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hldailyupdate · 8 months

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Many know Louis Tomlinson as a Doncaster lad-turned-pop-icon and part of era-defining boyband, One Direction. But despite his superstar status, the 31-year-old has never lost touch with his relaxed Northern soul. It’s been central to everything he puts his mind to, from music to football… and now, fashion.

After fighting his way through X Factor, growing his talent in One Direction, and going solo after their break-up in 2015, Tomlinson split fresh ground while keeping authenticity at the forefront. Embracing the rockstar lifestyle, he has traveled worldwide on his own terms, revolutionizing his sound through chart-topping hits, including Bigger Than Me, Change, and Silver Tongues.

Now fiercely independent, Tomlinson is continuing to make strides that set him apart from the crowd, releasing his debut solo album Walls in early 2020. Leaving the pop-forward One Direction sound behind, Tomlinson embarked on a journey of self-discovery by embracing his British roots and revitalizing his musical journey with a fresh mindset.

After returning to London from the third edition of his Away From Home festival in Lido di Camaiore, Italy, Tomlinson prepares to continue his global album tour for Faith in the Future across Europe. But there’s much more than music on his mind these days – before he jets off on tour, he’s sitting down with Hypebeast to discuss all things 28, his all-new streetwear label that embodies everything he has been, is, and will be.

Growing up in Northern England naturally gravitated Tomlinson to football, selling pies at his boyhood club, Doncaster Rovers. But he’s kept a keen eye on fashion since his early childhood. “When I grew up, I viewed Doncaster as a working-class town. Now, when I go back to Doncaster, the streets have a real sense of style. That wasn’t the norm for me growing up; there was just scruffy and cool — there was really no in-between. We couldn’t afford really nice clothes, so it was just about working with what you got.”

Standing out has always been of utmost importance for Tomlinson, aligning his laidback attitude with the clothes on his back. Football tops were always a staple, taking to vintage and charity shops to find hidden gems that strayed from normality. “It was always important for me to look cool as a young lad, and I always enjoyed wearing good clothes. You might think, in a place like Doncaster, that it isn’t about fashion — and fashion might be the wrong word — because the thing that would turn people’s noses was that everyone is striving to look cool.”

Known for wearing striped tees and suspenders in One Direction, Tomlinson grew into his true self after the band’s hiatus, returning to his Doncaster roots and embracing comfort at all times. “As a young lad going into a business like this, you are surrounded by people telling you what’s cool and what isn’t. I’d say the boys could relate to this; you have to go through the motions of letting the industry tell you what they think you should do — because you don’t have enough confidence in that world yet to say: actually, no, I want to dress how I want to dress,” the singer-songwriter explains.

He grew up wearing essential British tracksuits, football tops, and trainers, drastically different from the boyband style that had every member dressed in “uniform.” “It’s only as I’ve grown confident in myself that I started to revert back to how I dressed as a young lad, just a kind of modern example of that. I really do wear Doncaster on every item of clothing that I put on, even if it’s subconscious, it’s so much a part of who I am.”

Launching 28 is a tribute to his humble beginnings in music, fashion, and sport, representing his Doncaster Rovers squad number and his lifetime devotion to the football club. The brand idea came to him nearly a decade ago, taking a closer look at standard tour merchandise and finding missing pieces, feeling “a creative itch that I wanted to scratch.”

28’s first drop is a tribute to all things football, embracing the beautiful game through vintage-inspired sports silhouettes destined for summertime. Checkered green tracksuits are ideal for pre-game antics, featuring distorted and faded patterns alongside “OFFICIAL PROGRAMME” collared jerseys.

While concert apparel caterers to the general public, 28 allows his artistic talents to run wild. “That’s why 28 excites me. It’s something that can be a little bit more tailored, a little bit more stylized. I suppose it’s similar to songwriting… seeing how deep your imagination can go when creating clothes.”

When designing 28’s first drop, Tomlinson pushed comfort forward through quality craftsmanship and refined fabric manipulations. His ideas feature heavily across every design, architected on lightweight hoodies, turtleneck collars, and distressed knitwear. Abstract floral illustrations bloom on additional designs, complementing the collection with a neutral color palette. Collections will release on the 28th of each month, expanding its sportswear identity one step at a time.

28 is undeniably football-focused, making clothes he would identify with as a young boy growing up in “Donny.” Tomlinson aims to bring his community together with interactive drops and a story to tell, enlisting emerging creatives to front the brand’s first campaign. “Community is something that runs throughout everything I do, and after getting the casting ideas for the models, I knew I wanted to use street models. I didn’t want to use that traditional model face because that’s not what I grew up with,” Tomlinson says.

“If I picture that rough lad I grew up with in Doncaster, he certainly didn’t have that look — he just looked cool in the clothes,” Tomlinson says with a wide smile, “There’s a beautiful authenticity to that. I think there’s a more interesting way and authentic way of telling these stories for 28.” While Tomlinson is the brand’s Creative Director, he sees 28 standing on its own two feet without his face attached, building a core community within its evolving identity.

So what’s in store next for Tomlinson? “I’m going back on tour, which is my favorite thing to do. At some point, there’ll be a new record. I don’t know when, though; I’m trying not to put too much pressure on myself and just trying to enjoy it. I’m mostly tour-focused right now — that’s why I love creating 28 — because it means that when my brain is all on touring and music, it’s creatively fulfilling to get into something else and scratch that itch.”

via HYPEBEAST. (28 August 2023)

#louis tomlinson #louis update #28 clothing #hypebeast #article #august 2023

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louistomlinsoncouk · 8 months

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#louis tomlinson #press #28aug23 #28 clothing

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thestylesindependent · 1 year

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Harry Styles has had one hell of a year, ensuring that going forward his career will never be the same as it was. In addition to the release of his third solo studio album, Harry's House, which debuted at the top of the Billboard Hot 200, he hit movie theaters in both the paranoia thriller Don't Worry Darling and gay romance My Policeman.

In addition to drawing notice for his first leading roles on the big screen, Styles made headlines (for many reasons) with his press tours for both movies as they premiered at glamorous fall film festivals. Then, there's the world tour, which has been entertaining flocks of screaming fans since September 2021 and isn't slated to end until next summer.

To honor the former British boy bander as one of EW's 2022 Entertainers of the Year, Big Mouth creator Nick Kroll — who acted opposite Styles in Don't Worry Darling — pays tribute to the pop and movie star.

If Harry Styles were just to put out an album or just go on tour or just put out one movie, that would be an accomplishment. The fact that he is able to do all of these things in the same year — and then, still be a human being who you can drop in and have a real conversation with — is incredible. The elephant in the room is all the noise around his personal life. To navigate all of that, stay above the fray and to continue to try to make his art, it's a tightrope to walk. He is able to navigate it with a ton of class and grace.

When you watch him on stage, there's a buoyancy. There's clearly real joy in his performance. That's not dissimilar to how he is as a person. When you're with him, it doesn't feel like you're getting a show. It feels like you're getting a chat. On set, it surprised me how genuinely connected he was to everyone he came into contact with. Oftentimes people who are super unbelievably famous have to create some emotional boundaries. There was not a wall up, which frankly there often has to be just to make it through a day without having all of your energy sucked out of you. There wasn't a day where he didn't show up on set with coffee or donuts or extra vitamin C packets for people. He was always providing for people in a very nice way. One of the things that I enjoyed about him as an artist — but also now as someone who I know — is that he really doesn't take himself, or any of it, too seriously. When you're someone in his position, that's hard.

As an actor, I really wasn't surprised that he was so natural. One of the biggest performers in the world would be a great performer. He was so collaborative and open and fun to watch and play with. If you're used to performing live, there's nothing better than finding other people who enjoy spontaneity. In almost every scene that I was in with him, there's a found moment.

There's a moment the film where I back up, we're going in our car and I salute him and then give him the finger, and then he looks back at me and gives me the finger. The best thing you can do is find someone who wants to feel alive in a scene with you. Anyone who's watched him perform live has seen that. He feels very present, whether you're in a conversation with him or you're in a scene with him or you're watching him live on stage. It's why he's so f---ing charming — you feel like you're watching someone who is in the room with you at that moment.

He's somehow able to be an actor in two very different films, and while all of that has been going on, he has been on a world tour for a year and a half getting hit with Skittles. It's a weird thing to say, but he made me much cooler with my nieces and nephews (and many, many people) by very publicly kissing me at the Venice Film Festival. I want to rewrite the story where Prince Charming kisses a frog. I'm the frog, and I become a frog with a little crown on top. It was one of the most surreal moments in my life. That was not planned. We kiss in the first scene of Don't Worry Darling, but nobody had seen it, so it just appeared that Harry Styles had grabbed me for no reason and kissed me. No matter what I accomplish in my life, it will probably go somewhere in my obituary: "father, comedian, creator, and also someone kissed by Harry Styles." I gotta say, I ain't mad at it. That's his power.

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black-arcana · 4 days

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AMY LEE Shoots Down Rumor She Is LINKIN PARK's New Singer, But Says She 'Might' Be Willing To 'Do It Part Time'

In a new interview with Canada's iHeart Radio, EVANESCENCE's Amy Lee was asked about the recent rumors that LINKIN PARK has recruited a female singer and some LP fans' desire to see her step in as the replacement for that band's late vocalist Chester Bennington.

"That is an incredible compliment," she said after being told that she was a fan favorite to fill the slot (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET). "I have not heard that. No, I have not been contacted [by LINKIN PARK] or anything like that. But [I'm a] huge fan feel like our worlds, our fanbases are a lot of the same people."

She continued: "That's really sweet. We never… Well, did we play shows [together]? I don't know if [EVANESCENCE and LINKIN PARK] were on a festival together or whatever. We met. We were in the studio at the same time. When we were making 'Fallen', I just briefly got to have a conversation or two with Chester. He was really sweet.

"But no, it's not true," she clarified in regard to the rumors that could be LINKIN PARK's new singer. "But that's awesome. They should ask me about that. I don't have a ton of free time, but I might do it part time."

The rumor about LINKIN PARK recruiting a female vocalist was apparently started by ORGY frontman Jay Gordon who mentioned during a radio interview that he had "heard" that they were working with a "girl singer now". When pressed, Gordon continued by saying: "Don't quote me on that. I'm not sure who the singer is going to be, but I heard it was gonna be female. They might just try to move on like that. That ought to be interesting." Jay later seemingly walked back his comments, writing in a Facebook post that he knew "nothing about any of that" and accused "people" of taking his words "out of context."

During EVANESCENCE's 2022 tour with HALESTORM, Lee and HALESTORM frontwoman Lzzy Hale performed a cover version of LINKIN PARK's "Heavy" at every stop. Lzzy spoke about the decision to cover the track in an interview with the 105.7 The Point radio station. She said: "[Amy and I] were lobbing a couple of ideas back and forth and then, all of a sudden, we landed on LINKIN PARK. And [we thought], you know what? That would be really cool because inadvertently it would be a tribute to Chester, but also, everything that this song has been about, we've all been through that — everybody. And so it's almost this like very church moment where you walk out onstage and you're, like, 'All right. This is my church. These are my people. We're all doing this together.'"

LINKIN PARK has just released a career-spanning greatest-hits album, "Papercuts (Singles Collection 2000-2023)". The record also features a previously unreleased track with Bennington, "Friendly Fire", which was recorded during the sessions for the group's final studio album, 2017's "One More Light". Bennington died later that year.

In a 2004 interview with Revolver magazine, Chester talked about meeting EVANESCENCE in the studio, and how Amy explained to him that her record label tried to make them sound like LINKIN PARK.

"I met [EVANESCENCE] in the studio when they were recording their record. We were both recording in the same building. I was talking to [Amy]. And she was nice. She said, 'We're having these problems. Everyone at our label wants us to be you.' I told her that's lame. She agreed. She said they went as far as wanting to ask [LINKIN PARK's] Mike [Shinoda] to do a part on a song. She said, 'We knew he wouldn't do it.' So they're running around trying to get guys in other bands to do it like he would. ' I told her to be herself and tell the label to put it where the sun doesn't shine. But the next thing I heard was 'Bring Me To Life' with a guy that sounded just like Mike. It was a little upsetting."

In a 2018 interview with SiriusXM, Shinoda spoke about how he was asked to guest on "Bring Me To Life" and explained why he turned it down.

"I remember when EVANESCENCE first came out, somebody from the record label said, 'Do you want to be on this other band's song? They have this song with a singer — a female singer — and there's like, a rap part.' And I turned it down without having even known anything about the band," he said. "I didn't know anything about the band, and we didn't have anything to do with them. But I just — I just knew that, like, I did my thing in my band, and I didn't want to do my thing in another band. And when I ended up hearing the song, I went, 'Oh, I get it. I get why they wanted me on that song. Like, that would have sounded cool.' I still — I didn't want to do it, because I think, like, they have their own thing and the hardest part for EVANESCENCE was probably growing out of that moment, which they did gracefully. Part of it is just due to the fact that at the time, you know, they were writing cool stuff, and Amy's voice is just a great voice. I mean, she's just got a very powerful voice."

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#amy lee #evanescence #linki #Youtube

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natromanxoff · 1 year

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Daily Mirror - April 22, 1992

Credits to Roberto Macchi.

RICK SKY’S THE LIMIT WITH THE STARS AT THE FREDDIE MERCURY TRIBUTE

THE SHOW WILL GO ON

QUEEN are to reign again… but under a new name.

Remaining members Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon last night revealed they want to continue working together.

Drummer Roger confirmed after the tribute to Freddie Mercury: “There are projects in the pipeline, but we won’t be called Queen.

“It wouldn’t be right to use the name without Freddie.”

Guitarist Brian added: “Queen died with Freddie, but there is the rest of us. We’ve already proved we work very well together and there’s no reason why we can’t do so again.”

He admitted lying about Freddie having AIDS last year.

“We felt no guilt about protecting Freddie,” he said. “We told everyone the group wouldn’t tour again because we didn’t feel like it, but in reality Freddie was too ill."

Brian said the star-studded gig at Wembley Stadium was very important to the band.

“It was our way of saying goodbye to Freddie. We needed to lay him to rest in our own minds so that we can move on," he said.

• QUEEN are to release THREE new albums, including one recorded in Switzerland before Freddie's death. There will also be a Live At Wembley '86 album and a five CD box set featuring rare and unheard songs from their long chart career.

[Photo caption: BRIAN May gave Lisa Stansfield (pictured arriving at the gig) a hug after her version of I Want To Break Free, and told the Lancashire lass: "You were marvellous." Bob Geldof (pictured balow with Paula Yates) paid Freddie a real floral tribute — by wearing a yellow and green sunflower patterned suit.]

[Photo caption: ROYAL TREATMENT: Roger with Debbie Leng and Brian with Anita Dobson]

Tears from sad mum

FREDDIE'S mother Jer watched the tribute to her son with tears in her eyes. She got Freddie started on his musical career. Freddie once admitted: "If it wasn't for my mother I wouldn't have been a musician. She made sure I studied the piano.”

The late singer's ex-girlfriend, Mary Austin, who inherited a large part of his multi-million pound estate, also watched the proceedings, with Brian May's girlfriend, ex-EastEnders star Anita Dobson, and Roger Taylor's girlfriend Debbie Leng.

• LIZA Minnelli was one of Freddie's idols. But it was touch and go whether she would make the big event.

Said a source: "She came despite a lot of other commitments. She was marvellous." Dazzling Liza certainty perked up moody Guns N’ Roses singer Axl Rose at the post-gig party. The outrageous star gave up sulking at a comer table and joined Liza in a bop to the Stones’ Brown Sugar.

• GUNS N’ Roses' behaviour left concert organisers fuming. The bad-boy rockers refused to rehearse with the other stars or even stay at the same hotel.

A source close to Guns N’ Roses said: "The band were worried about security. If they appeared cold towards other stars it was because, frankly, they were in awe of some of the other big names."

• MILLIONS of fans almost missed the last part of the Freddie tribute. Council officials had imposed a strict 10pm curfew on the concert and were about to pull the plug when it ran over time. Fans would have missed the last four songs, including the all-star finale. But quick-thinking BBC producers persuaded them to let it continue.

#queen #queen band #roger taylor #freddie mercury #brian may #queen scans #daily mirror april 1992 #anita dobson #debbie leng #lisa stansfield #bob geldof #paula yates #liza minnelli #guns n roses #axl rose

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sweetdreamsjeff · 9 months

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Jeff Buckley “was creating something bigger than the song”

Buckley's friends and collaborators tell the full story of his rise

ByTom Pinnock

13th November 2015

In 1993, Jeff Buckley released his first EP: four songs, played live and alone, that introduced an extraordinary new talent to the musical world. Soon, he would create a debut album, Grace, that suggested he could do anything. Buckley, however, wasn’t so sure: “Jeff,” says his best friend, “was incredibly insecure about everything.” From tribute shows for his father, through the clubs, record labels and studios of New York and London, to the salons of his heroes, Jimmy Page and the Cocteau Twins, Uncut charts the tempestuous first moves of a lost legend. Eternal life guaranteed… Story: David Cavanagh. Originally published in Uncut’s June 2013 issue (Take 193).

Jeff Buckley’s Grace tour lasted 21 months, visited Europe four times, racked up almost 150 North American dates and finally ended on March 1, 1996 in Sydney. The venue was a picturesque spot for the last goodbye: a club in a seaside hotel overlooking Coogee Beach. Among those there was Belinda Barrett, a 26-year-old producer for a Sydney film company, who’d become a Buckley fan the year before.

“Jeff’s two tours of Australia were a life-defining time for me and many others,” Barrett says today. “Jeff was someone you wanted to become a devotee of, and I did. He had incredibly loyal followers who really connected with his essence and spirit.” She remembers looking around at gigs and seeing people gaping in astonishment at the stage. Two years on the road had honed Buckley’s setlist into a hypnotic, invocatory, near-holy performance. “There were moments of coalescence in Australia,” recalls his drummer Matt Johnson, “when new worlds in music felt like they were being glimpsed. Moments I’ll remember until my dying breath.”

Buckley was in good humour at the Coogee Bay Hotel’s aftershow party. Belinda Barrett asked him for his autograph. “Steely balance,” he wrote, adding: “Patti Smith”. But behind the smiles, the long tour had taken its toll. Johnson, suffering from exhaustion and depression, was leaving the group; he’d complained bitterly about the ravages of the “rock machine”. Under contract to Columbia, a Sony label, Buckley had committed to one of the most gruelling itineraries of the MTV-dominated ’90s. The promotional conveyor belt stretched from Paris to Perth, and Buckley had had to learn when to acquiesce and when to resist. It may be one explanation why “steely balance” – a phrase more befitting a wine list – popped into his head as he was approached for an autograph.

“We always said to him, ‘If it gets overwhelming, let’s take a breath,’” says Paul Rappaport, Sony’s former vice-president of artist development. “But you have to understand, people at the company were constantly fighting over him. ‘He’s got to go to France next.’ ‘No, he’s got to go to Australia!’” The conveyor belt paused; a Sydney hiatus in a New York story that had begun five years earlier.

It was a tale straight out of Dick Whittington. Buckley’s first visit to New York, in 1990, had ended with the 23-year-old Southern Californian fleeing Manhattan in despair after being accused of shoplifting. But in the spring of ’91, the bells coaxed him back. A phone call from Brooklyn invited him to sing at a tribute concert for his father, a man he’d hardly known. This time his arrival in the city would have an impact. Soon everyone from Marianne Faithfull to Allen Ginsberg would hear about him.

Held in a Brooklyn Episcopal church, “Greetings From Tim Buckley” was Jeff’s equivalent of a debutante’s coming-out party. He sang four of his father’s songs in the familiar Buckley vocal tone and range, dumbfounding anyone who’d presumed Tim’s multi-octave voice to be unique. The key moment came in “I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain” when the lighting designer projected Jeff’s head onto a stained glass wall at the rear of the church. It was, says the show’s producer Hal Willner, something akin to a visitation from Jesus. After that, there seemed little to keep Jeff in Los Angeles.

“He became a sponge of New York culture,” says Willner, who took him under his wing. “He jumped into the arty circle initially. I took him to see the Mingus Big Band at the Vanguard, and another night he went to see Sun Ra.” Buckley based himself in the Lower East Side, where he found “a village of freaks like himself” (in the words of actor-musician Michael Tighe, who would later join his band) and lived a monastic existence, burning incense and contemplating a small Bodhisattva on his windowsill. “People who were attracted to New York were not of the norm,” Willner adds. “They came here because of what they could do, which they couldn’t do anywhere else.”

Buckley cut his hair short and sang in Gods And Monsters, a virtuoso raga-rock outfit led by former Captain Beefheart guitarist Gary Lucas. At first, the collaboration was fruitful. Buckley wrote lyrics for a pair of Lucas instrumentals (“And You Will”, “Rise Up To Be”), turning them into “Mojo Pin” and “Grace”. Lucas, angling to sign Gods And Monsters to the BMG-financed Imago Records, envisaged success on a grand scale. Buckley – 14 years his junior – was his final jigsaw piece, his Robert Plant, his Jim Morrison. Gods And Monsters organised a March ’92 showcase gig at the same Brooklyn church where Buckley had honoured his father a year before.

“I was so pissed off at Gary,” remembers Kate Hyman, an Imago Records A&R executive. “Jeff was amazing – you could tell he was a star. But every time he came to the front of the stage, Gary would jump in front of him and play all over him.” Buckley began to feel mismatched with Lucas but was unwilling to confront him, a typical trait according to friends. The band’s bassist, Tony Maimone, proved easier to confide in. “He says, ‘Y’know, Tony, I’m not sure if I’m gonna continue with this,’” Maimone recalls. “It was a little bittersweet. He was kind and gentle, but I got the impression we weren’t going to be playing with him for much longer. He had his own vision to pursue.”

Steve Abbott, a New York-based Englishman who owned a London indie label (Big Cat), saw Gods And Monsters play in a club. Abbott immediately identified Buckley as their most interesting member. “He looked quite sulky and moody, whereas Gary was very in-your-face. Jeff came back on at the end and did a song by himself. It was one of those moments where you haven’t quite heard anything like it. It didn’t fit into any musical format. I spoke to him later and he told me he had some gigs at a place called Sin-é.”

Anyone who attended Buckley’s concert at London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire on March 4, 1995 will remember the dreadlocked black man who walked onstage to duet with him on “What Will You Say”. His name is Chris Dowd and he’d like to delete that night from his memory (not to mention from YouTube) – he admits that he was horribly drunk. Dowd, a founder member of LA ska band Fishbone, was one of Buckley’s closest friends. After Dowd left Fishbone, he and Jeff lived together for a time in New York, Dowd fielding phone calls for Jeff while he was out. “It would be Chrissie Hynde or Elvis Costello. ‘Hello, is Jeff there? Tell him Elvis called.’ ‘Er, OK.’”

Buckley had become the darling of Sin-é. Sin-é was a café in the East Village run by an Irishman (its name, pronounced “shin-ay”, is Irish for “that’s it”). It had a small bar and no stage. Buckley appeared at Sin-é almost every week in 1992, leaning against a wall and singing, accompanying himself on a Telecaster plugged into a little Fender amp. It was casual and informal (nobody paid to get in), but the customers agreed that something extraordinary happened when he sang. His voice, which he was modifying all the time, was sensual and gender-ambiguous. It could make people cry. It could make them feel elated. It could – and he would insist on this – eliminate conversation from the room. He alluded to his Sin-é period in a 1995 interview with Melbourne’s RRR radio station: “What I’m trying to do is just sing what comes to my body in the context of the song. And if you go by the emotion of the song, it’s almost like stepping into a city. Cities have certain customs and rules and laws you can break, and that’s what I was doing.”

“He would do mostly covers,” Michael Tighe told Uncut in 2007. “Nina Simone. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. I was very impressed with his knowledge. I thought he had really good taste. What really sent me was when I heard him do ‘Hallelujah’. That’s when I felt I was in the presence of genius. That made me see white flashes.” Buckley had heard Leonard Cohen’s hymn-like “Hallelujah” in a version performed by John Cale on a Cohen tribute album. It had become a feature of Jeff’s floating Sin-é repertoire – “Strange Fruit”, The Smiths’ “I Know It’s Over”, Bob Dylan, Edith Piaf – which grew by the week.

“I remember him opening once with ‘Sweet Thing’ from Astral Weeks and closing with ‘The Way Young Lovers Do’ from the same album,” remarks Nicholas Hill, a radio DJ for New Jersey’s WFMU. “To have the gall even to attempt something from Astral Weeks – usually that doesn’t go over great. But this guy could reinterpret songs, sing them completely differently every time. He was investigating where they could take him. He was creating something bigger than the song. For the first three minutes, you wouldn’t even know what the song was.”

Transported but relaxed, Buckley would talk, do impersonations, comment on what the clientele was wearing (“Nice sandals”) and sing adverts and jingles that he remembered from his childhood. “The motherfucker was so funny,” says Chris Dowd. “He was like… if somebody took Lenny Bruce and Jim Carrey and mixed them into one person. A really dark sense of humour combined with an incredible ability to mimic everything. He had a photographic memory for music.” Nicholas Hill concurs: “Everyone was drawn to Jeff’s personality. He was extremely magnetic and charismatic. Men fell in love with him. Women felt he was their future husband. It was just like, ‘Holy shit, this is a major dude.’ There was just no denying it.”

“Sin-é was this teeny little place with a couple of tables and chairs,” says Kate Hyman, “but it was a magical, fun time because there was no pressure. I was an A&R person, but I was enjoying listening to Jeff and not having to think about the business.” Steve Abbott of Big Cat, who lived a two-minute walk from Sin-é, chatted to Buckley one night and was intrigued to find they shared a love of The Groundhogs – as well as a taste for Guinness. Abbott said he’d like to do a record deal. Hyman, too, wanted to sign Jeff to Imago at some point. But things were moving quickly. One night Hal Willner showed up at Sin-é with a friend named Steve Berkowitz, an A&R man for the major label Columbia.

Abbott: “I left New York to go touring with Pavement, who were on my label. Within the week and a half that I was away, the record industry discovered Jeff Buckley. He now had a lawyer. There was one ridiculous night where I saw three limos outside Sin-é. You didn’t see limos in the East Village. This was when we still had muggings and killings, before the area was gentrified. I couldn’t even get in the door of Sin-é. I kept getting pushed back out again.”

Hyman: “When the limos started showing up, it was funny and silly and none of us took it seriously. But suddenly there was a bidding war. I was in there for a minute, but I was at a small label and there was no way we were going to beat out the majors.” There was another stumbling block for Imago that Hyman is slightly reluctant to reveal. “Well, I guess it doesn’t matter now,” she says. “My boss, Terry Ellis – I took him to see Jeff and his comment was, ‘He’s really good, but he has no charisma.’ He actually said that. Really.”

Buckley’s Sin-é apprenticeship didn’t end in formal goodbyes – he appeared there many more times, including a gig with his band shortly before recording Grace – but the innocence had been lost. “His initial crowd were disappointed because they couldn’t see him in a club with eight other people,” says Willner wryly. It was too late. The cat was out of the bag.

Buckley signed with Columbia Records on October 29, 1992. The lure was a promise of artistic freedom, but their historic catalogue (Dylan, Springsteen, Cohen, Cash) inevitably influenced his decision. It took Sony’s Paul Rappaport all of five minutes at Sin-é – Buckley was singing a Van Morrison song at the time – to be convinced that Jeff was potentially a figure of equal stature.

Rappaport: “Donny Ienner [Columbia president] said to him, ‘I know you’re getting offered more money by Clive Davis [Arista] but I’m not going to give it to you, because it’ll mess your head up. I’ll give you half of that, and I’ll make a deal that we won’t pressure you.’” Sure enough, the first thing Columbia did after signing Buckley was… absolutely nothing. They left him alone for months. A hands-off policy was regarded as essential to his development.

“He still hadn’t written many songs,” Rappaport points out. “We had no idea, really, whether he could write or not.”

Brenda Kahn, a ‘punk-folk’ singer-songwriter on a Sony label called Chaos, was introduced to Buckley by her A&R man. She and Jeff giggled at the multi-million-dollar Manhattan world they’d accidentally infiltrated. “We both felt like, ‘What are we doing here? We belong on the Lower East Side.’ We were both in a giddy sort of realm.” They became friends (and briefly lovers), Kahn finding Buckley surprisingly precise – she uses the word ‘intentional’ – about all aspects of his creativity. He already knew the importance of leaving a legacy. He talked of needing to improve his lyrics. Kahn: “I was in awe of his abilities. Have you heard his recording of ‘Satisfied Mind’? The way his voice and guitar work together? I was like, ‘God! I can turn a phrase, but look what you can do.’ And he was like, ‘Sure, I can sing the crap out of anything, but how do I say it?’”

It was in Buckley’s nature to fluctuate between resolve and hesitation. On top of his ongoing worries about being sold to the public as Tim Buckley’s son, he was anxious to be perceived as a fan-based, credible artist, not some major-label hype. It was entirely characteristic of him to phone Nicholas Hill, who ran a 7” label, and tell him he wanted to record six indie singles immediately. It was also characteristic of him to change his mind and forget the conversation had ever happened.

Chris Dowd: “Jeff was the kind of person who was incredibly insecure about everything. His ability to play his instrument. His voice. When I first met him, he didn’t think he was good-looking. It was, ‘Women don’t like me,’ all this stuff. Later on, he was embarrassed to be voted one of People magazine’s ‘30 Most Beautiful People’. I think one part of him secretly dug it, but the other part – the artist, the musician – was like, ‘What a fucking goofy fag you are.’”

“He was a bit dorky,” says photographer Merri Cyr, who shot the covers of Live At Sin-é and Grace. “That’s what made him charming. I think he was initially unaware of the effect he had on other people. Later, though, he became much more savvy about how he behaved and presented himself. I remember he acquired a stalker or two. He was scrutinised and was in the public eye. His demeanour changed over time. Perhaps he became a bit suspicious of people.”

Live At Sin-é was recorded in July ’93. Buckley and Columbia agreed that a four-song live EP was a smart, subtle way to introduce him to the public and the media. Following several planning meetings at Columbia, he was about to spend six weeks at Bearsville Studios in Woodstock recording his first album. Chris Dowd: “Steve Berkowitz was being very protective of him. The pressure was probably more on Steve than Jeff. But the other thing is, Jeff could walk into a meeting with Donny Ienner and all the Sony people would be mesmerised by him. There’s no other word for it. They knew they’d signed a guy who was going to have a prolific, 30-year career. Fishbone were on the same damn label and we couldn’t get them to do anything. But Donny Ienner would have tattooed Jeff’s name on his penis if Jeff had told him to.”

With studio time at Bearsville booked, Buckley told producer Andy Wallace (Nirvana, Rollins Band) that he wanted to make a ‘band’ album. Wallace: “I thought that was a good idea. Over the course of a career, you want to reach out to more complex musical presentation, and he felt he wanted to do it right away.” Mick Grondahl (bass) and Matt Johnson (drums) were hand-picked because Jeff felt an affinity with them on both personal and musical levels. “He was very particular about who he was looking for,” says Nicholas Hill. “He wanted guys his own age who didn’t have baggage, who weren’t hot session guys. He’d done all that with Gary Lucas.”

Buckley, a brilliant guitarist, recorded most of the album’s guitar parts but invited Lucas – in a conciliatory gesture – to play on “Mojo Pin” and “Grace”. Buckley-written material rubbed shoulders with covers of “Hallelujah”, “Lilac Wine” and Benjamin Britten’s “Corpus Christi Carol”. It was rock meets Sin-é.

Chris Dowd was one of the first to hear it. “He had a cassette. He put on ‘Lilac Wine’. He was like, ‘I’m going to play you something… OK?’ I could see in his eyes he was insecure about what I was going to say. I started crying when I heard it. There I am, his fucking best friend, and he’s made this album and he doesn’t even believe how good it is. I was like, ‘What are you worried about, man?’ Either a song showed his depth of understanding as a musician, or it showed his sensitivity as a human being. There wasn’t a song out of place. That album became a sonnet for the tortured.”

Live At Sin-é was released in America in November ’93. But Columbia’s counterparts at Sony in London declined to follow suit, feeling the EP had no commercial potential. Instead it was given a UK release by Big Cat, which had signed a licensing deal with Columbia. The next step was to bring Buckley over to promote it. “We knew he was very good live – that’s how he was sold to us by the American company,” says Luc Vergier, a Frenchman who ran Columbia’s marketing in London. “We decided to put him on the road, on his own, for a short tour.”

Buckley arrived in the second week of March ’94 with his Telecaster and Fender amp. He played in Sheffield, flew to Dublin and then hit London for a series of gigs that are still spoken of in hallowed terms 19 years later. On one particular Friday night, he gave a three-hour performance in two different venues, beginning at Bunjies, the folk café, where he handed everyone a flower with mock solemnity as they took their seats. When Bunjies closed, Buckley led the audience (still with their flowers) to the nearby 12 Bar Club where he played for a further 90 minutes. He took requests, accepted a joint and sang until he almost collapsed off the stage. “Live At Sin-é came out on the Monday,” recalls Abbott, “and sold nearly 6,000 on the first day. The word of mouth from those two gigs was crazy.”

Buckley returned to the UK in August with his band. Five days after Grace was released, they played the Reading Festival in a mid-afternoon slot beneath Cud and Echobelly. In hindsight, their lowly billing symbolises the size of the mountain Buckley still had to climb, and the extent to which Grace would struggle to assert its identity – let alone its audacity – in the year of Parklife, Alice In Chains and Hootie & The Blowfish. There was a unspoken subtext to the ensuing 21-month tour: Columbia’s abiding disappointment with Grace’s sales in America.

“It never broke in an immediate way, the way other bands’ records did,” Mick Grondahl told Uncut. “It grew. To us, that was the point. We didn’t want to do something fashionable. We wanted to do something that had a nice feel to it. Feel was the key word. Never mind that it was this style or that style. It was more about, how does it feel? How does it touch you?”

One man who loved Grace was Jimmy Page. There was arguably no-one whose opinion Buckley valued more. He’d sung Zeppelin songs at Sin-é. He’d amused Tony Maimone at Gods And Monsters rehearsals by thumping out “When The Levee Breaks” on the drums. Buckley’s music on Grace, and in his band’s live shows, embraced androgynous vocals, ’70s rock, power chords and heroic drumming. One might even say there was a transference of Zeppelin energy taking place, a blessing or endorsement from afar, from the older men to the young. When Page and Buckley met, it was clear they understood each other on a profound level.

“Jeff told me they cried,” says Chris Dowd. “They actually cried when they met each other. Jimmy heard himself in Jeff, and Jeff was meeting his idol. Jimmy Page was the godfather of Jeff’s music. A lot of people thought Tim was the influence on Jeff, but it was really Zeppelin. He could play all the parts on all the songs. John Paul Jones’ basslines. Page’s guitar parts. The synthesiser intro on ‘In The Light’ – he could play it on guitar and it would sound just like it. And then he would get on the fucking drums and exactly mimic John Bonham.”

Perhaps Page also recognised in Buckley – whom he considered the greatest singer to have emerged in 20 years – a rare courage, an elemental intrepid streak, a fearlessness and a gung-ho spirit that allowed him to reach heights of expression that many of his ’90s contemporaries were too self-conscious to risk or too uninspired to imagine. In that sense, Buckley was a true son of Zeppelin. Matt Johnson, in a comment that is all the more poignant given the circumstances of Buckley’s death, remembers him as an adventurer in music and in life – a man “well suited to jumping into raw experience – unprotected, raw experience. He seemed to have a quicksilver flexibility and an ability to adjust.”

Since the day his body was found in the Mississippi River in June 1997, appreciation of Buckley has soared (“Grace was way more successful posthumously,” Johnson notes) and in many people’s eyes he’s become the timeless heritage artist that Columbia believed they’d signed in 1992. Others feel he was only just finding his feet. “It would have been amazing to hear his fourth or fifth album,” says Brenda Kahn. “I don’t think his music had been totally fleshed out yet.” Hal Willner thinks about that fifth album, too. What conceivable directions would Buckley’s voice and guitar have taken?

“I have to say he’s still hard for a lot of people to listen to,” Willner continues. “His mom, Mary, got me to edit together some tapes that he made in his early New York days. The stuff with Gary. And what was interesting about those tapes – what was really heartbreaking – was hearing him sing the way he sang when he came to New York. He changed it later… became less studied. But it’s hard to listen to it. It’s too sad.”

Buckley left his New York home on June 1, 1994 to tour Grace in America. “Keep the next year free,” the band were advised by George Stein, Buckley’s lawyer-manager, a comment they would later laugh about. First France became enchanted with them (two tours in ’95) and then Britain wanted them back. And even when they’d toured America twice, three times, and been to Japan, there was always Australia waiting in the distance.

#jeff buckley #creating something bigger than the song #tom pinnock #uncut magazine #2015

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homomenhommes · 8 months

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THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY

based on: The White Crane Institute's 'Gay Wisdom', Gay Birthdays, Gay For Today, Famous GLBT, glbt-Gay Encylopedia, Today in Gay History, Wikipedia, and more …

1946 – For two decades, Freddie Mercury (d.1991) was the front man of one of the world's most popular rock groups, Queen. That he was able to maintain this status in spite of continued critical hostility, his flamboyant gender-bending androgyny, and questions about his sexuality is one of the more impressive accomplishments in the history of popular culture. He was also, arguably, the first Indian international rock star.

Freddie Mercury was born Farrokh Bulsara in the British colony of Zanzibar, East Africa (now part of Tanzania) on September 5, 1946. His parents were Parsees and his father was employed in the British civil service. From the age of six, he attended boarding school near Bombay, India, and showed a considerable aptitude for art and music. It was here that he was first called "Freddie" by his classmates.

In 1964, the Bulsara family moved to England, where Freddie completed his education, graduating in 1969 from the Ealing College of Art with a diploma in art and design. Around this time he adopted the surname Mercury, naming himself after the messenger of the gods.

After college, he sold second-hand clothes in trendy flea-markets, where he met future bandmate Roger Taylor, and joined Ibex, a local London group, as a vocalist and keyboard player. In 1970, he formed a group with Taylor and Brian May (joined in 1971 by John Deacon) for which he chose the provocative name Queen.

Even in its earliest days the band was notable for its stage performances, replete with light shows, flamboyant costumes, theatrics, and loudness. The group's first album, Queen (1973), was greeted with critical hostility, as were its early live performances, a result, no doubt, of the implied queerness of its name and Mercury's effeminate, long-haired, heavily made-up stage persona. The group's breakthrough came the following year with the album Queen II, and the first big hit single, "Killer Queen," a tribute to a fabulous individual "just like Marie Antoinette" who may or may not have been female.

Within a year Queen was one of the most popular bands in the world and began a series of world tours that drew crowds often in the hundreds of thousands. From 1975 until 1983, Queen enjoyed a long string of successful best-selling recordings. These include "Bohemian Rhapsody" from the album A Night at the Opera (1975), "Somebody to Love" from A Day at the Races (1976), "We Will Rock You" and "We Are the Champions" from News of the World (1977), "Bicycle Races" and "Fat-Bottomed Girls" from Jazz (1978), "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" and "Another One Bites the Dust" from The Game (1979), and "Under Pressure" (with David Bowie, 1981).

In 1980, Mercury underwent a drastic image change that demonstrated his talent as a gender shape-shifter. Gone was the flaming, campy, "queeny" persona, replaced by a macho one, mustachioed, muscular, short-haired, and attired in an undershirt and tight-fitting jeans (he had an impressive package). The new image was not without its own camp elements, which many fans took at face value.

Mercury nevertheless continued to confound gender assumptions, performing with the rest of the band in complete drag - and full moustache - in the video I Want to Break Free (1984).

During his lifetime, Mercury made no definitive statements about his private life or sexuality, leaving the interpretation of his public image up to the individual imagination; accordingly, many fans were shocked when events made some sort of revelation inevitable. In Queen's early years, Mercury lived with a woman, Mary Austin, with whom he subsequently maintained a significant friendship; in 1980, however, they separated, and he lived thereafter until his death with Jim Hutton, supposedly his gardener.

On November 23, 1991, Freddie Mercury released a statement confirming that he suffered from AIDS, as had long been rumored. He died the following day.

Jim Hutton, who himself was tested HIV-positive in 1990, lived with Mercury for the last six years of his life, nursed him during his illness and was present at his bedside when he died. Hutton claimed that Mercury died wearing a wedding band that Hutton had given him. Hutton died from cancer on 1 January 2010.

Since Mercury's death, many tributes, including an AIDS benefit concert and a ballet choreographed by Maurice Béjart, have honored him. In 2001, he was posthumously inducted as a member of Queen into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Bohemian Rhapsody is a 2018 biographical drama film about Freddie Mercury. It follows the singer's life from the formation of the band up to their 1985 Live Aid performance at the original Wembley Stadium. It was directed by Bryan Singer from a screenplay by Anthony McCarten. It stars Rami Malek as Mercury, with Lucy Boynton, Gwilym Lee, Ben Hardy, Joe Mazzello, Aidan Gillen, Tom Hollander, Allen Leech, and Mike Myers in supporting roles. Queen members Brian May and Roger Taylor served as consultants.

Bohemian Rhapsody received numerous accolades, including a leading four awards at the 91st Academy Awards for Best Actor (Malek), Best Film Editing, Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing; it was also nominated for Best Picture. The film also won Best Motion Picture – Drama at the 76th Golden Globe Awards, and was nominated for the Producers Guild of America Award for Best Theatrical Motion Picture and BAFTA Award for Best British Film, while Malek won the Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild and BAFTA for Best Actor.

1943 – Jack Charles is an Australian Aboriginal actor, musician, potter, and Aboriginal elder. His screen credits include the landmark Australian film The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978), Bedevil (1993), Blackfellas (1993), Tom White (2004) and Pan (2015), among others.

Born to a Bunurong mother and Wiradjuri father at Cummeragunja Mission on the Murray River, Charles was a victim of the Australian Government's forced assimilation programme which took him from his mother as an infant. He was long of the mistaken belief he was a Koori. He was raised in the Salvation Army Boys' Home at Box Hill, suburban Melbourne, where he was the only Indigenous child and where he was sexually abused.

Charles received a Christian education from the Salvation Army and continued to observe Christian values into his 70s when he told Geraldine Doogue,

"I've employed my Aboriginality as my religion now ... instead of God, I've found that the Godhead is within me ... I'm solely directed towards making an accommodation between Black and White."

In 1970, the director of the New Theatre Melbourne, Dot Thompson, cast Charles in Athol Fugard's The Blood Knot and this was followed by a non-Aboriginal role in Rod Milgate's A Refined Look at Existence.

Charles was involved in establishing Indigenous theatre in Australia. In 1971 he co-founded, with Bob Maza, Nindethana ('place for a corroboree') at The Pram Factory in Melbourne, Australia's first Indigenous theatre group. Their first hit play was called Jack Charles is Up and Fighting, in 1972, and included music composed by him.

In 1972, Charles auditioned for the role of the Australian Indigenous title character in the television show Boney but was declined because they were "looking for an actor with blue eyes". The job went to New Zealand-born James Laurenson who wore black face make-up for the role.

In 1974, Charles played Bennelong in the Old Tote Theatre production of Michael Boddy's Cradle of Hercules which was presented at the Sydney Opera House as part of its opening season. Also in the cast was a very young David Gulpilil.

Stage work includes Jack Davis' play No Sugar for the Black Swan Theatre Company in Perth.

Charles was the subject of Amiel Courtin-Wilson's 2008 documentary Bastardy which followed him for seven years. The film's tagline describes him as: "Addict. Homosexual. Cat burglar. Actor. Aboriginal." The film was in the official selection for Singapore, Melbourne, Sydney and Sheffield Doc/Fest film festivals.

In 2010, Ilbijerri Theatre staged Charles' one-man show called Jack Charles v The Crown at the Melbourne Festival. Charles was nominated for a Helpmann Award for Best Male Actor in a Play for this performance. Jack Charles v The Crown has since toured across Australia and internationally. In 2012, he performed in the Sydney Festival production I am Eora.

Charles played Chief Great Little Panther in Joe Wright's 2015 film Pan.

In 2016, Charles played the role of Uncle Paddy in two episodes of the television horror drama series Wolf Creek. Also in 2016, he played the role of Uncle Jimmy in the television drama series Cleverman.

Charles was for most of his adult life a petty thief and drug addict. He was sentenced to imprisonment 22 times and convicted twice as many times, mainly for burglary and drug offences. His first conviction was entered when he was 17 for the offence of leaving his foster home without the permission of his foster parents. In breach of a forced assimilation order, driven by curiosity about his race, he had been seeking out members of his tribe in Melbourne. He later commented, half-jokingly, that his cat burglary endeavours in luxury districts such as Kew, Melbourne, were rent-collecting missions on Aboriginal land.

1967 – The television series N.Y.P.D. includes gay characters. N.Y.P.D.was the first television series in America to air an episode with a gay theme. It was entitled "Shakedown." The police track down a man blackmailinggay men, prompting several suicides.

1987 – The Homomonument, dedicated on September 5, 1987, this gay monument is located in down-town Amsterdam, near Westerkerk and the Anne Frank Huis. This monument is a symbol against denial, suppression and discrimination. The monument also commemorates those who were victims of persecution because of their sexual orientation.

The planners also wanted to make sure that the monument didn't just honor those whom the Nazis killed, but gay and lesbian men and women who have suffered throughout the centuries and who continue to suffer today. Discrimination and oppression of the LGBT community is hardly a recent phenomenon and people still suffer greatly around the world for no reason other than being born the way they were born. The Homomonument recognizes and honors this.

As it is meant to honor both men and women, the designers were adamant that the monument wouldn't be tucked away in some dark alley, the location of which known only by those with a keen interest. It was always the intention of developers to place the monument in a central spot in Amsterdam, and the Westermakt is indeed the perfect location.

The monument was designed by Karin Daan and consists of three 10 x 10x 10 meters of triangles forming a large imaginary triangle 36 x 36 x 36 meters. A triangle is located on the Prinsengracht and it is often normal to put flowers close to it. At street level there is a triangle of granite with the text "Naar een vriendschap zulkir mateloos verlangen" ("a desire as limitless as friendship), a quote by gay poet Jacob Israel de Haan ,born in Amsterdam, who was killed in WWII. The third triangle is located near Westerkerk and is often used as a stage. The triangle was chosen because homosexuals had to wear this symbol in pink for the concentration camps. Since the seventies the triangle is often used by people proud of being gay at Gay Pride Parade.

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littlemixnet · 2 years

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Little Mix vow they WILL reunite and say ‘we can’t live without each other’ in their LAST interview before hiatus.

THEY have spent 11 years as a group, had five No1 singles, won three Brit Awards and released seven hit albums. But as Little Mix prepare to bow out - for now, at least - they have insisted they are doing it as the best of friends and are doing everything they can to ensure they aren’t pitted against each other as they prepare to launch their post-band solo careers. In an exclusive final print interview with The Sun, just a week before they go their separate ways, Perrie Edwards, Leigh-Anne Pinnock and Jade Thirlwall have revealed their timetables will be carefully managed so there is no way they will put new music out at the same time. Perrie, 28, said: “We’ve all said we will let each other know when we’re going to release so we don’t end up clashing in the charts. We’re rooting for each other, not competing against each other.” Jade, 29, who has signed a solo deal with RCA, added: “It’s just not going to happen. There will be a conscious effort from all of us to make sure of that.” Leigh-Anne, 30, said their friendship was too precious to risk a head-to-head and the fact they remain so tight-knit will mean they’re able to be open with each other about their solo plans. She has recently signed with Warner and said: “We are so close and that’s the thing. We’re all going to be in communication about this the whole time.” In the 11 years since Little Mix were first brought together on The X Factor, they have become Britain’s most successful ever girl band, selling more than 50 million records worldwide and collecting over 22 million monthly Spotify listeners. Next Saturday will see the final performance of their sold-out Confetti tour. It will end with an emotional show which will be livestreamed around the world from London’s O2 Arena – the last chance to catch the girls before they bow out for their hiatus. Perrie, who has also already started working on solo music, said: “Even though it’s a massive, epic show, I think knowing everyone is watching it is going to make it feel super intimate.” However, they are already plotting their comeback as a band and promise they won’t follow the lead of One Direction, who went on their “hiatus” in 2015 and show no signs of reuniting. Perrie said: “Honestly, we haven’t even parted ways yet and we’re already talking about when we’re coming back! We’re like: ‘is two years away enough? Two and a bit years?’.” Jade points out they are parting as the closest of friends and so there’s every reason to get back together sooner rather than later. She said: “You can’t deny our relationship – whenever anyone comes to watch the show or sees us in interviews or on social media it’s pretty obvious that we can’t actually live without each other. We know how phenomenal we are together, so why would we never want to do that again? Change has to happen in life, you have to move on at some point and try new things, but it’s such a comfort to know we have each other to come back to. We don’t know how long this will be for but I’m already ready for that reunion!” MAKING HISTORY There have been plenty of record-breaking Little Mix moments over the last decade, not least when they made history in 2021 by becoming the first girl group to win Best British Band at the Brits. They used their moment to pay tribute to the likes of All Saints, the Spice Girls and Girls Aloud who came before them but were always overlooked. Perrie said: “We couldn’t get our heads around the fact that a girl group hadn’t won it before. There were incredible girl bands before us who deserved that award, but it always went to males. We’d thought there was no way we were ever going to win simply because we’re female, which is kind of s**t. So we were really shocked when we won and we wanted to shout out all those women who were so deserving of it. We’re so grateful to have won that award and it’s a huge deal for us. But it should have happened sooner.” Huddled together in their hotel room today, it’s clear how close the three of them are. Leigh-Anne says that after all the success, they no longer feel like they have anything to prove. She said: “As a girl group we’ve been constantly trying to prove that we’re credible. But this tour I feel like we’re all up there just having fun because we frickin’ earned it.” Jade agrees and says the bond between them is stronger than ever. “People have come and gone throughout the last ten years but this relationship we have has remained and I think that’s very telling. We’ve come through a lot together, all the ups and downs and to get to this point and be as close as we are, I think says a lot about how we’ve grown as women.” MUMS ON TOUR They all laugh when talking about how different the atmosphere is on tour now compared to the party days of the past. Leigh-Anne and Perrie both became mothers within a week of each other last August and say the backstage booze has all been replaced by baby paraphernalia. Perrie said: “It’s all baby bouncers, highchairs, you name it. Life has changed. I mean, we were never exactly rockstars before – it wasn’t like you’d walk into bottles of Jack Daniels all over the place with us having it large. But it is a different dynamic.” Perrie has a boy Axel with Liverpool star Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, 28, while Leigh-Anne has twins with fiancé Andre Gray, 30, who plays for QPR, although she hasn’t made the babies’ names or sex public. She said: “I’m just trying to keep it as private as possible for as long as possible. It was a decision we made at the time because [the attention] was freaking me out a little bit.” Both say that going into rehearsals so soon after giving birth was a challenge. Perrie said: “I feel like me and Leigh-Anne should have had a note from the doctor saying: ‘Perrie and Leigh have baby brain, go easy on them today’. Baby brain is real! Jade would pick up the routine in two seconds and we’d be there for an hour doing the simplest of things and then totally forget what it was. I’ve never struggled so hard for a tour. I thought I was going to die! Our bodies weren’t ready, our minds weren’t ready. If it wasn’t for Jade, keeping the morale up and the positivity going then I don’t know if we’d have made it.” However, Jade said she was in awe of how well the new mums managed everything. “Perrie and Leigh-Anne have had to adapt after having kids and being able to go into full-on rehearsal mode while breastfeeding and having the babies there was so amazing. And then to get on stage and these fabulous costumes! They’ve been incredible. I struggled with rehearsals, never mind having to look after children as well. So I know I’ve had an easier ride.” As for what’s next, they are all playing their cards close to their chests but say they are excited and nervous in equal measure about what the future holds. Jade said: “I’m just stepping into the unknown, I don’t really have a plan! We all sort of have an idea what we want to do and how we want to do it. But personally, I’m going to enjoy not putting pressure on myself to have to do something by a certain time.” Perrie added: “As long as I can sing somewhere and at least someone is listening, I’m happy.” Leigh-Anne said while they hoped to explore lots of avenues, music is where their hearts remain. She said: “I feel like we’ll probably all dabble in a bit of everything, I don’t think we’d ever want to restrict ourselves. But being on stage is everything to me and I can’t picture myself being anywhere else. It’s what we do, isn’t it?”

#little mix #article #6may22

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fuckyeahvanhalen86-95 · 11 months

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Back in 2021, Wolfgang Van Halen shared his thoughts on the use of backing tracks during live shows, saying rather frankly that he thought the practice was “lame as hell.”

He did make exceptions for some situations – “unless it's like, for a keyboard part that you can't necessarily get,” he said – but for the case of vocals and guitars, he made himself pretty clear: “You should just stay home and listen to shit on Spotify if they're going to play to tracks like that.”

Well, his opinion on the matter hasn’t wavered one bit, with the Mammoth WVH frontman doubling down on his stance during a recent conversation with Ola Englund.

When asked about his Taylor Hawkins tribute show shredding taking people by surprise – even leading to accusations of using backing tracks – Van Halen replied, “You never know... hell, half the people live, it’s tracks nowadays. It’s just a fucking bummer.”

“Everybody else draws their own line with what tracks are acceptable or not, but it’s like, if you’re pumping in the main guitar riff and the lead vocals and actual fucking drums – like, pre-recorded drums – that’s a problem. You should be able to play your shit.”

youtube

Echoing his earlier comments, Van Halen went on, “I can understand [if] you don’t have a keyboard player so [you] need the pad, that’s fine, you can’t carry around a 60-piece orchestra, so you’ve got the strings – that’s fine. But lead vocal, main guitar, main bass and the drums… you should be playing that.”

The topic turned to the question over whether over-production in modern music has lead to an over-reliance on backing tracks to recreate certain songs, but Van Halen’s approach remained rooted in traditional approaches.

“I never do anything in the studio that I can’t do live,” he asserted. “Sure, there are tricks that you can do to do stuff you wouldn’t normally be able to do, but why would you want to do that? It’s about creating music that you’re capable of doing and you could do live.”

“I got to a concert to see bands play the fuck out of their music. That’s what we try to do with Mammoth. First and foremost, we are playing everything and we’re doing it to the best of our ability.”

The use of backing tracks during live shows is a hot topic of conversation in the guitar world, with Dream Theater’s John Petrucci recently taking a far more laissez-faire approach to the practice, while still sharing some of Van Halen’s sentiments.

“It depends on what people are doing,” he mused to Guitar World, “because some people don't tour with their whole bands, so they have sound effects and things going on. If they're up there playing their asses off, and they have some sound effects backing that up while they're doing it, that doesn't really bother me.”

youtube

His approach further contrasted with Van Halen’s on the subject of bass tracks, specifically, with Trooch saying a “pre-recorded bass player” would be acceptable “to keep the show going.”

But, he stressed, “Having said that, I think that if anybody's up there faking it or pretending, that's a whole different thing.”

Van Halen is gearing up to release his second Mammoth WVH studio album – Mammoth II – which has so far been previewed with Another Celebration at the End of the World and Like a Pastime.

Once again, he called upon some of his father's most notable guitars – as well as his original Van Halen Marshall amp head and cab – for the effort.

#post van halen #mammoth wvh #wolfgang van halen #2023 #guitar world #Ola Englund #youtube #videos #interviews #backing tracks #pre recorded instruments #John Petrucci #dream theater #like a pastime #Mammoth ii #news

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sinceileftyoublog · 1 year

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Avey Tare Interview: Making Sound And Putting It Together

Photo by Amy Grace

BY JORDAN MAINZER

When you’re listening to Avey Tare solo or even his work with Animal Collective, you’re waiting for that moment: a scream, a jittery melody, chaotic percussion that pans throughout the speakers like ping-pong balls. His latest album, 7s (Domino), has almost none of that. A subdued, reflective affair, 7s was born out of a desire to collaborate. In 2020, Animal Collective had just finished making Time Skiffs remotely, and Dave Portner wanted to channel his creative energy into in-person collaboration. Of course, during the early stages of the pandemic, the inability to (wisely) be in the same room as many others disrupted just about every facet of life, let alone every line of work. Portner, ironically situated in the musical mecca of Asheville, where he’d have a murderer’s row of collaborative choices any other time, felt depressed, and a bit lost. Luckily, he did have Adam McDaniel and Drop of Sun.

Unlike on his past records, Portner went into 7s with very little ideas of how his songs, casually written during 2020, would take shape. During the first week of 2021, he and McDaniel spent three days with achievable goals--a guitar part here, percussion there--and emerged happy even if they only got half done what they set out to do. It’s these initial sketches that inform the aesthetic and ultimate vibe of 7s. The first song Portner had for it was the 9-and-a-half-minute centerpiece “Hey Bog”, originally written to play on his 2019 tour for Cows on Hourglass Pond. Ambient and rubbery, it’s easy to get lost in before strumming and thumping percussion enter, his ethereal, yet outwardly emotive singing combining with the instrumentation to make a sort of New Age acid house. The rest of the songs were sculpted around “Hey Bog”, from the trilling tribute to essential workers and good deeds, “Invisible Darlings”, to the ever-anxious shuffle “Sweeper’s Grin”. Though Portner’s words are devotional and grateful, they’re also extremely uncertain. On “The Musical”, he converses with himself, questioning how he came to be as a musician. The woozy closer “Cloud Stop Rest Start” seems to be one of many moments where he questions humanity’s motives, referring to the impersonal nature of COVID data and inherent, yet unavoidable selfishness of living during a pandemic. “Oh American stranger, is it always like this? Losing things to spikes and the ups and downs?” he sings.

Those ups and downs, albeit of a different type, have continued ever since for Portner. Of course, live music would return about a year and a half later thanks to an unprecedented, life-saving vaccine, but the still volatile nature of COVID would mean Animal Collective had to cancel their EU/UK tour as recently as last October. Time Skiffs and 7s were released last year and this February to critical acclaim, and Portner still finds time to work with McDaniel. “We’ll...just get together and make something and record,” he told me over the phone from his home last month. “He’s always down.” Portner knows that there will be trials and tribulations, but just like his and Animal Collective’s approach to playing live, it seems as though he’s starting to look at everything--studio albums, careers, life, and everything in between--with a sense of wondrous improvisation and honesty, no matter how messy.

Read my conversation with Portner below, edited for length and clarity. Catch Avey Tare at Sleeping Village tomorrow night. Lipsticism, the solo project of local musician and producer Alana Schachtel, opens.

Since I Left You: Animal Collective finished Time Skiffs remotely, and it led to a creative streak for you at a time when people were working by themselves. What specifically for you led to this period of being prolific?

Dave Portner: When I have time around the house or time off from touring, I try to write songs. It’s a big part of my day, my time in the studio, my work. During the transition from 2020 to 2021 in particular, I was getting more and more depressed about being cut off from collaborating musically with people. It’s such a big part of my life. We had planned to record Time Skiffs together in the studio, and that couldn’t happen. [It] isn’t a bad thing in terms of process, but quarantine and 2020 and the pandemic, having me shut in so much and not able to do anything beyond going outside of my studio, led to a lot of cabin fever. I was craving musical collaboration with somebody.

It worked out that Adam McDaniel, my friend, had this studio called Drop of Sun. We just decided to be really relaxed about it. I had a lot of time around the house, so I started writing these songs. [We blocked] off three days at the beginning of January [2021], because I had to get out of my house and into another musical environment. At that time, Drop of Sun was one nice studio room in his basement, and the whole Drop of Sun team was working on building this new studio, which was done by the time we started the mixing stage. But even starting in his basement, it was nice and crucial to be able to bounce ideas off somebody. I didn’t have a huge game plan, just basic structures of songs I wanted to start working on and see where they would go.

SILY: After this time period of less collaboration or remote collaboration, it seems like the journey from the demos to the finished product was pretty seamless. It that true, or were there bumps in the road?

DP: No, it felt really good. We started with three days, and when they ended, we wished we had more time. We had to do other things here and there. Allowing myself to step away from things and go in every day with a goal of, [for instance, “ finish] this guitar part” or a few ideas I wanted to accomplish, [felt] really good. We started wanting to do more and more.

At the beginning, I didn’t know what 7s was. It was just me recording some songs. As we got towards the end, I was still working on “Invisible Darlings” and wanted to get that in the fold. I had “Hey Bog” already, which I wrote in 2019 when I had solo shows and wanted to put new songs into the set. I wanted to record that one for a while. Since I knew it would be a centerpiece, or at least on the record, it was a matter of fitting other songs around it. I think that’s why 7s feels like it has one foot in the past and one foot in the present and future. I wanted everything to feel cohesive and not too random; it was just a matter of building it from the bottom up in Drop of Sun. That’s not usually how I do my solo records. Typically, I’m planning them beforehand when I’m off from Animal Collective, and I know what I want to do. This one was created as we went, even though the songs were kind of written.

SILY: Do you think the casual vibe of the recording made its way into the quality of the songs? “Hey Bog” and “Sweeper’s Grin” are relaxed, reflective, melancholy songs. In other words, did the anomaly in process allow the songs to breathe more?

DP: Definitely. Having a lot of time at home to work on stuff and play them, it was a very introspective time. There were melancholy thoughts that went along with that, and there were happy thoughts, joyous thoughts, anger. Music and making and recording music is often a very cathartic process, especially when I’m doing stuff at my home studio. I’m working through a lot. The same is the case with 7s. I [was] working through the emotions when recording and doing the vocal parts. Some of the vocal parts were written and created as I was recording them. It’s really relaxed working with Adam, because we’re good friends, and at the time, there was nobody else around, so we set our own limits and time and let it feel good. “The Musical” and “Invisible Darlings” had a couple different versions we tried, and having the time to not feel rushed about it helped them because we took the time to really find the place for them.

SILY: This all reminds me of when you sing on “Sweeper’s Grin”, “Happy to be carefree / Do tell.”

DP: It’s kind of a cynical question. Some interpret that as me saying I’m happy to be carefree, but it’s really somebody else saying they’re happy to be carefree, and I’m like, “Oh, really? Do tell.” What’s there to be happy about? The world is crumbling. That’s not my typical worldview or outlook on life, but it comes into my mind sometimes. That side is there, so I want it to be there.

SILY: Is that also why you decided to end the record with “Cloud Stop Rest Start”, a bit more of an uneasy track?

DP: For sure. I also didn’t see that song going anywhere else.

SILY: On “The Musical”, you sing, “I wonder, how is it explained that a person comes into the field of making sound and putting it together.” Was that something you were wondering especially when making 7s? Is that a question you get asked a lot?

DP: I feel like I’ve [lately] been a lot more interested in conversational songwriting. That’s me starting to mess around with that, which isn’t something I’ve done before. I haven’t been so personal about my process of making music and my place in music. Asheville is a musical place. I’m around a lot of musicians, and there’s a lot of history of music with Appalachia, people doing all kinds of stuff. Being in this environment, I have friends that play music for the joy of making music, and they’re not so interested in a record contract.

There are a lot of people in the music industry frustrated or trying to figure it out for themselves. It’s been a transitional period, which I was feeling at the time. I had a lot of thoughts about Animal Collective and 2020 and the pandemic. It was a big shift for us. This wasn’t an attempt to answer those questions, just saying what’s on my mind.

SILY: Last October, Animal Collective cancelled their European tour. It seemed like a reality check for people not in the music industry, to see this very successful band unable to tour for financial reasons. Do you still sort of feel like you’re in that transitional phase?

DP: There were a lot of factors that went into cancelling that tour. In some ways, the band is always in a transitional phase because there are so many things we want to do alone and together. It gets complicated to map out. There’s a need these days to really map out your future in the music industry, and probably in a lot of other fields of work and life. People need to plan far in advance, which is difficult for us, being so spread apart. There’s a lot of complicated things that go into setting up a tour and getting together to practice. There were a lot more hurdles, the fact that COVID was still peaking pretty hard during the tour, and having gone through cancelling shows because two of the band members got COVID, myself being one of them. The risks were just too high. It wasn’t fully because we were in transition, but beyond that, the music industry is in transition. Musicians need to get on the same plane and same field and work together a bit more. I think we can work through the transition to make tours happen and not have these kind of worries, and make everyone who wants to tour able to tour. There are so many musicians and bands out there that want to tour, and because we’re such a name already and people know us, it’s fairly easy for us to get shows. I feel like stepping back and letting newer musicians [step up] is the right thing to do, to let people have their chance. It’s tough these days.

SILY: Do you think something like the Union of Musicians & Allied Workers is a step in achieving more equitable touring?

DP: I think so. There’s a certain state of being and frame of mind. A lot of musicians have different goals. For some, it’s not all about making money. There are many different reasons to do it. That kind of thing is helpful, but I don’t think you’re going to get everybody on the same page. It’s a little bit more than just getting everybody in the same union.

SILY: You just mentioned that you feel like other industries are also in flux, which reminds me to ask: On “Invisible Darlings”, are you singing about essential workers during the pandemic?

DP: I am, yeah. I’m trying to sing about anybody that would go unnoticed in your regular day. It could be an essential worker. There are people in the music industry that do a lot for a band that take a lot of crap, too, or are overlooked when they make the night go as smoothly as the music does. It’s also about people that do simple, good deeds, like holding the door open for someone else or pick up a fallen bag of groceries.

SILY: Is the album title simply a reference to the number of songs on the album?

DP: It is, but 7 is an important number for me. I wanted to have that energy be part of the record once it seemed like 7 songs is the way to go. I usually run with stuff like that on my solo records and Animal Collective records.

SILY: What’s the story behind the cover art?

DP: I’m really into collage and trying to take my own visual art in different directions. It’s some sort of landscape, for me, the psychological landscape of the record. You could call it dreamlike, and I’ve referred to it as surreal, even though that’s pretty vague. I’m influenced by the surrealists and [André] Breton’s work.

SILY: Do you think the music on this record is equally influenced by surreal visual artists?

DP: I’m very influenced by visual mediums, film, art that I see that affects me. During the writing and recording of Time Skiffs, I had been reading a lot of surrealist essays, diving deep into the short stories and essays of surrealist writers.

SILY: During recording, do you ever have images projected or displayed to inspire you?

DP: I do. We’ve done that with Animal Collective since Feels. Projections, visual accompaniments. In my own studio, maybe not when recording, but when writing or jamming, I’ll put something from my computer on and let it play. Old cartoons--I was in a real Rocky and Bullwinkle phase. He-Man. Any 50′s/60′s abstract avant-garde stuff. It’s all over the place for me.

SILY: How are you adapting these tracks to a live show as compared to how you’ve adapted past material?

DP: I’m trying to keep the set pretty diverse. I’m playing from all my records. In terms of playing live, I’m never trying to recreate the record. That’s not very interesting to me. A live experience, as a performer, and I hope for the audience, too, should be something different. If you want to listen to the record, you can stay home and listen to the record. There are strengths to [7s], though, that I can’t look past. [I want to keep] pretty true to the vibe of the record. It’s just gonna be me on stage, using sequencers and playing guitar, mostly. I’ll do some acoustic songs. I want it to also feel organic and like a live experience. It’s a balance between finding the strength of the record and feeling like I’m making something as I go.

SILY: What else is next for you and the band?

DP: We’re finishing up a new Animal Collective record. We hope we can put it out this year, but that will depend on our label. I’m finishing the artwork now.

SILY: How did you find the experience scoring The Inspection? Would you do it again in the future?

DP: Definitely. That’s something else we’re trying to wade into more and more and get deep into, being able to do scores and have a reputation as musicians who would like to do that. The Inspection was a positive step in that direction. It got some good attention. It was tough work. It was a challenge to step out of our Animal Collective comfort zone, which is how doing scores is gonna be. It’s a driving factor in our creative communications: We look for challenges, for things outside of ourselves to instigate a change for us. Having a cool film to score is just what we need in that regard. It’s an added creative outlet for us. [We made] a long format video, ODDSAC, with our friend Danny Perez. We’ve always loved psychedelic, horror, and sci-fi films, which is why The Inspection, [a drama based on a true story,] was [even more of] a challenge.

SILY: Anything you’ve been listening to, watching, or reading lately that’s caught your attention?

DP: Right now, I’m reading a collection of short stories called Terminal Boredom by Izumi Suzuki. I’m a big sci-fi fan. Music-wise, it’s all over the place. I’ve been listening to a lot of stuff from my vinyl collection, a lot of older stuff, since I’ve been working on artwork and [that’s] where my turntable is. I listen to a lot of jazz, Chico Hamilton, Eric Dolphy, Sun Ra. When I’m making visual art, I listen to less cohesive, more improvised stuff to get in that zone. I like the record that Eric Copeland and Josh Diamond made last year, Riders on the Storm. Good electronic grooves. I like a record called Felicita by Anadol. It’s a little more out-there, [an] experimental record. A lot of the bands that I have opening for me on tour, Paradot and Anastasia Coope, have music they’ve just put out or [that’s] coming out that I’ve been listening to a lot. That’s why they’re opening up for me.

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