-blues-1993-feature/

Wheel - Movement

Wheel is a 4-man progressive metal band from Finland. They’ve released two EPs and two albums since 2017, the most recent of which is ‘Resident Human’. One of their singles, ‘Hyperion’, caught my eye and subsequently put this album on my radar. ‘Resident Human’ was my first introduction to the band, and though it’s early into 2021, I must say this is one of my favourite releases of the year so far.
‘Resident Human’ starts right off with the nearly 12-minute track, ‘Dissipating’. The song begins and ends with the same sombre guitar riff that is simple but captivating. It has a cool, spacey feeling to it that is recurring throughout the album. This song builds slowly, but it never becomes uninteresting. There are some undeniable musical influences from Tool, from the song structure down to the guitar tones, and I mean that as a positive. Around eight minutes in, ‘Dissipating’ has its climactic moment, with chugging bass and guitar riffs. It’s a satisfying conclusion and sets the standard for the rest of the record. ‘Movement’ is the title of the next track, and it provides quite a tone shift. The song opens with an explosive bass riff and maintains that intensity from beginning to end. Aki Virta plays the bass on this album and does an excellent job of it. The track is held together with some dynamic drum work. Where ‘Dissipating’ was a slow build to a climactic moment, ‘Movement’ is simply a burst of energy.
That contrast continues throughout ‘Resident Human’, with two more ten-minute epics, and two more short, hard-hitting tracks. The balance between the two styles is an interesting dynamic for the record to lean on. Long songs are, of course, not something new to the world of prog. But I found the way they constructed the album to be fairly unique.
‘Hyperion’ is the second of the ten-minute tracks found on the album, and it shares many of the same praises as the first. One of the key differences, however, is the presence of a chorus. It’s both catchy and memorable, two things that are welcome in an album that often focuses on technicality. The song is groovy and atmospheric, dark and complex. It’s my favourite track on the record, and it’s easy to see why it was released as a single. ‘Fugue’ is a more melancholic track. Though the instrumentation remains rich, the vocals convey just the right amount of emotion for that sorrowfulness to come across well. It’s a positive break before the album’s grand finale.
That finale is the title track, ‘Resident Human’. The third ten-minute epic. Lengthy songs such as these can really drag an album down when done poorly. But I feel the band hits the nail on the head with each one of them and they are the strongest parts of the record. The song starts with a lone ominous guitar riff. Then the rest of the music kicks in and fills the song with catchy and interesting licks. The song builds into the last chorus, which explodes with intense and progressive instrumentation before closing with that same opening riff. I have very few complaints about this album. If I had to come up with something I’d say it shies away from the more melodic side of prog that I normally enjoy, but that’s more personal preference than it is criticism. ‘Resident Human’ is an album that combines atmosphere and groove, rhythm and technicality. And Wheel displays maturity in sound beyond what you’d expect from a band on their second LP. On the whole, I thoroughly enjoyed listening to this album. And I have no issues in saying that so far this year, Resident Human might just be my favourite progressive album of 2021.  From: https://proghurst.co.uk/2021/04/wheel-resident-human-review/

Richard & Linda Thompson - Pavanne

A long time ago, almost forty years, late one night on BBC2, I found myself watching a television performance of Richard and Linda Thompson. Other than idle curiosity, I don’t know what motivated me to put the programme on: I believe it had already started. No doubt I was just putting off going to bed. I knew very little of the Thompsons, though in a few years I would know much more. I knew of them mostly from the New Musical Express, my weekly music bible from 1972 to 1987, where Richard remained very much a favourite. And I definitely heard ‘I want To See The Bright Lights Tonight’, an unusual choice to be favoured by Piccadilly Radio 261, when commercial radio reached Manchester. If I knew any other songs even fleetingly, I can’t remember: my friends were all into prog and I didn’t develop friendships with those who were Richard Thompson fans until later that decade.
It might have been a Jake Thackeray programme on which they guested. I’d have watched that. The point was that I came into this cold, in silence and solitude, and the first song that hit me was ‘Pavanne’
Hit me was right. It stunned me into total fascination. Then, before and since I rarely gave a brand new song, by brand new artists, such undivided attention. For five minutes, as it unwound itself simply, an acoustic guitar and that amazing voice of Linda Thompson, slowly drawing out the image of a female assassin, a cold steel woman, infallible and implacable held me rigid, intent only on what this amazing song would do, where it would go to next. Enigma, impossible to feel as a corporeal woman, lethal in effect yet curiously neutral in impact, neither to be despised nor idolised, Pavanne was a woman whose name was taken from an old, slow, courtly dance, as referenced in the song’s lyrics. I was familiar with the term from my comics reading, for Pavanne was an assassin elsewhere, a foe of Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu.
It was an astonishing experience. By the time the song was over, I wanted it. In contrast, the other song they played that night (which was ‘Just the Motion’ if it was indeed that Jake Thackeray Show) didn’t affect me remotely as much. The track appeared on the Thompson’s album First Light. Good though it was, it was lacking. The intensity of the performance, the stripped down force, the aura around Linda’s voice just wasn’t there to be heard on vinyl. Other songs, yes. The title track, for example, was wonderful. And in time I would discover the full I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight which is awesome, and the alternate, electric version of ‘A Heart Needs A Home’, which always makes me wonder why on earth they released the original, acoustic version, on Hokey Pokey.
Truth to tell, I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight is the only wholly satisfying, front to back Richard and Linda album for me, though for near forty years the alternate ‘Heart’ has fought it out with ‘Pavanne’ for exclusive rights to be called the favourite. ‘Heart’ has an edge in that I know it only as the recorded track, and ‘Pavanne’s most pure and affecting form is locked in a memory from so far back.
There are different versions of the song on YouTube. The one I’ve chosen to highlight comes from the Thompsons’ last tour in 1981, which makes it contemporaneous with that five stunned and yearning minutes that television night. In some ways it’s almost better. Richard plays guitar, Linda sings, but from the moment she starts she is scary cold, ice and steel. She isn’t singing this song, she is inhabiting it. Every inflexion in her voice is simultaneously intimate and distant. She might be Pavanne herself. Eyes cold as the barrel of her gun. The woman who has never missed her mark. And this performance was part of the farewell tour in which the Thompsons’ marriage was a hollow thing of hatred on both sides but his guitar and her voice are meshed together without a gap between them that you could fit the blade of a knife into.  From: https://mbc1955.wordpress.com/2021/12/20/the-infinite-jukebox-richard-and-linda-thompsons-pavanne/

Gary Numan - Cars

What are prog musicians if not sonic pioneers? In which case, Gary Numan is definitely prog. In fact, he received an Innovator In Sound award to confirm his credentials: pushing the boundaries, experimenting with new technology, ploughing his own furrow – these are all in his DNA. As for those credentials, they have become weightier with the passage of time. When he emerged in the late 70s, he was dismissed as a synth-pop lightweight, a fraud in face paint. Since then, he and his peers – including his hero John Foxx – have improved their standing with the prog fraternity.
Numan has become something of a name to drop, if not among prog musicians then certainly for well-respected rock heavyweights: Marilyn Manson, Trent Reznor, Beck, Queens Of The Stone Age and Dave Grohl have all cited the importance of his work in left-field electronica with a menacing sci-fi edge, his lashings of noir and textured atmospherics conjuring up a dark, dystopian future world. “He was innovative and refreshing with his synth-driven music,” says Fish On Friday keyboard player Frank Van Bogaert. “He also has an attitude that’s almost like rock’n’roll, but without guitars. Numan sure has influenced my career!”
It doesn’t take long, in a conversation with the man himself, before the talk takes a turn for the prog. There was his team-up in 1983 with Bill Nelson, for instance, a collaboration he sought because he was a huge fan in his teens of Be-Bop Deluxe. “They were my first ever gig,” Numan recalls on the phone from his home in Los Angeles, where he has lived for the past few years with his wife and three young daughters. “They were brilliant – I loved every single song they played.” Unfortunately, the pairing didn’t work out – “We didn’t see eye to eye,” he says – but he remains a fan.
The same goes for Queen, whom Numan saw in concert as a teenager at the Rainbow in London. He remembers the band “rescuing” him a few years later during one of their gigs in Japan, where he was stranded after traveling there with the group Japan – another art-rock/synth-pop outfit from the early 80s with prog tendencies. “I was in Tokyo and things had got a bit weird,” he relates, his accent more cockney than Californian. “I got dumped so I went to see Queen at the Budokan. Anyway, I was sitting in the balcony and there was quite a lot of fuss around me and I couldn’t work out what it was until security came and got me – it was me causing the fuss! So they took me backstage and the band adopted me like this little waif and stray. It was really cute. I sat and had sushi with Freddie and the band. Problem was, I didn’t like sushi, so they went and ordered me McDonalds instead! They were amazing. I still think Freddie is the best frontman in the history of music.”
Numan subsequently worked with Roger Taylor (on the former’s 1981 album, Dance). More recently, he made a cameo on the new album by Jean-Michel Jarre. “It sounds like Jean-Michel Jarre with me singing,” he offers drily of his track on the second installment of the French keyboards whiz’s Electronica project. “I love him,” Numan adds of Jarre, whom he considers “one of the loveliest and most charming people I’ve ever met” – and not just because he’s been to his house several times, played with his kids and wrestled on the floor with his 200lb English Mastiff. “I get such a lot of lovely things said about me being a pioneer – but fuck me, Jean was doing it years before me. That’s a pioneer. He was out on his own for such a long time, creating his own sound.”
Numan could easily be talking about himself. He’s just delighted that after years of abuse – of being a so-called surrogate Bowie, a keyboard dilettante with a fetish for leather and android froideur – he’s now taken seriously, and across a wide variety of genres. He’s being interviewed today by Prog, but if such journals existed, it could easily be Goth, Electronica, New Wave, Post-Punk or Industrial magazines asking the questions. “Yeah,” he says, and you can hear his face forming a satisfied smile through the phone line. “One of the things that’s cool that’s happened to me over the last 20 years or so is not so much that I’m recognised as influential, which is lovely anyway, but the fact that it’s across so many genres. I get more actual satisfaction out of that than ever having been No.1 [with 1979’s Are “Friends” Electric? and Cars]. There’s a big element of luck and fortuitous timing with that. But other people covering your songs or acknowledging your music, that means a lot more to me.”
For so long, Numan rejected his back catalogue. Now, he is more accepting – proud, even – of his past. That explains why, a day after this interview, he’s coming to London to perform three of his key early albums live over three nights: Replicas (1979), The Pleasure Principle (1979) and Telekon (1980). “I didn’t realise they had such an impact,” he says. “I had this huge chip on my shoulder about the old stuff and I spent most of my life trying to distance myself from it so I could bring attention to my newer stuff. It’s only recently that I’ve become aware of their impact.”
Numan considers his 1992 album Machine + Soul his nadir – “It was rubbish,” he says bluntly – while 1994’s Sacrifice is widely regarded as the moment of his artistic rebirth. It has officially been okay to like Numan for over 20 years now, whereas his initial period of success – when he was arguably the biggest pop star in Britain – was relatively brief. “Yeah, I was massive for about a year, then it started to go downhill and carried on relentlessly until about 1992-93 when it bottomed out and everything was shit,” he says of his career trajectory. He shudders when he recalls that one of his singles from that time, Absolution, sold fewer copies than one of his early punk singles – 1978’s That’s Too Bad, with Tubeway Army – when he was, as he puts it, “a complete unknown”. Shifting 3,000 copies compared to That’s Too Bad’s 4,000, it’s miserable fare indeed compared to the million units Are Friends Electric? sold.
“I pretty much lost everything at that point – it had all gone,” he laments. “I couldn’t give away tickets, whereas before I’d done three or four nights at Wembley [Arena, 1981]. I was finished.” It was then – with no label and huge debts that he estimates at around £600,000 – that he decided to pursue music more “as a hobby”, without worrying about chart success and radio play. The music he began making – to please himself and no one else – was suddenly darker and heavier. He’d rediscovered his mojo. Every album of the last two decades has sold better than its predecessor, and critics – usually the bane of his life – have been glowing in their praise: 2013’s Splinter (Songs From A Broken Mind) was widely hailed as his best album to date. “I felt as though I’d finally come out of the shadow that my early success had created,” he says.
It’s ironic but true: there are early-80s outfits who were far more credible than Numan back then who have since succumbed to the cheesy retro/nostalgia circuit, whereas he has kept well away from anything that might posit him as a relic, even as the wolves were circling his door. He’s just happy that a photograph of him in a magazine these days would more likely be captioned ‘industrial legend’ than ‘80s icon’. “It said ‘80s icon’ for 15 years and that drove me mad,” he says of his dog days. “It painted me as someone from a bygone era and I didn’t feel like that.” The music he has made since 1994 – especially Sacrifice (1994), Pure (2000) and Splinter – has established Numan as a going, contemporary concern, reinvented as a sort of UK analogue to Reznor/Manson. His heavily textured atmospherica has even gained the approval of prog-heads.
“I’m lucky,” he admits, looking forward to going back into the studio. “I’ve had a very long career with a lot of ups and downs, and yet here I am at 57, just about to start my 21st album, and I’m probably in a stronger position that I’ve been almost since day one. So I have absolutely nothing to grumble about at all.” It hasn’t been a problem-free journey. He was diagnosed not long ago with Asperger’s Syndrome, and that brought with it a whole set of difficulties. Circa 2009, he began to suffer with terrible depression. And he has always been wracked with self-doubt.
“Look, I know I’m not a very good singer, I can’t play guitar very well, I’m not a virtuoso musician,” he says. “But I’m lucky in that I’ve got something about me that’s slightly different and some people like it. But as far as being better than anyone else, absolutely not. I’ve got a kind of mental dysmorphia,” he adds of his inability to believe the positive hype and only focus on the negative. It has, perversely, been his “driving force” over the years, pushing him on to prove his worth. So did his insecurity never allow him to enjoy fame and acclaim back in the day? “No – in fact, it was far worse then than it is now,” he winces, recalling the slings and arrows of outrageous critical opprobrium hurled his way when he was writing, performing and producing his own records, and even managing himself, while still in his early 20s.
“Everyone was pretty fucking horrible. I was aware the records were selling well, but I was also aware that pretty much everyone else seemed to hate me. I might have sold a million albums, but that meant 59 million people in the country didn’t buy them! People were incredibly hostile. My confidence was a mess.” How about now? Should Numan fans be concerned that living in sun-kissed Los Angeles in a nice big house, he’s going to get happy? Where will that leave the dark artist of lore? “Well, luckily I’m not actually that bothered by surroundings,” he replies. “The place in my head that I write from is uniquely dark. It sits in a little corner of my brain, festering away regardless of whether I’m living in sun-kissed paradise or wherever.”
He explains that Splinter was written largely in a period of depression, one that almost ended his marriage. “It didn’t matter that I’d been sitting in the sunshine when I wrote it,” he says. “It came out of my memory and my experiences.” It was his wife’s own postnatal depression that exacerbated his deteriorating mental state – that, and a sort of midlife crisis. “I started worrying about getting old, dying and illness and all sorts of shit. It built up and I went over the edge. I was like that for three or four years.” He was in “a zombie state” for a while as he took heavy medication, and even the threat of his wife leaving and an intervention by friends couldn’t snap him out of his ambition-free funk. Eventually, recording Splinter dragged him back to his regular state, which can perhaps be best summed up as ‘anhedonia’: a condition that means an inability to experience pleasure.
Numan is candid and forthright, not to mention brutally honest with himself about his feelings; strange things to say, perhaps, about someone once lampooned for being a shallow, hollow man-machine. “I remember [NME journalist] Paul Morley slagging me off because all my songs were ‘I’ and ‘Me’ – but they are!” he laughs. “That’s what I write about. Like Telekon, that was me talking almost exclusively about what it’s like to become famous: it made me paranoid as fuck! “I never thought my music was cold and unemotional,” he adds. “That seemed to me a slightly ignorant reaction to electronic music being regarded as cold and emotionless. Maybe because I didn’t smile much.”  From: https://www.loudersound.com/features/gary-numan-prog-credentials

Maria Ka - Ikh Bin Mid

Maria Ka (the singer’s full last name is Kawska) lives in Poland, and she discovered that her family had covered over its Jewish roots; there were Jews in her father’s genealogy. This revelation led Ka to pursue Jewish studies and psychology at University in Krakow. It also led to further realizations: that the Yiddish language deeply resonated with Ka, and that her University program did not provide much by way of women’s studies. This culminated in Ka’s thesis on Jewish women in Polish interwar cinema. A consistent theme in Ka’s work is restoring the centrality of women’s voices, as women have been marginalized in both society and by patriarchal religions. By the time that Maria Ka recorded these songs, women were in the streets protesting the Polish court decision that sought a ban on abortions. For a scholar-activist such as Ka, the stakes were clearly high.
Ka’s interests permeate Der Hemshekh, and she sings entirely in Yiddish. The soundworld of the album is resolutely contemporary, primarily built around electronics and loops, oboe, drums, and Maria Ka’s vocals. “Gikhe Trit (Fast Steps)” kicks off the album with some cold electro-new wave, and the song establishes an urgent tone. The song celebrates the regenerative power of Mother Earth, against which Ka declares that “it’s high time for your greed, black piousness to disappear.” More than that, the song points towards abandoning social structures that have kept women from achieving full equality in public life. “Ale Teg (Every Day)” continues the collision between modernism and Yiddish futurism by laying down a seriously fuzzy bass line for Maria Ka’s call to live authentically: “Every day I go another way/I create myself from the beginning.” The declaration arrives with liberatory swagger. Given Maria Ka’s feminism, it is not surprising to find songs that ‘flip the script’ in order to illuminate a woman’s perspective. Ka and her band perform “Di Mizinke,” a traditional song that is sung by a father to God upon marrying off his daughter. The tune speeds up as if it were a traditional klezmer romp, but it also sounds like hard cabaret. With the song re-focused on the daughter, rather than the father, the bride refuses to give her father a kiss by the end of the song.
Another track that offers subversion through the female gaze is ”Sheyn Vi Di Levone (Pretty Like The Moon),” a tender song usually sung by a man but here is enlightened by a woman taking the lead. The stunning, trance-inducing “Sha Shtil! (Shhh Quiet!)” takes a song that would ordinarily celebrate a rabbi and the pupils who follow him in the male study of Torah, and turns it into a celebration where we are encouraged to be “quiet, the woman is doing a dance for us/stamp feet when she sings.” It is women that we are to learn from, and women who are powerful when returned to the center of public life: “And when the Woman sings the holiest melody/Satan loses his wings – becomes a dead body.” Ka also takes a well-known Yiddish song, “Papirosn (Cigarettes),” which features a young boy attempting to sell cigarettes in the rain; here, a young girl is asking passersby to purchase her cigarettes. With its tango rhythm, the song highlights the intertwining of misery and poverty.
Casting off the social shackles that constrain women is addressed several times. In “Oyfn Veg Shteyt A Boym (By The Wayside),” the issue is the overprotective mother. The young daughter is likened to a bird about to fly away; but the mother stifles the daughter with her own worries, making it hard for the young woman to become an adult. “Ikh Bin Mid (I Am Tired)” can barely contain it’s outrage and the song is born along by what sounds like ‘industrial’ jazz. “I am tired/I’m to fury wired,/Want to beat all the walls/With my burning hands’ pall!” – Both these songs speak to the invisibility of women in public life, but again, can be easily seen to reflect the social context faced by women in Poland around their bodily autonomy and individuality. Of course, there can’t be a revolution if you can’t dance to it. The contrast between the electric sounds and acoustic instruments is often jarring and sexy, as when Maria Ka celebrates the Zodiac sign of Scorpio. And the album closes with an absolute goddamned banger, “Ven Ikh Kuk Oyf (When I Look At)” that brings Yiddish culture storming onto the dancefloor. It’s a thunderous dance tune that celebrates identity and remaining true to one’s culture. “I am more from the distant fields,” sings Ka, squaring the circle between that which the modern world left behind, but then embraces.
Maria Ka’s work is profoundly moving: this is avant-garde music by choice of language and daring musical settings. Yet, the album is also strangely accessible. It feels like outsider music moving towards center stage -- demanding it – and insisting on being accepted on its own terms without compromising an empowering political and feminist worldview. The fiercely independent and eccentric matriarchs of my family and yours are enfolded within this brilliant, starry, original work. Maria Ka’s work is also profound punk music, a resistant force arriving with a call to action. Der Hemshekh signals a paradigm shift for contemporary Yiddish music, highlighting that the language has much to offer our navigation of the modern world.  From: https://www.rootsworld.com/reviews/ka-23.shtml

Bhopal's Flowers - Byrd Of The Tree

A collective of like-minded musicians led by Lionel Pezzano and based in Montreal, Canada, Bhopal’s Flowers are inspired by both Eastern and Western influences in their soulful, sophisticated approach to songcraft. Guided by the spiritual science of Anthroposophy, the band seeks truth through beauty, with each song blending modal and harmonic systems in a dancing constellation of esoteric concepts, powered by sitar and 12-string Rickenbacker guitar and driven by catchy melodies and intricate psychedelic arrangements. The band recently released ‘Alstroemeria’ via Sugarbush Records and Kool Kat Musik. ‘Alstroemeria’ is a psychedelic concept record, mapping a 24 hours cycle, in which each song of the cycle is linked with a specific time of the day/night, slicing its journey in two distinct parts: a bright and vintage Sunshine Pop on disc 1, facing a deep and Modern Moonlight pop on disc 2. Exploring the deepest mysteries of life and drawing an esoteric vision of the soul’s materialization from upper skies to down below, ‘Alstroemeria’ tales the cosmic and earthly adventures of the human soul, surrounded by numerous guides, divinities and historical characters: Galilee, the three Magi, Jesus Christ, Ettore Majorana, Archangel Uriel, Nikola Tesla, Angels Seraph & Metatron, Rudolf Steiner, Swami Vivekananda, Paul Dirac, Napoleon Bonaparte, Yahveh Zarathustra, Virgin Mary, Adam, Christopher Columbus, St John the Evangelist, Charles Darwin, Lord Krishna.

Would you like to talk a bit about your background?

Lionel Pezzano: I learned the guitar when I was 11 years old, rocked in country music repertoire. After ten years learning, playing and recording a very large music repertoire, I had the opportunity to learn the sétâr (a Persian luth) with Koorosh Nowroosi, a master of Persian music who taught the traditional Persian repertoire, the radif. In the meantime, I became the disciple of the classical North Indian musician (sarod player) and composer, Pandit Alok Lahiri, who taught me the sitar, in its most traditional way through the tradition of Guru shishya parampara: an old form of teaching who requires to the student to live in the house of his teacher (his Guru), to give full dedication to learn Hindustani music. After decades of this Eastern music studies, I went back to rock’n roll with Bhopal’s Flowers, in which I never really included these exotic elements for personal reasons. It is only in 2016, when I bought a Rickenbacker 360/12 that the band took this psychedelic turn.

When did you decide that you wanted to start writing and performing your own music? What brought that about for you?

As my uncle was a live and studio musician, I grew up very young with this way of life model in the back of my mind. I used to join him during his rehearsals and his show that the concept of writing and performing music was naturally written in my subconscious. So, as soon as I started to learn the guitar, writing and playing my own music was part of the deal.

What does the name “Bhopal’s Flower” refer to in the context of the band name?

It refers to the Bhopal disaster that happened in 1984 in India, a chemical substance has been spread by a lack of security of an industrial company located there. As flowers are in general expressing life and hope, I did this association with the city of Bhopal, mainly because at that time, the music I wrote was fed by this antagonism: deep and sad lyrics, on easy-listening melodies. The deep meaning of the name Bhopal’s Flowers is that after the tide, there’s always a rainbow that will come, but to enjoy the rainbow, you first have to struggle through the tide.

How do you usually approach music making?

I am always seeking for melody strong enough to be played over and over. If I don’t feel hooked by the melody or, at least, the harmonic structure I wrote, I just give up the song until the next one comes to me. Melody is the holy part of the music, the one that comes from the Devachan, the place we go during our deep sleep, and when we die. Some songs are directly coming from Hindustani ragas, like ‘Hail To Her Sun’ (based on raga ‘Ahir Bhairav’) or ‘Ohm Namah Shivaya’ (based on raga ‘Paramshwari’). Then, there is no rules, I sometimes write and record the song in one shot, like I did for ‘Midnight Girl’, ‘Cosmic Reflector’ or ‘When The Sinner Becomes A Saint (Then The Devil Bleeds)’. But things can be way more complicated, like it happened with ‘Mysteries Of Love or Enjoy Your Life on Earth’: once recorded and demoed, I had to struggle and investigate so hard to bring the song where it had to go. These two different situations reflect the fact that music already pre-exists to the composer. Musician’s job is to catch songs like they would catch fish, or translate something untouchable by our senses to make it accessible to our ears. But sometimes, we can’t see the song properly at first sight. But once we get rid of the fog that blurs the perception we have of the music, the songs appear the way they are, ready to shake ears of the listeners.

I first heard your music via the Hypnotic Bridge Records 7″, which was perfect and was hoping for a full album!

Such sweet memories are popping in my heart when you talk about this single released on Hypnotic Bridge Records, mainly because I wrote and produced these two songs (as well as the design and visuals) in the same approach I did ‘Alstroemeria’: a job of investigation and readings led by a will to open an hidden door to another dimension. I don’t know how often it happens at Hypnotic Bridge Records, but my e-epistolary relationship with Stu, the man behind this company, has largely contributed to the successful result of this single.

You already self-released an album in 2018?

Indeed, ‘Lovesongs & Psychedelic Tones’ was released on our own through Bandcamp in 2018. I wrote that album in two or three months, fed by the creative power of the Rickenbacker 360-12 I just bought at that time. Surprisingly, this album has been pretty successful for an LP launched without any promotional support, label or marketing plan. Mainly I guess, because the UK magazine Shindig! has given a 5 stars review to the record. I’d love to find a label interested in a vinyl reissue of this LP, it has only been released on CD and digital, and I know for sure that a whole part of our audience would love to get that record on vinyl.

How would you describe your sound?

An anthroposophic message powered by a Rickenbacker 360-12 on a bed of tanpura buzz, ornamented by a lyrical sitar. I assume that it sounds like an ice cream advertisement on a Deli’s menu!

There aren’t many bands that successfully employ sitar in their music.

Probably because they haven’t spent enough time to learn Hindustani music tradition properly before to exploit (and sometimes spoil) it. On the other hand, those who give enough devotion to this art to have a better knowledge of the tradition, are often leaving western music on the side to give 100% of their time to Indian music. I am in between, out of the frame, as I always was in my life. Harrison stopped practicing the sitar after he realized that there will always be better sitar player than him in somewhere in India (apparently Clapton would have told him: “you should better practice your guitar than the sitar”), I know that Crispian Mills from Kula Shaker was also learning the sarod. I think that it’s important to find a middle ground, continuing to take lessons with your Guru, practice your instrument as much as you can, to one day, being able to give a humble but good rendition of Hindustani music. Nowadays and unlike the innocent wave of the 60s, no matter what kind of music you play with your sitar, you should always keep in mind that if the sitar part you play would make an Indian musician laugh or feel ashamed for you, it means that your song should remain on your PC before to be proudly shared. It may sound a bit conservative but sitar belongs to Hindustani music tradition which is intrinsically conservative.

You have a new album ready, ‘Alstroemeria: A Journey On Earth And Beyond’. It’s released via Sugarbush Records as a double vinyl. Are you excited about it?

I am really happy about that release! Finding a tasty label like Sugarbush Records, courageous enough to press a double vinyl looks like a stars alignment to me. This will actually be the first time Bhopal’s Flowers’ music will be pressed on a 33 rpm. The concept of two records based on the Sunshine Pop (dis one) and Moonlight Pop (disc 2) ecosystem has imposed itself naturally during the time we recorded that album, I feel so blessed that Sugarbush embraced that concept by pressing a double vinyl.

There’s a lot of material on it. Is it a concept album? If so, what’s the story behind it?

Indeed, ‘Alstroemeria’ is a concept album, actually, the logical following part of our single at Hypnotic Bridge Record. These two records are the two sides of the same coin, mainly because the tracks are linked with a specific time of the day / night, like it is for ragas in India. If you go to India, you’ll never hear a morning raga performed at night time. We have lost this tradition in the West, but it gives to the music its full meaning. The Gregorian chant sang with specific modes, scales and lyrics for the monk prayers marks the last tail of this tradition of music linked with time of the day / night. Since the Renaissance time, as the self of the humans grows more and more in his being (which has given the concept of composition), we have lost that track. It is now time to combine modernity: the established “self” in our entities, with and older tradition: individual entities that are part of a group entitled universe. As the album is split in two parts, Sunshine Pop (from 5 am to 6 pm on disc one) and Moonlight Pop (from 7 pm to 4 am on disc two), there is an analogy between the early hours in which the album starts and the birth of the human. As long as the songs go by, it draws not only a 24h path within a day, but also the life of a human being on Earth, we lift our souls day by day as we grow old, to final go back home to our original state, the Devachan. As we never walk on our own, the album is surrounded by numerous guides, divinities and historical characters: Galilee, the three Magi, Ettore Majorana, Lord Krishna, Archangel Uriel, Nikola Tesla, Zarathustra, Virgin Mary, Adam, Christopher Columbus, Jesus Christ, Paul Dirac, Napoleon Bonaparte, Yahveh, angels Seraph & Metatron, Rudolf Steiner, St John The Evangelist, Charles Darwin & Swami Vivakananda.

Can you share some further details on how your latest album was recorded?

There’s a lot of back and forth between my home studio in my apartment and the Mandragore Studio where I do my recordings and mixing. All the tracks have been composed and recorded on a Rickenbacker 360/12 played on an AC-30 and a janglebox-compressor through an old Midas board. When the songs are completely arranged, Jeremy Thoma played the drums at the very end of the recording process, the opposite way the band usually record an album, but I guess this is the way we do the thing in Bhopal. As said earlier, some tracks required to be arranged and re-arranged, mixed and remixed to final find the right balance. Some of them, like ‘Napoleon Candy Sweet’ have almost been composed and recorded in one shot … except that this one had to be re-recorded because I accidentally deleted the project from my computers and back up, without having at least a mix or a bounce of the track!

How pleased were you with the sound of the album?

As happy when you do the recording and mixing on your own, you always want some more, you always want to improve your playing, your takes and your mix. As an engineer, I learn so much every day, record after record, track after track. Of course, the Sunshine Pop disc on that records, sounds more vintage, so it has been a completely different approach of the recording and the mix than the Moonlight Pop disc, more modern. But I am really happy of the sound and the production, it gathers both sides of Bhopal’s Flowers’ sound, an old fashioned way to make music coupled with standard of the contemporary audio gear.

What are some future plans? How are you coping with the pandemic?

I am currently recording our forthcoming record, ‘Joy Of The 4th’. As I recently became a happy father 3 months back, I took a little break to delay the recording of the second part of the album to this summer. The track list will of course be shorter than the one of ‘Alstroemeria’, but the album will be really colourful, psychedelic, filled with tanpura, sitar and mellotron. We also have a new line up on stage, as Jeremy, our original drummer, has definitely left North America for Europe. We will release a live recording of this new live band next September.

Is there an album that has profoundly affected you more than others?

Definitely yes, classics we all love from the Byrds, The Beach Boys or The Association. ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ by Kula Shaker and ‘Healing Hands’ by Crispian Mills (only available on YouTube!) have been an album I listen over and over. But I most recently fell in love with The Seekers’ ‘Seen In Green’ and for and The Searchers’ ‘Take Me for What I’m Worth’.

Are any of you involved in any other bands or do you have any active side-projects going on at this point?

Yes, I drive another project named Youngstown, a country’s billy trio that plays bluegrass-like music on amphetamines. Our second album is recorded and on mixing process. I focused on Bhopal’s Flowers since 2017, but I have many recordings to release. I used to collaborate with the science fiction writer Maurice G. Dantec who sadly passed away in 2016. A lot of our common work has not be released and I want to finalize this project in 2021. I am also daily practicing the sitar and weekly with a tabla player named Saulo Olmedo Evans. A busy schedule that sometimes requires me to make drastic choices regarding the project I can put the focus on.

Let’s end this interview with some of your favourite albums. Have you found something new lately you would like to recommend to our readers?

I am not so much aware about new bands release, but I am waiting to receive by post the new Electric Looking Glass vinyl LP, an interesting baroque pop from L.A. I’ve been blast by the last single of The Communicant ‘She Moves The Sky’ as well as the last LP of Constantine ‘Memory Of A Summer Day’. The French organ and composer Shepard Electrosoft in Public Garden has released last year an uncommon musical phenomenon named ‘Mountains’ sadly ignored by listeners and the music industry. As said Arvo Pärt: “miracles happen in secret”.

Thank you. Last word is yours.

Always keep in mind that Love is the force that has to be integrated to our environment in this Earth incarnation, the same way wisdom has been integrated to our world during the previous incarnation of our planet. Music will play its part in this process, so thank you so much for spreading this art all over the place and to take the time to listen to it the way you do. It seems meaningless but it brings so much to mankind’s future.

From: https://www.psychedelicbabymag.com/2021/07/bhopals-flowers-interview-new-album-alstroemeria-a-journey-on-earth-beyond.html

Zepparella - Kashmir

Gretchen Menn grew up loving Led Zeppelin, but she never actually learned how to play one of the band’s songs until she had to – and then she had to learn a whole boatload of them, and fast. It was in 2005 when the Bay Area guitarist, then portraying Angus Young in the all-female AC/DC tribute band AC/DSHE, accepted an invitation from that group’s drummer, Clementine, to form a similarly configured Led Zeppelin cover outfit – Zepparella. Clementine even went ahead and booked shows, which meant that Menn had to immerse herself in all things Jimmy Page, with no time to spare.
“I was so green at first,” Menn says. “I think I had played the riff to Black Dog, but that was about it. I had eight weeks from the time Clementine said that I could be in the band till we had our first show. And as everybody knows, Zeppelin songs aren’t like AC/DC songs. They’re not just cool riff, guitar solo and a few parts. There’s a lot of curveballs in Zeppelin’s material. There’s so many different sounds and song structures to consider. The Lemon Song alone has so many things going on. You can’t gloss over any of it. You can’t just play something and go, ‘Oh, it’s kind of like this.’ You have to get it really right.”
Over the past decade and a half, Zepparella (which also includes singer Anna Kristina and bassist Holly West) have established themselves as one of the most popular and in-demand Zeppelin tribute acts around. Their video rendition of When the Levee Breaks has amassed a staggering 18 million views on YouTube. “That’s just remarkable,” says Menn. “We did that video to show promoters and venues what our deal was. We had no idea it would blow up like that.” For Menn, who earned a Bachelor of Arts Degree in music from Smith College in Massachusetts, the experience of playing Led Zeppelin’s music night after night has brought with it the kind of musical education she couldn’t have gotten in school.
“The amount of practice that I’ve had to put into learning Jimmy Page’s parts has been very intense but also extremely rewarding,” she says. “Beyond that, Zepparella has really forced me to kind of grow up on stage. We’re a band, and we go through everything any other band experiences. We have onstage mishaps and gear meltdowns, and we’ve had to learn how not to get thrown by that stuff. You have to toughen up fast to do what we do. The audience demands a professional show, and that’s what we deliver. So being in Zepparella has prepared me for whatever might come in whatever else I might do.”
As it was for every other performing unit in the world, the Covid pandemic wiped Zepparella’s dance card clean for 2020, and it wasn’t until last summer that they could resume touring on a limited basis. The time offstage afforded Menn, who has previously released two solo albums (2011’s Hale Souls and 2016’s Abandon All Hope), the opportunity to begin work on a third album, tentatively titled Purgatory. It’s even given her some time to brush up on her technique. “Right now, I’m working on improvisation,” she says, “and what I mean by that is, I’m concentrating on authentic improvisation. So it’s not just moving my fingers through familiar patterns and knowing that it sounds OK, but I’m actually trying to construct ideas and phrases that have little of an intention behind them. Which sounds a little funny, but it’s kind of like you’re speaking and you don’t know what you’re going to say, but you know the next idea you want to convey. You’re kind of taking out the random nature of improvisation.”

Let’s talk about your playing history. When did you start on the guitar?

“I was a teenager, maybe 15 or 16, like an older teenager.”

Is it true that your dad used to be editor of Guitar Player magazine?

“No, that’s correct – he was. My parents just kind of let me decide what I wanted to do, but they were always encouraging. I didn’t really know much about what my dad did. He actually left Guitar Player years before I started playing, but when I did pick up the guitar, he was like, ‘Honey, I do know a little bit about this…’ To me, it’s a testament to how non-intrusive he was in my development, but he was certainly more than happy to take me to the right areas of the CD store when I was like, ‘I like Led Zeppelin’. He was like, ‘Well, you should check out Jeff Beck then’.”

So was Zeppelin your gateway drug into liking guitar music?

“They were, but so were other bands. I just found that I loved the energy I heard in guitar players. When I was 15, I started listening to Django Reinhardt on my dad’s recommendation. I liked Extreme and Mr Big. People who weren’t in the know thought they were ‘chick bands’ because of their ballads, but I was like, ‘Uh, have you actually heard their albums?’ I was so into the guitar playing and the solos.”

At this point, were you already seriously studying the guitar?

“I was, but as soon as I got into it – toward my junior and senior years in high school – I had to pause because I was dealing with college applications and stuff. Although I was pretty serious in my listening. I was way into Steve Morse and Steve Vai.”

As a player, were you a natural, or did you have to really labour over it?

“I had a couple teachers who told me I was really quick to get started, but I didn’t let that affect me. I kind of realised early on that, while I might have some natural ability, I had a lot of work ahead of me.”

On your solo records, you can hear influences like Steve Morse and Steve Vai, but also hear Ritchie Blackmore.

“Definitely Blackmore. I love the classical element in his playing.”

What about traditional blues? Did you get into that?

“Sure. I had the Robert Johnson box set. I always loved BB King and Robben Ford – they were big for me. Currently, I think Derek Trucks is about as untouchable as you can get.”

Even though you’re into guitarists who can shred, it doesn’t sound like you got into the ‘math rock’ guys.

“No, I didn’t get into that, really. I do write stuff in different time signatures and odd-time, but to me, the trick is that it should still sound like music. I mean, listen to Zeppelin’s The Ocean. That’s all over the place in terms of being odd. But it shouldn’t sound… cerebral. Stravinsky is one of my favourite composers, and I study the scores all the time. To me, his stuff is like prog metal.”

How did you start learning about gear – how to pair which guitar with which amp?

“To be honest, I’m lazy about that. I was lucky in that the first guitar I got was a Music Man Silhouette, which is the same guitar that I play today. I have different guitars, but I love the Music Man. When I started playing in Zepparella, it was like, ‘Well, I’m going to have to get Les Paul and a Marshall’. When I plugged in, I said, ‘Yep. That sounds the way it’s supposed to sound’.”

Being in a tribute band offers more of an immediate chance for employment than, say, being in a band that plays original music. Did you find that alluring?

“There’s certainly a lot to that, but there was also a musical part to it – getting a paid musical education. I was going to learn my favourite songs and solos, and I would play them night after night. That was true to some extent in the AC/DC tribute band. You can’t be lazy in a tribute band. People watch you and judge you very critically. The prospect of public humiliation is a real incentive to get things right.”

You guys stay pretty close to the original records – is that what fans want?

“Yeah, we try to. On the other hand, nobody took more liberties with Zeppelin than Zeppelin, so one could make a great case for making the songs completely wacky. But you know, it’s great music and we try to honour that. I’m always a fan first. At times, we improvise, and I think that’s important. Zeppelin were improvisatory, so if we didn’t uphold that tradition, we’d be missing the point. Sometimes I extend sections, and there are places in which I haven’t learned parts note for note. I weave a little of my own stuff in there, but I always try to stay within the Zeppelin universe.”

What about a song like Heartbreaker? Page’s solo is a little, shall we say, not precise.

“It’s interesting you bring that up. The Heartbreaker solo is ridiculously hard to play. It’s way easier to play anything by Ritchie Blackmore or Randy Rhoads or Eric Johnson. But with the Heartbreaker solo, it’s like you’re watching a Charlie Chaplin movie. He has those moments when he’s falling, but then he steadies himself. That takes such control and aptitude. Staying in control while looking like you’re out of control, but at the same time you seem graceful… it’s really hard.”

After playing Zeppelin’s music so much, do you ever have to “de-Page” yourself when you go back to your own music?

“It’s funny you would ask that. In fact, it can be the other way around. When I have to go into Page-land, I have to try to remember to put aside all the other stuff that doesn’t belong there. It’s easy for me to snap back to being myself. Actually, when I did my second album, Abandon All Hope, it occurred to me that it didn’t sound even remotely like I had listened to Led Zeppelin. I had to actually give myself permission to be like, ‘It’s okay to let a little bit of the Zeppelin show through’.”

No, it doesn’t sound like Zeppelin. It’s almost as if Kate Bush decided she wanted to make a guitar record.

“Oh, my god! That’s like the best compliment ever. She’s one of my favourites. I’ve studied her concept albums and picked up a lot from her.”

The last question is maybe the most important one: have you ever met any Led Zeppelin members?

“I met Robert Plant very briefly, and he was perfectly delightful. I haven’t met John Paul Jones or Jimmy Page, and honestly, I’m okay with that. My feeling is, I don’t ever need to meet my heroes. I don’t see how them meeting me could make their lives any better. Why do they need yet another person to be like, ‘Hi, you’re Jimmy Page.’ Cool! Now what? Now I can just brag to people that I’ve met him. Of course, now that I say that, if the situation ever presented itself, I would be there with bells on. [Laughs] Who am I kidding?”

From: https://guitar.com/features/interviews/zepparellas-gretchen-menn-led-zeppelin/

Permanent Clear Light - Ribes Nigrum

Permanent Clear Light is a great psychedelic rock band from Finland. They released their debut album, ‘Beyond These Things’ in 2014. After that, the group has released several singles, EPs and appeared on a number of compilation albums on the British Fruits de Mer label. After a creative break, Permanent Clear Light released its second album, ‘Cosmic Comics’ (Sulatron Records), which shows that the band has travelled a long way through the spheres since their debut.

What’s the concept behind Permanent Clear Light and when did you form this group?

Matti Laitinen: The basic idea is to make our own music the way we want to make it without anybody saying what we should do. We’re all fans of the 60s psychedelia so that is the obvious influence as well as early 70s Finnish prog rock. On the other hand, all of us have always been open to all kinds of good music from pop to jazz. We started working together in 2008, though we had known each other for a long time and even been in some bands together.

Would you like to talk a bit about your background?

I’ve been in a couple of rock bands before. Markku has played in a folk rock jazz band and Arto has played everything from rockabilly to jazz. In our civil lives I’ve worked as a teacher, Markku works at a university and Arto in informatics.

What’s the concept behind Permanent Clear Light? How would you describe your sound?

Our sound is based a lot on keyboards like the mellotron, synths etc. On the other hand, there are a lot of guitars there, too, but not in the form of long solos. We like to create sceneries, pictures, fragments of a movie. The long instrumental sequences are an essential part of our music. The songs usually have lots of layers with everything carefully planned to make an entity. We like to think that we sound like nobody else.

How do you usually approach music making? How important is improvisation for you?

We usually work independently first. Meaning that everyone develops his ideas on his own, we send our ideas to the others, they add something or suggest changes. After that we get together, typically for a week at some isolated place, jam, put everything together and record. After this all the material goes to Arto, who mixes it and adds some stuff and sends it back to us. This finally develops into the final product. We try to avoid doing, for example, the vocals over again and again. If there are mistakes or irritating details, so be it.

Can you share some further details about how your latest album ‘Cosmic Comics’ was recorded?

Most of it was recorded at Markku’s “forest studio”. Basically a log cabin by a lake in the middle of nowhere. Some tracks we made at my summer house. ‘Cosmic Comics’ was actually ready for a long time. When we finally got in contact with Dave at Sulatron records, he suggested some minor changes and we made them and then the album was out really quickly. Some of the material has actually been released by Fruits de Mer records as singles, split singles etc. By the way, a big thanks goes to Eroc for the excellent mastering.

Where did you record it? What kind of equipment did you use and who was the producer? How many hours did you spend in the studio?

As mentioned above, most of it was recorded in the two country studios. Everything is produced by our multi-instrumentalist Arto, who happens to be very good with the recording as well. Nowadays everything is recorded on a computer. It makes the process a lot easier than dealing with tapes. For the equipment we use a normal drum set, different kinds of keyboards and suitable guitars and amps from our, or mostly Markku’s, immense guitar collection. For a band with such a keyboardish sound, we have lots of guitars available. Probably more than any other band around. When we are recording, we work from dawn to dusk for several days in a row. We have found this way of working very productive. New ideas keep popping out all the time during these sessions. The sessions also involve a lot of discussing all kinds of things, drinking, going to sauna, swimming in the lake etc.

Are any of you involved in any other bands or do you have any active side-projects going on at this point?

Arto plays some jazz in his free time and he and I also have a side-band that plays more straightforward rock. Markku has recorded some tracks for his international friends. He has also been working on some avantgarde-stuff.

How would you compare it to ‘Beyond These Things’ from seven years ago? At that time you also recorded a couple of singles.

We did some singles for Fruits de Mer. I think ‘Beyond These Things’ is our favorite baby. I still like to listen to it sometimes. It has some titles like ‘Higher Than The Sun’ that are really good. Still, my favorite PCL track ’25 German Boy Scouts’ isn’t on our albums. It was released by Fruits de Mer as a single. To compare the two albums is really hard. I think that we can still do a lot better than we did on these two and we have already started working on our third album.

Were you inspired by psychoactive substances like LSD at the time of writing the album?

If we used them? No. But obviously they have influenced this kind of music a lot. Markku has been propagating the use of some substances for medical purposes, but I personally am not interested in taking any kinds of drugs.

How are you coping with the current world situation?

I am staying in Madrid, Spain at the moment. The other guys are in Finland. These are like two different worlds. In Madrid you hardly dare to go out with all the restrictions around. In Finland, where I spent the summer, everything was totally different. People living relatively normally. When it comes to politics, we noticed that for the third album we already have some really angry texts. I personally am worried about the rise of nationalism in Europe. I wish people would study the history a bit more and learn from it.

What are some future plans?

I’m moving back to Finland in the spring. I’m already staying there for a month in October-November for an operation. We will keep on putting the third album together, hopefully with a longer recording session next summer to get it out before Christmas 2021.

Let’s end this interview with some of your favourite albums. Have you found something new lately you would like to recommend to our readers?

My favorite albums are CSNY’s ‘Deja Vu’, Argent’s first album, King Crimson’s ‘In the Court of the Crimson King’, Love’s ‘Forever Changes’, Wigwam’s ‘Fairyport’, everything by the Move and some by MC5. All of it old stuff. I don’t listen to new bands a lot, but I like for example Dungen (or is that an old band already).

From: https://www.psychedelicbabymag.com/2020/11/permanent-clear-light-interview.html