Al Green Interview

For The Quietus

The sleeve notes to Al Green's 1969 album, the seminal Green Is Blues, introduced him as "a young man who is a red hot rhythm and blues singer with a difference that is gonna be greatly dug by all who tune an ear to the variegated tones and shades of this album".

And so it came to pass: by the time Al Green became the Reverend Al Green in 1976, half a decade of prolific album-releasing and hit-making had established him as the father of a new breed of soul music. Combining Memphis label Stax-Volt's brassy arrangements with the caramel vocal of Motown, Green, abetted by producer and friend Willie Mitchell, seduced soul fans and the pop charts, peppering the top 40 with his effortlessly sexy falsetto throughout the early seventies.

Now 63, Green is as effusive as your archetypal evangelical, barely getting through his sentences without breaking into song and then dissolving into laughter. These days he's back into soul, touring compulsively and preaching that same old kind of stay-together love from way back when, while the record labels and agents tot up the royalty fees on his behalf.

As can be the case with interviews with artists of Al Green's stature, it can take a while to actually get a hold of the man. By the time we speak, there's already been two cancellations and, this time, we make sure we listen to the preconditions. We're advised that Green is unaware Demon Digital are repackaging Green Is Blues for a reissue to celebrate its 40 years this June, let alone that there's an accompanying Most Sampled CD collating, um, his most sampled tracks – a fact that will be all too apparent when we finally get to speak to him.

We think we've been stood up for a third time then, just as interview notes are going the way of the paper bin, the phone rings. Michael Jackson's 'The Way You Make Me Feel' is playing. It could be morbidly appropriate hold music – except for there's a preacher man singing along in the background – and then suddenly Reverend Al comes on the line.

Does it feel like 40 years since Green Is Blues was released?
Oh god, no, it seems like it was just yesterday, remember?

Well, I don’t, no…
That was when Michael [Jackson] was playing the Wizard Of Oz.

Do you feel like a different person now to the person who released that album?
I guess so… I guess I’ve grown up in the meantime and I’m a lot stronger now, but I’m still Al, it’s just that I know more and therefore I don’t know anything, if you can make any sense of that.

I wondered about your return to secular music, which you’d kind of departed from by the eighties, and then this decade you came back to making ‘sexy’ songs again – why did you come back to it now?
Oh… oh, I don’t know, that was just what came to pass, I’m just following what was laid out, I’m not the author of anything. The big man upstairs is the author of everything, and you know what else, I got a whole record label named Demon! That’s right! When I go to heaven they’re going to be like ‘huh?’ [laughs] But they’ve really been a great company for me in the European and I guess international areas, so I can’t complain, they’ve been really good.

Okay, so you don’t think there’s any contradiction between making sexy music and being a reverend?
Jeez… you wanna ask the tough questions, huh?! Well, no, I don’t think so, I think there’s a tonne of difference between, say, secular, natural secular, or spiritual, now that’s the dividing line, that’s the difference. Like the ‘Belle’ album, “It’s you that I want but it’s him that I need,” so we can’t go further than that unless you have that element to go further, which is dealing in spiritual things right, right, right, right, RIGHT, RIGHT, RIGHT! [laughs] Now what about this album they’re putting out, what do you think about that?

The reissue?
Yeah.

Well I love it, but it’s been about for a long time now.
Did you guys remix it?

[Demon man comes on the line]: No, we didn’t remix it, we’ve released it in its original form with some bonus tracks on it.

Well, now, that’s just… you gotta send me a complimentary copy. [laughs]

No problem.

Now, Hazel you’re a witness to that right?

Oh I’ve got it all here, don’t worry. Speaking of the Green Is Blues album, you covered the Beatles on that right?
Yeah, the Beatles, that’s right, and I was just 22 or something, going into the studio with Willie Mitchell, um, it was the beginning beginning. So I feel like really it’s the beginning beginning of the ‘One Woman’ song that opens up the album that you know, going into the ‘Give Me A Ticket For An Aeroplane’, the Boxtops, and the Beatles, and ‘Get Back’… I don’t know! We were just cutting a lot of stuff! You know, we were cutting a lot of stuff! We were just flowing! [sings] “Ain’t no love like my baby’s love…” Whatever! [laughs] We didn’t have a direction back then, we didn’t know what Al was, what is Al? You know, Willie kept telling me, “Sing Al Green,” and I was like, “What’s that supposed to sound like?” I didn’t know.

Do you think you know now?
Oh yeah, oh yeah! We know now! We just played the Superdome in New Orleans, Louisiana to 60,000 people… I think we just about know now.

So is it better now that you know who Al Green is and you don’t have to keep striving for that?
Well, I’m never satisfied with him, I always want to push him further and further and further and further, it’s like a line or a track – because I know the hill’s over here, you don’t try to… uh, try to interpret it before it comes, you just finish the journey. Don’t worry about the hills or the valleys, just finish the journey, and that’s what we’re trying to do.

Okay, so you never really feel like you’ve achieved what you set out to do?
Well, you say Creations, Al Green and the Creations, when you start saying Creations you start saying Green Is Blues because that was what he created in himself.

And you’re still striving to create something new every time?
Well, yeah, there’s this guy in the band, and he says to me after the show, “Why do you sing so hard? You already cut this song, this song’s already perfect,” and I go, “Well, I keep trying to make it better. In my head, I keep trying to make it better.” That’s right.

Do you think that’s why you’ve lasted so long when so many of your contemporaries have fallen by the wayside?
I guess so. I think you’ve got to find maybe one thing or two things you can do, and do those real well. And that’s kind of the philosophy of our National Anthem, ‘Let’s Stay Together’, you know. That’s what we do, and everybody comes in on the [sings] “I’m,” – it kills me! – “so in love with you!” Yes yes, okay, great, sit down! [laughs]

Did you ever hear what the Beatles thought of your cover of ‘Get Back’?
It’s like the Roy Orbison song, ‘Pretty Woman’, it’s like the same thing… those guys are so fantastic, so far advanced it what they wrote, it’s just incredible. And people were asking me “how do you sing it?” But I didn’t know – Willie wouldn’t let me hear the song! He said, “Sing what’s inside!” But I’d only heard it on the radio! So he said, “Just sing that!” But he wouldn’t let me hear it! So I had to kinda just improvise… but I think it turned out alright.

What about all the artists, hip hop artists especially, that sample you – Kanye West, Jay-Z, Notorious B.I.G – do you mind?
Their stuff is incredible.

Do you listen to it?
Yeah, I have to because I’m in the music business. And whether it’s rap, or whatever, I have to listen to it because I have to share in the vocation I’m in.

Okay, sure. So you don’t feel protective over your music when someone is cutting it up and reusing it?
No, I think they do good – Talking Heads ‘Take Me To The River’, that’s just fantastic; Tina Turner ‘Let’s Stay Together’, I said “Hey, man, that’s another interpretation – why didn’t I think of that?!” [laughs]

Have you ever heard your music used in a way that you really didn’t like?
I don’t really know because they send me from Los Angeles only what they want me to hear! [laughs] So I don’t know, I guess it’s a screening process or something! I probably should cut through that, but I don’t know, I guess they’re like “The man is a Reverend, he’s been in the church for 30 years, and now he’s been doing this here for 40 years and we kinda wanna protect the whole career…” the ‘Tired Of Being Alone’, the whole career, you know, ‘God Blessed Our Love’, fine fine fine. The whole thing is illustrated here on the wall with these gold records – but I can’t take these boys with me! Can’t take the money, can’t take the car.

Your music’s got a reputation for being really sexy…
Sexy?

Yeah, really seductive, but why is that?
You’re making an old man nervous! [laughs] Sexy, sexy… well when a man is 22 he’s got hips and a nice BO, he’s got that stance… I mean, Otis Reading didn’t try to be sexy, but he turned out to be sexy anyway – you know, 6’6’’ tall, young, handsome… come on man, I couldn’t help it!

It’s still hard to explain why some music can be so seductive…
I guess it’s kind of seductive if you’re playing it in the car on the way to work or something, and you’re thinking, “I should turn right here…”

What about your music, do you listen to stuff that’s in the charts or when you go home do you have your favourite records that you’re still listening to?
Well, I mean, with the tragedy of Michael they sent me all of Michael’s records, and I’ve played 1, 2, 3, 4 of Michael’s records so far, just incredible to listen to the talent of the man. I met Michael, and I hugged him, I gave him one of those boy hugs, type of thing, because we were over at Tito’s house, and they was having like a pool party with little crackers and champagne or something, and we were all out around the pool when Michael came in, with Germaine and, oh I don’t know man, it was a long time ago. And he says “Oh, I like your music,” and I said “Thanks, I like yours!” He’d been singing longer than me. It’s kind of hard to realise the fact that’s taken place for me. It’s just that everything ain’t right. A wonderful talent – a super-talent!

Yeah I know, but we kind of watched his decline over the last few years, that’s why I was talking about you still having the drive to get out there and do it – that takes a special kind of person.
Yeah, I mean, we’re doing like 100 dates, more than 100 shows a year, so you’ve got to be committed to it, you’ve got to love it to stay in it that long, to do that. Because if you don’t love it you get out of it real fast.

And who knows whether Jackson wanted to do it in the end or whether he just wanted out, you know.
Yeah, it’s kind of a question of whether he wanted to do it, and if he did want to do it, the people were saying he only weighed 112pounds! That he had anorexia! 112pounds! For 50 shows! I don’t know if he could’ve done the 50 shows. But he was a great talent, anyway.

For you personally, was there ever any one moment when you really thought ‘I’ve done it’?
Well, I keep pushing Al, I hug him and tell him how good he is, like at the Superdome, I keep telling him, ‘fantastic, fantastic, now come on, move of further, come on,’ But I don’t know how to tell him he’s done a good job, I just tell him to move on further to the next ladder.

Do you think hip hop and r’n’b has taken over from where soul music left off?
How can Monday be Tuesday? You gotta have your Mondays and you gotta have your Tuesdays. So why don’t Monday stay over in Monday’s slot and Tuesday stay over in Tuesdays slot, Wednesday will be in his slot, Thursday stay where he belongs, and everything will be fine!

Jamie T Interview

Billy Bragg once said, “I don’t mind being labelled a political songwriter – what upsets me is being dismissed as a political songwriter.”

Bragg had politics to write about. He musically came of age when Thatcher was doing one over on every working man that moved, Russia was giving off the nuclear farts of the decomposing Cold War, and people still believed in protest. These days British democracy means being governed by a slack-jawed mushroom who was neither elected nor validated by the public before he gained the authority to place the burden of billions of pounds of debt on its shoulders, nationalise the banks and remain in office while his entire cabinet – and the entire government – rot away around him in scandal.

Thus apathy has replaced activism in the universal attitude to the regime. Jamie T might carry the punk ethic and street serialising of Bragg into this century, but he point blank refuses to be directly political, in songs or in conversation. “I don’t talk about politics because I don’t know what I’m talking about,” he says, blue eyes flashing defensively on a pub terrace in Wimbledon. Presumably then, this is a one-dimensional view of suburbia – all beer, fights, fag and girls? “It’s sad to think that people think that’s all it is – beer, fights… I’ve got a wider perspective than that. I think it’s more important to know how you feel about a situation than to know what you’re fucking talking about. Your daily life comes from a lot of things, a lot of things can affect you, and I don’t think my life is just about beer, fights and cigarettes.”

A little riled, he slurps on his Kronenburg and leans back to light up, in illustration. This is Bragg in reverse: this is politics for the attention-deficient solipsists of a disenfranchised generation – and the only politics they know.

“If I find myself in two years in a mansion having a chat with Mariah Carey then I’ll write about that,” says Jamie of his consistency, “but until that happens I’ll write about the things around me. And no, it hasn’t changed all that much. I think you’d probably know if it had – you’d hear it.”

What you will hear on the Sticks ‘n’ Stones EP on June 29 and forthcoming album Kings and Queens is the same soundbitten street-life, wrapped up in cling-film choruses to sing along to. Jamie’s muses still scuff their shoes on suburban pavements and find mischief in their safe, symmetrical confines. His personal vaudeville is a stage for many players, guest starring, for this series, the gun-toting Emily, the cocky counsel of Joey, and the usual chorus of nameless mates with drug habits and attitude problems.

Four years since Panic Prevention’s schizophrenic mix of beats, punk and raw acoustics and the chain-smoking 23-year-old is still, by his own admission “a cheeky little git,” only now he’s got a top ten album, Mercury nomination, and Best Solo Artist award from the NME, no less. “I suppose it’s difficult when you have to deal with so many people’s opinions and people asking you who you are and what the fuck you think you’re doing,” he comments in a voice that implies he never gave it a second thought. “But once I came to the agreement with myself – early on – that I was going to do whatever I wanted, I didn’t worry about any of that. I didn’t feel particularly part of the limelight in any kind of manner, you know. I feel really part of being in a dark room for seven hours a day and writing music.”

Don’t let the south London accent and wide boy affectations fool you - Jamie Treays is a good boy come good. Raised by supportive parents and educated at private schools, he describes feeling like a ‘Vietnam veteran’ when he came back from touring Panic Prevention and wasn’t supplied nightly with a rider of carrots, hummus and pitta bread – hardly the diet of lager and snuff you might expect. He still lives in his hometown of Wimbledon, twenty minutes from his parents’, with his mate and the big brother who can be held responsible for his first musical outing. “My brother wanted to play the drums and I fucking hated my brother, so that’s when I decided I was going to play the drums to piss him off. He had a little cry about it,” says Jamie, “and after that it becomes your identity as a kid if you start doing something – it becomes what you do.”

What Jamie did was listen to a lot of records – a lot of ska and punk, and then a lot of garage and UK hip hop. But it started with ska. “Back then I was into a lot of Desmond Dekker and stuff like that, constantly trying to work out how it sounded so good – I still haven’t worked it out. So I spent a lot of time locked away, to some extent, having a lot of fun and going [he puts on a Dick Dastardly voice] “shut up, go away, I don’t like you! I like Desmond much more, you’re an idiot!””

Plenty of clean little white boys have appropriated music in their bedrooms. Few sign five-album deals with Virgin. Even fewer stop snivelling over acoustic guitars and write songs that become biting social commentaries better than any government white paper.

“I’ve always known I wanted to do music,” Jamie says, matter-of-fact. “I like doing graphics and a lot of that arty kind of shit. I’ve always been into that stuff, and that goes with doing it your own way. It’s better to do it your own way because if it’s not good then you’ve only got yourself to blame, and that’s what you want. Fuck pointing fingers.”

It seems Jamie T always left the finger-pointing and fisticuffs – political and otherwise – to others. Doesn’t he ever plan to turn his hand to the bigger picture? “We’ll have to see, won’t we? We’ll have to see. I’d rather talk about what’s going on at the moment than think about writing iconic epic songs that have world meaning. Leave that to Bono.”

Funny thing is, for all his apolitical posturing, Jamie T speaks for the streets better than any politician. Just don’t tell him that.

Tori Amos Interview

There’s something terrifying about pop music. All the smoke and mirrors of unrealism clogging the pores – the promise of the impossible sugared by sinister painted-on smiles. Pop music was invented to distil escapism into three minutes; to make us believe that there exists a place where sex-starved, gorgeous women are ten a penny and money comes for free and you can have what you want. Ultimately, pop music is about deceit.

And then there’s Tori Amos. A weird, writhing creature of many faces, she became an icon for the unconventional back in 1992 with her first solo album, Little Earthquakes. It was a deeply personal debut, perhaps best remembered now for ‘A Man And A Gun’, describing Amos’s own experience of rape. At first, Atlantic, her record label, rejected the album, fearing piano pop – the first of its kind – wouldn’t sell in an alternative climate of early nineties hip hop, trance and grunge. Amos fought a four-year battle to have the album released as she wanted it, fending off the ideas of an A-list producer who tried to replace all the pianos with rock guitars. Finally, Atlantic complied. The record was an immediate success.

“I had confrontations with record people at certain times that I don’t think would be my way now,” Amos tells Pigeon, curled up in black in the armchair of a Kensington hotel suite. She’s physically tiny, softly-spoken, and tired – but there’s a steeliness to her manner that can only have come from years navigating the choppy waters of the press. “You don’t even realise you’re agreeing to things, because the industry has so many tentacles. It’s not only the record company, that’s just one little facet. There’s the commercialised media, and then there’s the public – there are a lot of players in this story.”

Tori Amos’s story wasn’t ever conventional – and her pop music was about deceit, but of a different kind. Hers was the kind where fucked up people get fucked – and come out the other side.

It was carried by the enigma that is Amos herself. An odd-looking ‘moonchild’ with a static frizz of red hair, she used to rub herself suggestively against the leather of her piano stool during performances, falling across its keys with total abandon. The spectacle fascinated and enchanted onlookers, as much as the rawness of her material. Endlessly strange and ethereal, that talented pixie-pianist quickly divided listeners, winning legions of fans who stood with her on the outskirts of convention, and felt liberated by her openness and eccentricity.

Twenty years since she signed to Atlantic, and it’s hard to know what’s real and what’s not with Tori Amos anymore. She’s mastered the art of disguise, transforming from brazen and bare-faced into quite the smooth professional. Any direct questioning is bound to send her off on rambling tangents about spirituality, mythology and the psyche, while the front that she presents to the world is a polished veneer of thick, ageless make-up and stiff fake hair. She keeps Pigeon waiting half an hour while being minutely groomed by her stylist, who hovers, readjusting things intermittently, during the photoshoot. Has age made Amos vain? Or is this self-defence?

“I realise that I’m 45 and that this is my tenth album,” she says. “But time marches on, and so I guess I’m at that age where you either become someone about whom people say ‘wow, she’s carved a trail’ or you become a tragic figure.”

Of course, the two aren’t mutually exclusive: surprisingly often it’s the pioneers who burn out under the pressure of their own innovation. The Amos whose first album ushered in a new generation of frank and forthright female singer-songwriters, including Beth Gibbons, Alanis Morissette, Fiona Apple, and Regina Spektor, has spent the ten years since trying to escape from the clutches of the aforementioned ‘players’, becoming ever more surreal in appearance in the process. It smacks of escapism, her way of coping with the industry that lays claim to her, and it’s rooted in an early struggle for control.

“I’d say in the nineties there were those moments when I got in trouble because I let the woman walk out the room and the teenage girl step back in. But that was more in the early nineties – mid-nineties – and then you learn that being a woman is such a powerful thing. That doesn’t mean I can do everything, but you have to be an expert at choosing experts, and it’s taken me a while to understand that. When you hand over too much power you have to ask yourself why you’re handing it over.”

And then, suddenly proud: “These are all little things that you learn in order to be making your tenth album, and sitting where I am – it’s not because it was handed to me. And the challenges I face all the time are just in a different arena from an artist on their first album, they’re just different issues in 2009 to those that I faced in 1991.”

Power struggles punctuate Amos’s biography. She was born in 1963 – the same year that The Beatles’ first album introduced the world to pop music, and the death of Kennedy signified the end of a democratic era. At the age of five she was awarded a scholarship to study classical piano at the prestigious Peabody Institute in Baltimore; by eleven she’d been thrown out for insisting on playing her own pop compositions in exams. At 21 she moved to Los Angeles, where she formed a rock band by the name of Y Kant Tori Read, the line up of which included future Guns ‘N Roses drummer Matt Sorum. In the same year she suffered the sexual assault that would later be relived in ‘A Man With A Gun’. Her band signed to Atlantic and released one album in 1988, which flopped, but the six-album contract meant that Amos was legally bound to continue producing music for the label: Little Earthquakes was the result.

“I wouldn’t choose a pissing match with a big cheese, I’d sooner drink champagne!” she laughs, but there are chinks of fragility under the bold exterior. “They never set out to be there, nobody sets out to be there, they don’t seem to be in control of their life, but sometimes you’re busy, and sometimes there’s so much coming up that they hand everything over and then you don’t know how to take it back. It’s very easy to hand it over but it’s very hard to start taking responsibility of your life.”

Is Amos talking about herself? Her longheld tendency to deconstruct the female psyche and deflect personal enquiry was best demonstrated on 2007’s American Girl Posse, which saw her adopt various guises to depict five alter egos, both in the artwork and her performances. “I don’t think that one female archetype is totally and completely any woman I’ve ever met,” she explains, aware of the dangers of taking certain character-types to the extreme. “Sometimes someone will show me something and I’ll seem a bit scary, and I think that’s got its context, but… That’s the thing, I’m strong when I need to be strong, but a strong woman can also be very supportive and nurturing and loving, and very feminine.”

Does she think of herself as feminine? “I do! My husband does, my daughter does, they think I’m really warm – southern American and warm – like my mother. But if I’m battling the big boys, in whatever structure I’m having to deal with, it’s a different tone.”

Repeated battles with the big boys at Atlantic Records eventually fuelled Amos’s decision to construct a physical retreat from label pressure. In 1995, while in Ireland to record third album Boys for Pele with sound engineers Mark Hawley and Marcel van Limbeek, Peter Gabriel advised Amos to build a private studio. Two years later, in a collaborative venture with Van Limbeek and Hawley, Amos founded Martian Studios – and a year after that Amos and Hawley were married. Her studio was constructed in Cornwall to escape the pressures of LA, London and New York, and when, in 1997, Amos suffered the first of three miscarriages, the importance of Martian studios to her career can barely be overestimated. It gave her freedom to work independently and respite from industry pressure, allowing for room to experiment. Today, with the ordeal of those troubled years well behind her, Amos has a much more flippant view of Cornwall, saying “my husband lets me crash there, and my daughter goes to school there, but so much of my life happens in the states…”

Her daughter, Natashya, was born in 2000. Afterwards Amos revealed that Atlantic had only allowed her two days to recuperate from the third miscarriage before pushing her back into a gruelling promotional schedule. It was the final straw, provoking her split from the label in 2002, and although she found a home with Epic for several years, last year Amos announced that she’ll be operating independently of all major labels from now on.

Label independence seems hard-won, but not unexpected. Amos has solitarily crafted every album since the completion of Martian Studios in its quiet confines, preventing any major label meddling with her masters. And her output is staggering considering the traumas of her personal life over the last ten years. Typically, however, she attributes her productivity to something else entirely: “I serve the muse. I do, I serve the creative force. I have to do it, when it takes over,” she says. “It can be when I’m taking a shower, sitting having a coffee somewhere, and she walks in, in a dream in the middle of the night – a lot of the time when I’m travelling, because your senses are heightened and you’re out of it. I just resolve myself to the muse being in control.”

And of her latest album, Abnormally Attracted To Sin, “I didn’t think I was going to do it, I thought I was going to take a break, but it took over…”

Why can’t Amos take credit for her own talent – for her own proven ability to withstand the multifarious pressures of producing records and media enquiry? It’s a contradiction that’s dogged her all her life – and a subject that finds a home on her latest release – “I’m fascinated by the idea of erotic spirituality,” she says, oblique as ever. But then: “there’s this idea of being attracted to something that once we’re into we’re not attracted to any more; once we realise what it is, it doesn’t seem very sensual, it seems disgusting to your spirit.”

The struggle between her compulsion to write and release records and the baggage that goes with the whole process is perhaps the reason that she’d now rather let imaginary friends take credit for her achievements. Amos has learned to deal with public and professional scrutiny by invoking eccentricity, and coating it with the lacquer of a contrived ‘public’ face. This deceit – this deflection of reality in favour of a more exciting alternative – is the very definition of pop. But talk to the woman long enough and it’s very clear that there’s a shrewd mind at work behind it all: “I’m a woman who carries my own weight: I hunt,” she says, blue eyes burning behind that distracting red wig. “So if you don’t hunt and you need help, that’s different, but if you’re a good hunter and you’re just sitting on your ass, I’m gonna kick your ass: you can come out and hunt with me.”

Great Escape Festival Day 3

What better way to start a Saturday than with a secret fans-only gig by Ben Kweller, in a tent? Gigwise, like most other punters at The Great Escape, heard about this and seemingly hundreds of other gigs throughout the weekend by signing up to an invaluable texting service (though the text-a-minute tip-offs did begin to grate a little towards the end). Never one to disappoint, Kweller took requests from the crowd, encouraging sing-a-long renditions of ‘Penny On A Train Track’ and ‘On My Way’, before trying to flog his new album for a tenner at the end of the set, in true troubadour style. Maccabees brothers-in-arms Felix and Hugo were spotted singing along, word-perfect. “The only person I wanted to see was Ben Kweller!” an overexcited Felix told Gigwise at the end of the set.

Saturday’s big news was the not-so-secret Babyshambles gig, which saw Pete Doherty and co. play a six-songs to hundreds of festival-goers at Audio. Those who wanted to attend had to apply for separate tickets, but even that didn’t stop the waiting crowds from queuing round the block hours before the venue even opened. Pete seemed in reasonably good form considering he’d come straight from an impromptu Libertines reunion in London the night before, even managing to head a football kicked up to him by the crowd mid-set.

That night, in Audio’s basement, Fight Like Apes unleashed ferocious sweaty screamy-pop on an unsuspecting, beer-swilling audience. The programme described them as having spent ‘the majority of the past 12 months ram-raiding their don’t-take-no-for-an-answer songs in people’s ears’, and the ram-raiding continued unabated in Brighton. A short while later, on the same stage, San Diego garage rockers The Soft Pack played their second gig of the weekend. The soundsystem didn’t do them justice, but they impressed nonetheless, imparting fuzzily distorted riffs and disaffected obscured vocals to a rowdy crowd that threatened to erupt into full-on rioting – the gig was a definite Escape highlight.

Night-time revellers were low on the ground for the grand finale, perhaps the result of it being the third night of wind-beaten city trudging, but the cosy upstairs of Ocean Rooms busied slightly with the friendly fans of Post War Years, and their polished, punctuating, bleepy indie. Scheduled entertainment was equally thin on the ground after the midnight hour, but those with the stamina graced a marquee dance tent for Queens Of Noize’s very own cocktail of eighties pop and rock, that veered towards the bland as the night drew to a close. No bother – Great Escape had already re-instated itself as the best of the inner-city festivals. As the Camden Crawl with added seaside and cider, it’s pretty hard to beat.

Great Escape Festival Day 2

There were plenty of hungover gig-goers as grizzly as the weather when Friday came around. Daytime shows at Above Audio were sparsely attended, but that didn’t stop San Franciscan fourpiece, Love Like Fire, from playing a full-volume set of grinding guitar riffs and shouty vocals courtesy of frontwoman Ann Yu. James Yuill followed with his own especially enticing brand of bedroom laptop-pop, still managing to look incongruously the nerd even when surrounded by carefully styled Brighton geek-chic. By the time cheery Norwegians Casiokids took to the stage at 3pm the bar was full of the slow-to-emerge Escapers all hoping that some uber-happy Scando-pop could sooth aching heads. Entertaining haircuts aside, blissed-out saccharine songs were just too sweet for our ears, so we headed for one of Brighton’s many punter-filled pubs to find shelter from the storm in large pints of the best southern cider.

Evening entertainment kicked off at the Sallis Benney theatre, where the student cafe served fruit by the piece and cheap tea with portion packets of digestive biscuits, just like a student canteen should. Veils positively tumbled onstage at 6pm – frontman Finn Andrews breathlessly explained that they were “a little disorganised.” The New Zealanders are currently mid-tour promoting album Sun Gangs, and there was an urgency about the performance that Fin later put down to his being used to a ninety-minute touring set, rather than the standard festival thirty. “I kept thinking that thirty minutes is the length of an episode of The Simpsons, which actually seems quite long,” he mused to Gigwise backstage.

Micachu And The Shapes seemed much more comfortable with the rather stuffy industry crowd, chatting amicably with the audience between songs of meticulous pop chaos. One punter was overheard groaning “This music makes me feel so old!” To the contrary, it was very easy to see why Micachu has garnered such a high profile this year – who else could make catchy pop out of vacuum-cleaner samples and a battered, strung up acoustic?

Twilight settled into Brighton’s colourful lanes as Vivian Girls rattled the walls of the Pavillion Theatre with the kind of ballsy bitch rock that could incite impromtu violence against bras. Their set ended with a slick manoeuvre involving them each exchanging instruments without stopping playing – testament to their hefty use of distortion and pedals if nothing else.

Next door in the enormous school-sports-hall of a Corn Exchange, Club NME played host to a considerably younger crowd, who sat cross-legged in clusters on the laminated floor, waiting for neo-folk fourpiece Mumford & Sons. The effects of a day of free-flowing lager were becoming more apparent by the time the wholesome-looking band graced the stage at 11pm – and despite the fact that most of Mumford & Sons’ songs embrace subject-matter that tends towards indulgently melancholy, the venue erupted into zealous jigging and uncontainable grinning. It must have been the banjo (or maybe banjo-player Winston Marshall’s hilarious chicken-like dancing). They claimed it was the biggest gig they’ve ever played, and with an album on the way later this year, things are looking increasingly rosy for Mumford and his progeny.

Metronomy rounded off the night in their usual, infectious electro-vein, but with the added extra-excitement of a completely new line-up including Gbenga Adelekan on bass and one-time Lightspeed Champion drummer Anna Prior. Oscar Cash, on keys, was still affecting the robotic dancing and stylised pouting of Metronomy’s trio days, which made him look like a bit of a twerp, but the new band line-up was an resounding success, giving tired songs from album ‘Nights Out’ an unexpected vitality. If only the same could be said of the drunken punters who wobbled out into the night as the gig finished.

Great Escape Festival Day 1

Part punters’s piss up by the sea, part industry conference, Brighton’s Great Escape festival has established itself as one of the UK’s leading searchlights in the hunt for new talent. True to British seaside tradition, festival-goers can divide their time between arcade games on the pier, ice creams on the pavilion and fish and chips on the beach, or over thirty venues hosting live entertainment from undiscovered and established artists from all over the world. And while the city’s pretty well infested with those carrying ‘delegate’ passes pushing in all the queues (30% of those in attendance are in the business), there’s so much going on that you’d be hard pressed not to discover something special, even if you didn’t quite manage to get into Kasabian.

Brighton welcomes everyone with bad weather on the Thursday, which puts a damper on the trudge between venues. Brighton town proper is relatively small, however, and endowed with a huge number of gig venues all marked on a dummy-proof map, so it’s still fairly simple finding something to suit. Deadpan Londonite Emmy The Great kicks off proceedings at Digital with her delicate mix of acoustics and understatement. While Emmy is as enchanting as ever, the venue is ill-suited to her sound, and songs dissipate in the beery chatter of the crowd, loosing their poignancy somewhat.

Meanwhile down at Concorde 2 youngsters Bombay Bicycle Club have caused a bit of a ruckus in the rain – their gig is heavily oversubscribed and most of the hopeful fans are turned away at the door, left to trudge back down to town and see what else is on offer. A few early gatherers at the Corn Exchange catch noisy Brooklyn duo The Hundred In The Hands, who’ve begun to build a solid reputation from their raucous live performances. Tonight, however, a large proportion of the audience is still sitting in wait for Thursday’s big gig: The Maccabees.

Fresh from a UK tour in which they launched much anticipated new album ‘Wall Of Arms’, Brighton boys The Maccabees are on happiest on home soil, and their set plays out like a huge sweaty homecoming party. There’s the usual favourites from debut ‘Colour It In’, but some of the best received material comes fresh from their more recent release, including a joyous ‘Kiss And Revolve’ that threatens to see the riotous crowd lift off from the floor entirely. It’s a fitting welcome to Brighton – and judging by this reception no one present would be rather be anywhere else.

Madness Interview

So you’re skint, right? And everyone’s talking about how they’ve got no money, and the TV keeps telling us we’re all going to die of swine flu, and the fleeting sunshine has been replaced by those familiar black clouds. God love England.

Some things can be relied on though – Domino’s pizza is doing alright. Lager’s still on tap. And Madness are making a comeback ten years after their last album, with a record about London, no less.

Crafted with an Oliver Twist narrative borne of history, mystery and spectacle, The Liberty Of Norton Folgate explores London’s dirty little corners, sweeping out the oddities for inspection, and putting the city’s story to the tune of a full-scale orchestra. It’s as gleeful as ‘Our House’ was back in 1983. If the hoards of fans screaming every word in the backstreets of Camden at this year’s Camden Crawl are anything to by, it doesn’t matter one bit whether you fell for Madness back in seventies, or you didn’t hear ‘It Must Be Love’ until its rerelease in 1991. Madness are a band of the people, for the people, and they’re back to put a bit of cheer into our downtrodden, recession-filled lives, as Chas recently told Gigwise…

It’s been a decade since you last wrote an album. Why the comeback?
We began in a recession, in a difficult time for the country. It was a wave, so there was something being expressed by The Specials, Madness, The Beat. Then we reformed, again in an economic recession, almost because people wanted us to. And now we’re back in a recession again, and this album is the third energy bubble. I like to think of Madness as a bright shining bit of joy.

Where did the idea for the album initially come from?
Because we’ve been together for so long, it’s difficult to say who said what, when, and we’re it begins. It came from an interest in London, it came from wanting to express that interest, it came from Patrick O’Brien mentioning the Liberties [Norton Folgate is pocket of land in London excluded from the normal legal system of the UK], it came from Sugs reading Peter Ackroyd, it came from me reading Ian Sinclair – it also came from that side of us that likes to be a bit theatrical, you know? There’s elements of Beckett in there, there’s elements of Oliver Twist – when we’re touring we listen to Snow White & The Seven Dwarves and Tommy Cooper, because we get a buzz off that, that’s what we do. I think Madness has got a joyous thing about it – we’re more post-war than we contemporary – we were born around the fifties and early sixties.

What about Madstock, why are you bringing that back?
Madstock is a brand – I want us to be building that live. I don’t really care much about records and recording, I like the live experience. It’s financially sensible because you get 85% instead of 20% on a record.

Speaking of financial incentives – is that why you’re making a comeback?
No, not at all, it’s not like that at all. In fact I get bored with this – you don’t ask an actor if they’re acting in a film because they need the money. I’m an artist, you know.

You feel like you have things to say?
Absolutely, I think it’s a credible album and I think it’s worthy of being released. Someone like James Brown goes on for thirty years playing the same set – but for us it’s not about the same set, it’s about delivering something that people expect and want.

So you feel the pressure to deliver something of a certain quality?
No, not at all. Selfishly, we write for us.

But there is an element of trying to cheer everyone up a bit.
Sure, we play old songs, and when we play new songs we slowly introduce them over time. We’ve got such an extensive back-catalogue that it’s really easy – we can choose between our original songs, a ska-set, and a whole Liberty Of Norton Folgate set – so we change the sets depending on the territory and who we’re playing to.

What about The Specials, are they going to be appearing at Madstock?
Hmm, how can I put this – not if I can help it. I believe that Jerry Dammers started The Specials, I believe he’s a genius, and I think it’s very sad that the band can’t reconcile their differences. [Dammers hasn’t played with The Specials since the 1980s] Music should be a unifying thing, you know, and it just doesn’t feel right to me, to be honest. I know that I’m not meant to be saying these things, and that it’s political but I can’t be arsed with all that – it’s not the real deal.

You don’t want them to play?
I don’t want to stop anyone from what they’re doing, it’s their choice, but do I want them to play? I would feel like I was betraying Jerry in some way, and I wouldn’t betray someone as a matter of principle.

So that’s a no.
That’s a definite, resounding fuck off! [uncomfortable pause] I didn’t mean you! It’s difficult, it’s difficult because they’re a fucking great band. But the fact is that they can’t play original songs due to this rift. I want to mediate and have a little chat with all of them, you know. One thing that Madness is good at is sticking together and being truly friendly. The trouble with The Specials is that they weren’t friends before they were a band, you know. But I love them all individually, seriously, they’re good people.

Do you stay in touch with what’s going on in music at the minute?
I’m listening to Lily Allen’s album, to Elbow’s latest album, I’m listening to The Cinematic Orchestra…

But do you care what’s going on, in terms of what you actually do?
I like to see what cuts the ground a bit, you know – if it’s been in print for fifty years then I’ll read it. I’ve run a record label before, but now, I feel like I don’t need to know what’s going on. I’ve stopped reading newspapers, I’ve stopped watching television, and I don’t want 57 megahertz in my mind, I want 8 megahertz and a fireplace. My truthfulness to my voice is all that matters.

Is this the start of a new chapter for Madness?
I totally see it that way, I see this as the third cherry bomb – boom!