Category Archives: Indie

On my radar: Aidan Moffat’s cultural highlights

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The Arab Strap vocalist on late-night horror chats with his mum, spending time with Alan Partridge, and bingeing on Succession

Born in Falkirk, Scotland, in 1973, Aidan Moffat is the vocalist of indie rock band Arab Strap, which he founded in 1995 with Malcolm Middleton. Characterised by Moffat’s half-spoken vocals over lo-fi instrumentation, the band gained international acclaim with 1996 single The First Big Weekend; they went on to release six studio albums before splitting in 2006 and reforming in 2016. Since 2002, Moffat has released music under the name L Pierre, and collaborated with artists including Mogwai and Bill Wells. Arab Strap’s first album in 16 years, As Days Get Dark, is was released this month on Rock Action.

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Goat Girl: ‘We’re seen as harmless because we’re not men’

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With a member diagnosed with cancer and their politics deepened by BLM, the south London indie quartet have reassessed their priorities ahead of their excellent second album

South London quartet Goat Girl were deep into making their second album when it became clear that something was very wrong with their youngest member, guitarist-vocalist Ellie Rose Davies. At the end of 2019, she had had lumps on her neck for some time, which eventually spread to both armpits. It wasn’t until the 23-year-old’s “fourth or fifth” trip to the doctors that she was finally referred for a blood test, then a biopsy. “By which time the cancer was at stage four,” she says.

Davies had Hodgkin lymphoma, a cancer of the blood, and had to start a six-month course of chemotherapy immediately. “We were pretty worried because we knew it was getting worse,” says their bassist, Holly Mullineaux. They had been mixing the record with their producer, Dan Carey, when Davies got her results, “and we all just started crying”.

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How we made: All Together Now by the Farm

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‘Pills were just starting to flow in Britain. We thought: “What will this sound like in a club with people off their heads?”’

The origins of All Together Now go back to 1981. Michael Foot had been the centre of tabloid outrage after wearing what the papers called a “donkey jacket” at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday. He later revealed that it was an £800 coat from Harrods which the Queen Mother had actually complimented him on, but the outrage made me angry. I thought the soldiers in the trenches would be more annoyed with the top brass that sent them to the front than, decades later, a Labour party leader’s attire. I’d trained as a history teacher and this incident inspired me to read more about the first world war. I chanced upon an article about the unofficial truce in 1914, when British and German troops came out of the trenches to play football with each other for Christmas. I wrote a song called No Man’s Land and we recorded it for a John Peel session. A couple of years later Paul McCartney released Pipes of Peace, with the same theme. I thought: “Bastard!”

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Dave Grohl’s teenage obsessions: ‘I learned drums by arranging pillows on my floor’

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Ahead of the 10th Foo Fighters album, their frontman recalls the music and scenes that made him – from punk gigs in Chicago to sleeping on floors in Italian squats

Before I was a teenager, I started playing music in my bedroom by myself. I fell in love with the Beatles, then began to discover classic rock. I went from Kiss to Rush to AC/DC, but in 1983 I discovered punk rock music through a cousin in Chicago. My world turned upside down. My favourite bands were Bad Brains and Naked Raygun; I listened to Dead Kennedys and Black Flag. My introduction to live music came when my brother took me to a punk show in a small bar in Chicago. I didn’t have that festival/stadium/arena rock experience; I just saw four punk rock dudes on the stage, playing this fast three-chord music, with about 75 people in the audience climbing all over each other. It changed my life. One of the most prolific scenes in hardcore American punk rock was in Washington DC, just across the bridge [from Grohl’s home town of Springfield, Virginia]. So I started going to see bands like Minor Threat and Fugazi. By the time I was 14, I was cutting and dyeing my hair and wearing leather jackets. All I wanted to do was leave school, jump in a van and tour shitty basement clubs with my punk band.

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‘All that mattered was survival’: the songs that got us through 2020

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Butterflies with Mariah, Bronski Beat in the Peak District, Snoop Dogg on a food delivery ad … our writers reveal the tracks that made 2020 bearable

When it came to lockdown comfort listening, there was something particularly appealing about lush symphonic soul made by artists such as Teddy Pendergrass and the Delfonics. But there was one record I reached for repeatedly: Black Moses by Isaac Hayes, and particularly the tracks arranged by Dale Warren. Their version of Burt Bacharach’s (They Long to Be) Close to You is an epic, spinning the original classic into a nine-minute dose of saccharine soul. But their cover of Going in Circles, another Warren exercise in expansion, is their masterpiece, reimagining the Friends of Distinction original as a seven-minute arrangement with stirring strings and beatific backing vocals that builds into a story about lost love that transcends the genre’s usual parameters. A perfect, if slightly meta, balm for the repetitive lockdown blues. Lanre Bakare

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‘My coolness has disintegrated’: how pop stars cope with fatherhood

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Pop’s mothers have told of guilt, loneliness and record-label prejudice – so do men face the same problems? Wayne Coyne, Tom Fletcher, Ghetts, Thurston Moore and others respond

This summer, two of the world’s biggest pop stars became parents for the first time. Katy Perry told an interviewer that after becoming pregnant, “a lot of people have asked me: are you going to go away?” Presumably, though, nobody has enquired if new dad Ed Sheeran will be exiting the music industry with immediate effect. Perhaps they should.

In recent years, female artists such as Perry – but rarely their male counterparts – have been speaking with increasing candour about the anxiety, guilt, unrealistic expectations and logistical nightmares involved in balancing parenthood and pop stardom. Paloma Faith said the toil of touring with a young baby made her ill, and that her record company assumed her sales would divebomb because “people wouldn’t find a mother as appealing”. In 2018, Cardi B cancelled a tour due to begin six weeks after the birth of her daughter, saying she had “underestimated this whole mommy thing”.

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‘People in their 40s were crying’: the sad final days of New York’s coolest record store

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Other Music fuelled New York’s 00s indie boom, boasting Vampire Weekend and Animal Collective among its fans. Then it closed. A new documentary tells the story of the store’s tragic demise – and its ‘terrifying’ staff

A lot of skulking went on at Other Music, the celebrated New York record store. It was an odd kind of dance: nervous customers, hiding behind CD racks or LP sleeves, trying to conjure up a question that wouldn’t result in utter humiliation. The staff there had quite a reputation, after all.

The experience is relived in a surprisingly moving new documentary about the shop, also called Other Music. Notable fans Regina Spektor and Jason Schwartzman still sound daunted by Other’s intense atmosphere. “If I’m completely honest, I was never just ‘chill’ in there,” confides Spektor, to camera. “I always got that first-day-of-school feeling, like: OK, just don’t fuck up.”

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10 of the best Christmas songs (that aren’t by Mariah Carey)

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The classics are back in the charts even earlier than usual – alongside the perennial row about the Pogues. So why not discover these lesser-known festive bangers?

Judging by the number of trees and lights going up already, the UK is rounding off the worst year ever by turning Christmas 2020 into a six-week celebration of successful vaccine trials. Sure enough, sales and streams of festive songs are up by 50% compared with the same week last year, with Mariah Carey leading the charge and likely to go Top 40 tomorrow. But to avoid being thoroughly sick of All I Want for Christmas Is You before you have even opened an Advent calendar, consider adding these lesser-known tracks to your playlists.

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Pixies: how we made Where Is My Mind?

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‘It’s about a small fish about four inches long that aggressively followed me and poked me while I was swimming in the Bahamas. It freaked me out’

The song is about a high-school trip to the Bahamas. I was swimming in clear water and there was a small fish – about four inches, not dangerous at all – that was aggressively following me and poking me. It kept doing it – it freaked me out. I was like: “I have to get away from this fucking crazy fish.”

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Laura Veirs on surviving her divorce: ‘My life is strangely awesome’

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After her 20-year relationship ended, the US songwriter refused to believe that she would emerge stronger. Yet against the odds, she experienced a creative and feminist rebirth

In 2018, as her marriage fell apart, Laura Veirs cried and biked all over Portland. “I called myself the crying cyclist,” she says. It was a new, impetuous hobby taken up after years of putting her desires on hold. When some friends asked her to join them on a 100-mile ride, she immediately kitted up and began training: 50 miles, 60 miles, weeping down her Spandex. “That got me through the divorce, honestly,” she says. Another friend wondered whether the optical act of navigation mimicked eye-movement therapy, which is thought to weaken the effect of trauma. “I was surprised by how much it helped get the grieving out.”

The theory – balancing intellect and intuition – hit Veirs in her sweet spot. She is the daughter of academics; a former geology student and a career songwriter beloved for her moving, naturalistic vocabulary. Her voice has a sturdy, earnest clarity: on the superb 2016 collaborative album case/lang/veirs, her freshness contrasted the fiery Neko Case and earthy kd lang.

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Throwing Muses’ Kristin Hersh: ‘I knew integrity would pull me into the gutter’

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With their 10th album inspired by a near-death ordeal, the alt-rock heroes discuss seeing their peers sell out as they stayed defiantly on the fringes

In 2013, after Kristin Hersh’s 25-year marriage came to an end, she was left broke and without health insurance. The songs she wrote in the aftermath were “about drowning in one way or another”, she says. She means this literally and metaphorically.

Hersh was relaxing by the water in California and – because she was on the prescribed tranquiliser Klonopin – nodded off. The tide came in and she awoke in the water. “I’m a triathlete so I’m a very strong swimmer but this surf just wasn’t moving toward the shore,” she recalls. “I was swimming as hard as I could but the shore wouldn’t get any closer and I started to black out.”

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Joy Division: all of their songs, ranked!

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It’s 40 years since the release of their final album, Closer. From flexidiscs to French magazine giveaways, which tracks match up to the Manchester band’s beautiful, brutal best?

Failures has a very Joy Division title, but the sound is sub-Raw Power-era Stooges. Meanwhile, the fact that Ian Curtis sounds about 13 years old underlines the slightly amateur air. With the best will in the world, you would have needed powers of clairvoyance to work out that its authors would turn out to be epochal.

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Phoebe Bridgers: ‘Aged 12 or 13 I was just like, I’m the next Bob Dylan’

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As she prepares to release a second album, the Californian indie rocker reflects on provocative lyrics, recent collaborations and what she now thinks of Ryan Adams

You are a talented young musician whose career has taken off in the past couple of years. Artists you greatly admire want to collaborate with you, declaring themselves “floored” by your music, and excitable comparisons are made to the work of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. Now you’re touring the world, jetting off to faraway places that you could only dream about while growing up in west-coast suburbia. But when you get there – to Japan, say – you find yourself strangely unmoved by your surroundings. Worse, you end up longing for the everyday comforts you’ve left behind. You would rather skip the visit to the temple or the ride on the bullet train with your bandmates and sneak home.

This is the predicament in which Phoebe Bridgers finds herself on her new album, Punisher, a collection of beautifully wrought songs that cast a razor-sharp eye on the absurdities of modern life. In Bridgers’s lyrical universe, dreams that appear beguiling from a distance are liable to fall flat in the space of a chorus. “I wanted to see the world,” she sings rousingly on Kyoto. “Then I flew over the ocean/ And I changed my mind.”

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‘A generation that decided to fight’: making music amid chaos in Venezuela

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As they endure a political crisis that has led millions to flee, Venezuela’s musicians are striving to make life worth living

‘Everything here happens at gunpoint,” someone tells me when I arrive in Caracas. Venezuela is in crisis, suffering from a lack of power, water and basic supplies and enduring widespread violence on the streets: the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence estimates that the country has the world’s highest murder rate at 81.4 per 100,000 people. According to the UN, around 4.5 million people have fled since 2015, escaping an economy in a state of hyperinflation and the authoritarian rule of president Nicolás Maduro.

The chaos has intensified recently, as opposition leader Juan Guaidó – recognised as the true president by more than 50 countries – was forced to storm a barricade of riot police to gain access to the country’s national assembly. Donald Trump has now rolled out economic sanctions to try to squeeze Maduro out of power – but they will squeeze an already embattled Venezuelan public, too.

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Morrissey ejects anti-far-right protester from Portland concert

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The protester held two signs, one condemning anti-Islam party For Britain, and another that said ‘Bigmouth indeed’

Morrissey has ejected an anti-far-right protester from a show in Portland. During his performance at the city’s Moda Center on Monday night (30 September), a woman held up two signs. One depicted the logo of the anti-Islam party For Britain struck through by a red line. The other read: “Bigmouth indeed.”

In fan footage from the concert, Morrissey can be seen addressing the woman after the second song of the night. “Let’s be quite frank,” he says. “When you with the sign are removed, I will continue.” His fans then join in as he repeatedly shouts “go”, “we don’t need you” and “goodbye”, calling upon his lighting technician to bring up the house lights.

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Mashrou’ Leila concert cancelled after ‘homophobic’ pressure from Christian groups

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Human rights organisation says decision to remove popular Lebanese indie rock band from Byblos international festival amounts to enabling hate speech

A concert by one of the Middle East’s most popular bands, Mashrou’ Leila, whose frontman is openly gay, has been cancelled following pressure from Christian groups.

The Lebanese quartet were due to play Byblos international festival on 9 August, but the set has been cancelled “to prevent bloodshed and preserve security” according to the organisers, after critics of the band on social media threatened to attack the concert.

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Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig: ‘Rock music is dead, so it’s more joyful to me’

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As his band gear up for Glastonbury, the singer talks about his Jewish politics and how there are musicians far more privileged than him

If you have never been to Glastonbury, you will always get people telling you that “it’s just got a different vibe to other festivals, man”. Even platinum-selling musicians. “It’s like being in some weird medieval village,” says Ezra Koenig, frontman of Vampire Weekend, who had played Glastonbury three times with the band before going as a punter in 2014, when it finally clicked. “I stayed up all night and understood: this is very special. I can’t think of many festivals where there are old hippies who do their thing and keep to themselves, and keep that spirit of the 60s alive with arts and crafts. And there’s all the secret stuff you find in the woods, the various raves, little mini pubs everywhere ... Everybody’s walking through the mud and there’s a real communal energy to it. Probably a lot of them are on drugs, too.”

His band are playing their biggest-ever slot at this year’s festival, Sunday night on the Pyramid stage just before the Cure’s headline performance. They released their fourth – and best – album Father of the Bride in May, and like the previous two, it went to No 1 in the US and Top 3 in the UK. It came six years after the last one, Modern Vampires of the City, with Koenig having taken creative control after fellow songwriter Rostam Batmanglij left the band.

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