Loud and Quiet #74

8/18/2019 Loud and Quiet #74

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ZERO POUNDS / VOLUM E 03 / ISSUE 74 / THE ALTERNATIVE MUSIC TABLOID

Anna Meredith

Plus

Christine & The Queens

Thomas Cohen

Lontalius

Whitney

This Heat

Sam Simmons

Composer in the wild


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COVER PHOTOGRAPHY

GEM HARRIS

ZERO POUNDS / VOLUME 03 / ISSUE 74 / THE ALTERNATIVE MUS IC TABLOID

Anna Meredith

Plus


Thomas Cohen

Lontalius

Whitney

This Heat

Sam Simmons

Composer in the wild

CONTRIBUTORS

ALEX WISGARD, AMBER MAHONEY,

AMY PETTIFER, CHRIS WATKEYS,

DAVID ZAMMITT, DANIEL DYLAN-WRAY,

DEREK ROBERTSON, ELINOR JONES,

EDGAR SMITH, GABRIEL GREEN, GARETH

ARROWSMITH, GEM HARRIS, GEMMA

SAMWAYS, GUIA CORTASSA, HAYLEY

SCOTT, HENRY WILKINSON, IAN

ROEBUCK, JAMES F. THOMPSON, JANINE

BULLMAN, JENNA FOXTON, JENNIFER

JONSON, JOE GOGGINS, JOSIE SOMMER,

JANGELO MOLINARI, KATIE BESWICK,

LEE BULLMAN, LIAM KONEMANN, MANDY

DRAKE, NATHAN WESTLEY, PHIL SHARP,

REEF YOUNIS, SAM CORNFORTH, SAM

WALTON, TOM FENWICK

CONTENTS WELCOME

You’re in London and hear a car backfire. It takes a

tenth of a second to realise what that sound was,

and the other nine tenths to pretend you’ve been

shot, or make some other immature quip relating

the bang to a gun. As if I needed reminding that a

barley field in Suffolk was a different world to the

city I live in, a bang went off earlier this month, I did

the gun bit, or at least thought about it before

checking my age, and then saw that, oh, there’s a

man over there with a shotgun.

While this grouse hunting was going on and I

gawped like a man raised under a manhole cover,

Anna Meredith posed for photographs while giv ing

us a brief history of Aldeburgh Music and Snape

Maltings – the complex of converted mill buildings

that we were stood next to; an isolated getaway for

classical composers to work from, away from city

distractions and jokes about banging cars, and

Anna’s current place of work. It really is work, too

– Anna Meredith is a jobbing composer, wri ting

and reworking symphonies on commission. I don’t

want to say that her talent is a curse (and I’m sure

that she wouldn’t either), but she has a relationship

with music that isn’t quite like anyone else’s that

we’ve featured in Loud And Quiet before.

This month Anna is releasing her debut album,

‘Varmints’, but she hasn’t funded it with cash from

pulling pints or working in a call centre; she’s paid

for it by rearranging Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’ in

Snape Maltings. It’s the first piece of music she’s

made without being asked to, although there’s a

good chance that i t could lead to new commissions

of a different kind – film scores perhaps, for movies

that would compliment experimental, electronicsongs heavy on drama, forever building and

twist ing until suddenly a twee pop song comes and

goes just as easily. Anna has achieved this

challenging/digestible sound of her own after a

lifetime of not being a music fan at all, but a young

woman with a gift, although, as you’ll see, she’d

never be so crass as to admit that.

Stuart Stubbs

CONTACT

[email protected]

LOUD AND QUIET

PO BOX 67915

LONDON

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EDITOR - STUART STUBBS

ART DIRECTOR - LEE BELCHER

DIGITAL DIRECTOR - GREG COCHRANE

SUB EDITOR - ALEXANDRA WILSHIRE

FILM EDITOR - ANDREW ANDERSON

BOOK EDITORS - LEE & JANINE BULLMAN

ADVERTISING

[email protected]

THIS MONTH L&Q LOVES

ADRIAN READ, BEN AYRES, KATHRYNE

CHALKER, LEAH WILSON, SAM SIMMONS,

WILL LAURENCE,

THE VIEWS EXPRESSED IN LOUD AND QUIET

ARE THOSE OF THE RESPECTIVE CONTRIBUTORS

AND DO NOT NECESS ARI LY REFLECT THE

OPINIONS OF THE MAGAZINE OR ITS STAFF.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 2016 LOUD AND QUIET LTD.

ISSN 2049-9892

PRINTED BY SHARMAN & COMPANY LTD.

DISTRIBUTED BY LOUD AND QUIET LTD. & FORTE

CHRISTINE & THE

QUEENS – 12

LONTALIUS – 14

WHITNEY – 16

THOMAS COHEN – 18

ANNA MEREDITH – 22

SAM SIMMONS – 28

THIS HEAT – 30


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THE BEGINNING

Daniel Lopatin: In 1998 I was liv ing in a suburbof Boston with my parents in a white range,

L-shaped ranch house, a mile away from the high

school that I walked to everyday. Wayland,

Massachusetts, was a rural suburb that had no

real sidewalks to walk on, just bike paths.

We moved there when I was 12 from Winthrop,

which was a dreamy little town by the airport in

Boston. If you were brave enough you could swim

to the airport. I always missed that dreamy town,

but by 16 I had my friends and we were all getting

our licenses. We were all interested in getting

inebriated for the first time and I remember we

were in the basement of my friend Jay’s house and

he had this 24-pack of Red Dog beer, which had

gone extinct. It was skunky already, but I guess Iwas trying to impress people so I was like, ‘nah, I’ll

drink this,’ and I got super sick instantly, and from

that day on they cal led me Red Dog.

We’d make mixtapes and listen to them in the

car, drink and smoke weed. I only ever drove Toyota

Camrys my whole adolescence, and my first one at

16 was an ’88 Camry that was a weird champagne

gold on the outside and maroon upholstery. We’d

go into Boston, which was 20 miles away, to buy

records. The closest thing you could get to a record

store where I lived was you’d have to go two towns

over where there were strip mal ls and there was a

chain of record stores in New England called

Newbury Comics. Everyone kind of hated it.

Newbury was OK, but buying a CD at the mall was

the worst experience so I used to make tapes off

the radio all the t ime because there was such good

college radio in Boston.

When I was 16 years old pretty much all I did

was make these tapes. There was a show in the

afternoon called ‘Tapedeck Tuesday’, which was

’80s Golden Era rap and hip-hop. I’d tape a lot of

that and stuff like Wu-Tang and DJ Premier and

Gang Starr. Then there was a reggae show on that

I hated and I stil l to this day loathe reggae. I’d hang

out and eat while the reggae show was on, and then

it would be techno, and at that point in ’98 it was

exclusively drum’n’bass and jungle – Dieselboy

and other crap that I’d get spaced out to unti l 1 or 2

in the morning. The song from then that takes meback to that time whenever I hear it now is Roni

Size, ‘Heroes’.

The summer being 16 I went to a film program at

Boston university. I went out there for a month, and

I let this girl dread my hair. And I had a girlfriend

who was in the theatre program, and basically I

was a really, really funny, creative kid who was

obsessed with music and movies. That was all I

wanted to do – write these screenplays, and I

would obsess over Quentin Tarantino screenplays

and I would read Natural Born Killers and True

Romance over and over and over. I was so fucking

obsessed with him, even my Hotmail password

was Quentin. He just feels like a family member

now – his new films might not be my favourite films

now, but I have to see them and I have to know what

he’s up to.

When I left school I strictly wanted to be a

screenwriter – that was all I wanted to do. I felt so

confident in the fact that that was what I was going

to do. I couldn’t imagine it any other way – all my

backup plans were cover stories so I could move to

New York or whatever.

I was not good at dating at all, until I went to

film school. That was the first time I felt like I was

cool and that girls l iked me. In my school, the kids

in my town were so stupid! So dull and uninteresting

that a kid like me who was alternative had few

options. In the whole school there were two kids

that were into hardcore and metal. Two! It was meand a couple of friends, and there’d be one or two

girls that made sense and would hang out in our

clique, but there was way too much competition. I

didn’t have enough game to compete, and it wasn’t

until I went to film camp where I really sowed my

seeds. When I came back f rom film school I had all

this confidence, and then I had some game with

the ladies, because I had this laissez-faire att itude

of, ‘well, I’m not impressed with you either.’ But I

had a great year when I was 16. I was a happy kid, in

spite of the homogenous study body I was faced

with, and I think I was cooler then than I am now. I

was definitely the kid that I’d want to hang out with

now. I was the best.

Sweet 16ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER recalls that magical teenage year.

He spent it making mixtapes and falling for Quentin Tarantino.

AS TOLD TO STUART STUBBS


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BOOKS + ANYONE CAN PLAY GUITAR

21ST CENTURY TANK GIRL

BY ALAN MARTIN, JAMIE HEWLETT

TITAN COMICS

THE ROCK POSTER ART OF

TODD SLATER

BY TODD SLATER

FLOOD GALLERY

PHOTOGRAPH

BY RINGO STARR

GENESIS

Tank Girl, beloved punk rock feminist style icon withgood taste in cigars, a kangaroo boyfriend and

healthy Clash obsession, is back to make her mark

on a brand new century, and she’s as refreshing now

as she was when she first appeared in the late

1980’s. The title has been quiet for the last twenty

years or so, which has been something to do with its

creator, Jamie Hewlett, forming Gorillaz with his

old flatmate Damon Albarn. Hewlett has found the

time though, to reunite with Alan Martin, hit the ink

and remind us all what we’ve been missing. 21st

Century Tank Girl finds our heroine as wild as

irreverent as ever, and suddenly the modern boy’s

club of superheroes look very old fashioned indeed.

Welcome back, baby.

Todd Slater is an American poster artist and

illustrator whose work you’ll recognise, even if you

don’t know his name. This beautiful collection of

his work includes commissions for everybody from

The Arctic Monkeys to Danzig via The Wu-Tang

Clan and his images jump from the page, again and

again begging to be framed. Some of the work here

is ethereal and dreamy, some of it is harsh and

uncompromising, but all of it manages to look both

utterly new and reassuringly old-school at the

same time. Slater’s trademark style is beautifully

showcased and lovingly presented in what is a

fabulous book, highlighting an artist reaching the

top of his game.

Ringo Starr used to carry his camera everywhere.He couldn’t have known it at the time, but the

cheeky drummer from the Beatles was recording

first hand with access to a ll areas a golden moment

in modern history. As well as the photographs

covering Ringo’s life from childhood to just post-

Beatles, Photograph contains his text, specifically

written for the collection, and memorabilia, lett ers

and scraps, which have never before been

published. The resulting collection will fascinate

fans and collectors alike, and Photograph also

serves as a reminder of a time when a photograph

actually meant something. Those included here

beautifully capture a world which seems close to

us, and very, very far away.

BY JANINE & LEE BULLMAN

For anyone exposed to early ’90s action films,

BruceWillis will always be the sardonic perpetually

bloodied cop, John McClane. Despite a few

attempts to soften him up – Disney’s The Kid &

Nickleodeon’s Rugrats Go Wild not withstanding –

it’s difficult to remember a time when Willis wasn’t

antagonisng psychopaths, chasing someone,

running away from someone, or generally shooting

everybody in sight. In the mid-eighties, however,

things were a little different.

Imagine a snake-hipped, sandwich-boarded

Willis bumping and grinding his way through

Harlem in Die Hard: With a Vengeance; blasting

Motown classics on the Freedom shuttle as it

embarks on a humanity-saving mission in

Armageddon; or whispering the lyrics to ‘Under the

Boardwalk’ to a distressed Haley Joel Osment in

The Sixth Sense. In 1987 you didn’t have to, because

on the advent of his A-List fame, Willis released

his debut album, ‘The Return of Bruno’, via the

legendary Motown label, complete with fake HBO

documentary. Working with backing musicians

including Booker T. Jones, The Temptat ions, and

The Pointer Sisters, Willis’ step into a sax-addled

world of blues, soul and RnB reworks also came

complete with a blues singing alter ego called

Bruno Randolini. It almost reads like a gratuitously

ridiculous script – an Alan Partridge “Monkey

tennis”.

Bruce as Bruno didn’t endure quite the same

way as Bruce as John did but ‘The Return of Bruno’

somehow managed to cl aim the number 14 spot on

the US Billboard Album chart while ‘Under the

Boardwalk’, although struggling in the US, reached

number two in the UK s ingle charts, becoming one

of the country’s best selling singles of the year.

He didn’t stop there, either. Follow-up ‘If It

Don’t Kill You, It Just Makes You Stronger’ arrived

in 1989 in straighter circumstances – Bruno

Randolini replaced with some upstart named

Bruce Willis – but by this point the world was

warming to the silver screen sight of beaten and

almost-broken Willis, not this face-contorting

crooner, and Willis’ short-lived music career

looked to be going the way of the brothers Gruber.

Undeterred, Willis found a way back in 1996,

providing the voice and throaty blues theme tune

for cartoon series Bruno the Kid , adding it to a

karaoke-pleasing back catalogue of ‘DevilWoman’,

‘Secret Agent Man’, and ‘Respect Yourself’ that

would help shape the release of 1999’s much slept

on ‘Classic Bruce Willis’. Yeah... CLASSIC Bruce.

Reef Younis catalogues the failed music careers of mega

celebrities. Illustrated by Jos ie Sommer./

Bruce Willis


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GETTING TO KNOW YOU

First a member of Denver-based alt. rock band The Czars, now a soloartist renowned for his wit and candid songwriting, John Grant is the

perfect person to fill in our Getting To Know You questionnaire.Because musicians are people too.

/

John Grant

The best piece of advice you’ve been given

Don’t eat yellow snow.

The film you can quote the most of

Clan of the Cave Bear.

Your pet-hate

Parakeets.

The worst job you’ve had

I worked in the box office of a theatre. People who

are buying tickets to the theatre are v icious and

won’t listen to reason.

If you had to eat one food forever, it would be...

Corn on the cob.

People’s biggest misconception of you

That I am compassionate and kind.

The most famous person you’ve met

I met Elton John at his place in London. He

couldn’t have been more lovely.

Favourite place in the world

The toilet. It’s the only place where peace and

quiet are available.

The worst date you’ve been on

A guy showed up at my apartment in NYC to pick

me up and left without a word while I was putting

on my coat.

THE ONE SONG YOU WISH

YOU’D WRITTEN?

‘LET’S DANCE’

BY DAVID BOWIE

The thing you’d rescue from a burning

building

A pin cushion I made for my mother at vacation

bible school.

Your guilty pleasure

Undermining others’ confidence.

Your favourite item of clothing

Corduroy thigh-highs.

Your biggest fear

Locust plague.

Your hidden talent

Extreme crocheting.

The best book in the world

The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinsky.

Your biggest disappointment

Cathedral cheddar no longer being available

in Iceland.

What is success to you?

A region-free Blu-Ray player.

What talent do you wish you had?

Pop and lock dancing.

How would you like to die?

Being eaten alive by hyenas.

YOUR FAVOURITE WORD

‘ZAMBONI’

What would you change about your

physical appearance?

I would have cro-magnon shelf reduction.

Your first big extravagance

Is a decent mattress extravagant?

The worst present you’ve received

‘The Complete Ann Coulter’.

What is the most overrated thing in

the world?

Cheesecake Factory.

The characterist ic you most like about

yourself

The ability to seem l ike I’m list ening/that I care.

Who would play you in a film of your life?

Linda Hunt.

What’s your biggest turn-off?

Complete lack of self-awareness, which,

incidentally, is also my biggest turn-on.

What would you tell your 15-year-old-self?

“You think this is bad? Stick around.”

Your best piece of advice for others

Wash your hands.

YOUR STYLE ICON

JANET RENO


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Gender performance and the power of dance


PHOTOGRAPHY: DUSDIN CONDREN / WRITER: GEMMA SAMWAYS


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hat’s interesting, right? That’ssomething I could talk to a shrinkabout…”

Surrounded by stacked chairs onthe first floor of Le Pavillon du Lac – inParis’ Parc des Buttes-Chaumont – oneof France’s most critically-acclaimedartists is laughing as she recalls howshe always “hated” her voice growingup. If it’s a surpr isingly candid start toan interview, it’s an even moreimplausible beginning to the career ofthe singer-songwriter behind multi-platinum-selling, bilingual pop projectChristine and the Queens.

Born and raised in Nantes, themusical tastes of Héloïse Letissier andher older brother were shaped by theirparents. Mixing classical and jazzmusic with pop and rock, their eclecticrecord collection included Frenchartists Christophe and Alain Bashung,plus David Bowie and Klaus Nomi. “Itwas really sometimes daring, thechoices they made,” Letissierremembers fondly. “They opened meup to really different artists, and tostrong personalities as well.”

Letissier was tutored in piano andsolfège but she describes her earlyrelationship with music as“ambivalent” at best. “I wassurrounding myself with music, but Iwas sure that I couldn’t make any.Funny, right?” she exclaims, grinning.“I always considered myself a lousymusician before I started to sing. I wasstudying Theatre and Music, and theteachers wanted me to have singinglessons and I was just running awayfrom it because I was feeling like myvoice was a bit bland and boring.”

Letissier was 22 before she foundcourage to sing in public. In 2010,reeling from a romantic break-up and

feeling unfulfilled by her studies inTheatre Design, she departed Paris fora three-week sojourn in London. “Itwas like a weird holiday of a depressedyoung girl,” she remembers with awry smile. “I’d been before because ofmy father, the English teacher, and Ialways feel more alive in London thanI do in Paris. I guess I just wanted to tryto find new inspiration, and newreasons to be happy.

“So I had my Time Out in my hands,and I did stuff that I wouldn’t dousually, because I’m an introvert. I wasgoing in the evening to parties and just

sitting there alone, waiting forsomething to happen to me. And this iswhere I met The Queens, actually, in[now defunct Soho cabaret club]Madame JoJo’s.

“They were doing a number called‘How To Make Music and Cook At TheSame Time’ so it didn’t make any sense,cynically speaking, but the energy wasso strong and so liberating that I startedthinking about having a character thatcould overcome what I couldn’tovercome myself.”

The trio befriended Letissier and,having heard her humming,encouraged her to sing. “Weirdlyenough, it was so liberating all of asudden to sing,” she remembers.“Something clicked, and I have to say Istill don’t know why. But what’sinteresting is I now use [my voice] asan instrument, so I find things withinit I probably wouldn’t find if I reallyloved it, you know? I stretch it – I try towork and make it stronger or thinner.”

It’s a startling voice – lissom andsmooth, with a sensuous huskiness inthe lower register – and Letissier

explores its range to powerful effecton her full-length debut. Written inParis, ‘Chaleur Humaine’ was recordedin London with Metronomy-collaborators Ash Workman andGabriel Stebbing, and Michael Lovettof NZCA Lines, a team she refers tofondly as “La famille, les partenaires ducrime” in the liner notes for thealbum’s original French release.

Having previously tried out withseveral producers who tried tosupplant her musical vision with theirown, Letissier was initially wary ofWorkman. “I was like, ‘I’m not surethis is going to work,’” she recalls, re-enacting the scene, eyeing me

suspiciously, arms folded. “I said, ‘Ilove hip hop. I love Drake,’ and he waslike, ‘Yeah, me too.’ I had reallyadvanced demos with precise sounds,but I didn’t know how to do it, and hewas really chilled, and giftedtechnically. So not all men are like that,but still some are. Being a female in thestudio, sometimes, it’s still a problem.But I can’t just be a singer; I come withmy whole songs.”

Gender bias was one reason whyLetissier decided to “discardfemininity” post-adolescence,abandoning her “overly-feminine

dresses and heavy make-up” andbecoming “obsessed with the idea ofhaving a dick, and being a man.”

“I was tired of being a woman,”she says. “Not physically, but becauseof what it meant to other people. It’stougher to be a boss and to be incharge, and to be loud, and to be rudewhen you’re a woman. It’s like, thestereotypical woman cannot becomplex: you have to choose betweenbeing the Madonna or the whore. Iconstantly change my mind, and Ithink it’s because I don’t see gender asanything but a performance; I see it assomething I can play with. It’s not agiven to me to be a woman. I still haveto recreate what it means everyday,because I’m not sure.”

Letissier confronts these ideashead-on throughout ‘ChaleurHumaine’. Sonically rooted inminimal, propulsive synth-pop, therecord is concerned with “self-defining; craving to be loved but afraid

of being a monster. The things I’vebeen experiencing as a teenager, and asa queer, young female.” Thoseexperiences are directly addressed on‘iT’, which finds Letissier repeatedlyasserting “I’m a man now” over ascuffed hip hop beat, and vowing, “I’llrule over all my dead impersonations.”For the LP’s forthcoming UK reissueshe enlisted Perfume Genius andPhiladelphian rapper Tunji Ige to duetwith her – on ‘Jonathan’ and ‘No HarmIs Done’, respectively – because shewanted “a queer one, and a tough one,for it to be a statement.”

In Christine and the Queens,performance is more than a mere

thematic concept: it’s an integral facetof what is, essentially, a multi-disciplinary art project. As a result,even the ballads bubble with kineticenergy. “I know if I’m going to keepthe song if I can dance on it,” Letissierconfirms. “If it’s not possible, I justdump that song. For me, writing asong is thinking about how I couldperform it, how I could film it.

“Before I wanted to make music, Iwanted to be a stage designer, and popmusic for me is the best way to be astage designer now. Music is contagiousand it can be really democratic as well.

When I was into theatre, I realised itwas always the same people coming tothe theatre, because it’s expensive andbecause of the culture. With music youcan bring theatre to people.”

In live shows and promotionalfilms, Letissier performs complexchoreography combining elements ofballet, modern dance and mime,inspired by her two biggestinspirations, Pina Bausch and Michael Jackson. Aside from pure aesthetics,dance provides another outlet forLetissier to explore the liminal spacebetween reality and imagination, highart and pop culture, masculinity andfemininity, aggression and grace. Shedescribes dance as “a sacred thing forme to do, because it protects me and atthe same time it frees me.”

It was the choreography in thevideo for ‘Saint Claude’ that compelledMadonna to invite Letissier to danceon-stage at her Bercy show inDecember 2015, or at least direct oneof her entourage to do so. “The onlytime I actually got to meet Madonnawas onstage for three minutes, with

lots of people watching,” she laughs.“But I was publicly spanked byMadonna, so… And it’s the only timeI will be publicly spanked, let metell you!”

During our hour together, I find itdifficult to reconcile Letissier’s battleswith self-confidence with thevivacious, witty individual before me,let alone the idea that an “introvert”would put themselves forward forscrutiny in such a cut-throat industry.“I see what you mean,” she says slowly.“[Writing the album] was abouttrying to relate to people, for the firsttime in my life, by being really sincereand unmasked. It was a conscious way

of reaching my hand towards someone.What happened after was surprising,because people shook my hand back,and I discovered that I was not doomedto be a loner forever. I could relateto people, and maybe be braver thanI thought.

“It’s such a different thing to be onthe stage than in life: it’s a delimitedplace. I’m really shy in everyday lifestill now. I’m not overly confidentbecause of what happened to me; I’mstill struggling with lots of things. Butwhen I’m on the stage the ruleschange. And I own the rules.”

LEFT: HÉLOÏSE LETISSIER

ON THE ROOF OF A NEW

YORK LOFT ON THE L OWER

EAST SIDE

“T

INTERVIEWS


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From a generation with no genre bias, Eddie Johnston is making

indie songs sound like Drake

Lontalius

PHOTOGRAPHY: ROB BURROWES / WRITER: IAN ROEBUCK


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used to get upset that people wouldsay this is a great song and he’s only16.” On the other end of the phone isself-proclaimed brat, Eddie Johnston.It’s 9am in New Zealand and for ateenager he’s putting a brave face on it.“That pissed me off as I want to makegreat music no matter what my age is.I am a bit too jaded for someone myage anyway, so I get annoyed.” Hemight get annoyed but right nowEddie is a laconic delight – as softlyspoken and precise, in fact, as thedeftly melancholic pop songs heregularly scatters on Soundcloudunder the name Lontalius. Right nowhe doesn’t seem to mind about beinglabelled as a youngster, or indeedabout anything at all. I decide to parkit, though; best not mention hisamount of years on earth anymore.

So instead, Eddie tells me aboutWellington and its wide-open spaces.“I have been here my whole life; it’s the cultural and liberal city in New Zealandand a nice place to call home. You dofeel quite isolated from the rest ofworld so being able to go overseas

recently has been really exciting. It’slike the height of summer here,though, so it really is beautiful.” I tellhim it’s deep midwinter in the UK butthe frozen landscape and early nightfallmake the perfect backdrop to listen to‘I’ll Forget 17’, the debut album fromLontalius out late March on PartisanRecords. He laughs, almost in slowmotion, and I imagine he’s just got outof bed.

Eddie has produced a heartbreakhotel of an album that draws on adazzling array of influences. Achinglynow RnB in one corner and mournfulindie soundscapes in the next, withplenty of space in-between. It’s

obviously a piece of work put togetherby someone in touch with popularculture, a young man from a generationwithout genre bias – inspired by Drakeand shoegaze – and one who spends alot of time on the internet no doubt.He laughs again. “Yeah, I guess so.” Asa matter of fact, I don’t know ofanother new artist out there who hasharnessed the Internet’s power asexpertly as Lontalius has. “Thanks, Ithink… I remember I went to thismusic conference thing and they weretelling the audience Lorde has thisfantastic Internet presence. I was like,

of course she does, she’s 17, you know.We’re all the same.”

There goes Eddie bringing up hisage again. The Lorde connection,though, there’s kinda something tothat. “We just had a mutual friend onthe Internet and we hung out a fewtimes but that was just before she blewup,” says Eddie. “I haven’t really seenher since! I’m sure she would be coolif I reached out to her again though.”

At the same time Lorde wasblowing up, Lontalius was evolvinginto something of a quieter onlinesensation. His Casio covers of popularhits, by Drake, Pharrell and Beyoncé,produced a word of mouth followingthat spread like wildfire. “I’m notscared of the Internet, for sure,” hesays. “Especially for people my age, it’sbeen a breeding ground for peoplelike me who put songs on Soundcloud.We have all these opportunities that wewouldn’t get otherwise because I livein New Zealand that’s as far away fromthe rest of the world as possible.”

The Lontalius we hear on ‘I’llForget 17’ has an originality and

confidence far beyond the confines ofhis bedroom set-up, and Eddieexplains: “The way trends work, musicthat gets put on Soundcloud, it allhappens super quickly. If I were tomake a song with all the trends thatwere around right now and got itreleased properly with my label itwouldn’t come out for a year and thetrend would be gone. It’s easy to copyother people, it’s definitely a lot harderfor any musician to try and be originalbut I think I have been lucky. I went tofar too many DIY punk shows when Iwas 13 and quickly got bored with theDIY thing. Even though I do a lot ofstuff myself, the lo-fi element

disappeared and it was pop music andRnB that started to really excite me inthe music world rather than shoegazeor punk bands.”

A fter a brief chat about the DIYscene in Wellington we find ourselvesback at his album, a body of work he’sclearly proud of. What’s interesting,though, is his hesitation and selfdoubt, a trait that you can hear inEddie’s vulnerable vocal and lyrics.“Yeah, I get nervous about it. Some of

the stuff I gained popularity from wasthe more electronic, more trendy stuff– the covers really. The idea with thisalbum is trying to round up all of mymusical influences from the last 5years or so. So that means there aremaybe some indie rock moods whichdon’t translate as well on the Internet.”

Tasked with condensing Eddie’sbroad taste (he’s quoted everyonefrom Crowded House to MF Doom asinspiration in various interviews) intoa collage of sound was Ali Chant, aBristol based producer with an eclecticCV. From PJ Harvey to Perfume Genius,Chant has been drawn to originaltalent. “One of the main things hebrought to the table was he kind ofrepresented a general music listener,”says Eddie. “I worked on the album alot myself and had a lot of strong ideasbut when I presented them to him hewas like, a good judge for me andwould tell me what would work andwhat wouldn’t straight away, whichwas what I needed. Working in thebedroom by myself I am not the mostskilled engineer so that was also really

helpful.”I wonder what he made of the UK

and if the country’s grey skies walkedwithin ‘I’ll Forget 17’. “I did enjoyBristol,” he says. “The UK alwaysinterests me because obviously NewZealand is a colony and it’s been supercool seeing what aspects of the cultureI am already familiar with. It was kindof scary when I had a cold in London Iwent and bought Strepsils and it wasall these brands I recognised, socompletely different to America whereeverything is brightly coloured andexciting. It was comforting, though,for the two or three weeks I was over.”

Despite his obvious interest in RnB

(Eddie lightly autotunes his vocals on acouple of tracks), I tell him that it’s therockier elements of his album thatshine, although admittedly thischanges with every listen. Certainbuilds can remind you of Mogwai oreven the Twilight Sad. “Well, Aliseemed interested in my RnB elementsand pop music but he kind ofrepresented the indie rock side, whichwas good. That element was definitelyneeded. I was trying to mix like it wasan RnB album when it should havebeen focusing elsewhere. Ali did thetwo most recent albums with Perfume

Genius – that was kind of the appeal:they are an indie band who I thoughtwere interesting and not just anotherguitar band.”

Eddie also records under the nameof Race Banyon, making strikinglydifferent dance music that showcaseshis whip-smart ear for honing a sound.He’s even supported Jamie XX on hisrecent stop off in Auckland. “I guessboth projects are releases really. I lovedance music; it’s been a big part of thelast few years as well. It just never feltlike I should do it under the samename. In my head they’re prettyseparate. I am not interested in singingon a Race Banyon song – singing in aclub just doesn’t work.”

It seems there cannot be a Lontaliusinterview though without Drake,whose music permeates right througheverything Eddie touches and whenyou hear him talking about hisfavourite artist it’s easy to see why. “Ireally adore him as a musician and thesound he is refining, and the artiststhat he works with. “As a person Idon’t really feel comfortable being

tagged with him all the time but thesound that he is working on reallyresonates with me and probably a lotof people my age – that kind of latenight, bittersweet feeling. That’s reallybeen the biggest drive for me when Istarted making music.”

I ask tongue in cheek if he really isas sad as he sounds?

“No, no,” he says. “When you’re ateenager you have too many emotions.I love being an emotional person butas I get older it doesn’t happen asmuch. That’s what the album is aboutreally, all those feelings. I am not supermature, recently at least… I have mymoments.”

So he really can be a brat but afterthis conversation it’s hard to imagine.As we say goodbye I ask him when hisbirthday is. “I’m 19 today actually.” Hehangs up.

LEFT: EDDIE JOHNSTON

PHOTOGRAPHED NEAR HIS

HOME IN NEWTOWN,

WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND

“I

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Country music from a couple of ex-indie gunners

Whitney

PHOTOGRAPHY: DAVID KASNIC / WRITER: KATIE BESWICK


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n his Twitter feed, JulienEhrlich has posted a message from hisfather. It’s a screen grab of a commentabout Whitney, the new band he hasformed with Max Kakacek, since theSmith Westerns, of which they wereboth formerly members, went onpermanent hiatus. ‘I come to Whitneyfor the guitar,’ says the comment, ‘andstay for the cute fuckable post-hipsterbros.’ It’s funny because it’s true. Theband I meet are certainly cute, certainly,erm, fuckable, although they wear itlightly (Julien and Max have teamedup with five new recruits to make upWhitney: Tracy Chouteau, MalcolmBrown, Josiah Marshall, CharlesGlanders and Will Miller, whom theyhave just given a rather fetchinghaircut). But the thing that strikes memost about them is their sincerity;their unabashed, unapologetic passionfor the work and the obviousexcitement they have for this newventure. If the hipster movementencompassed a counter-cultural coolthat was about irony, kitsch anddetached insincerity masquerading as

depth, then Whitney, as the antithesisof that, are definitively post-hipster.“We’re not going to pop up with asynth record any time soon,” they tellme halfway through the interview, asif to prove a point.

The forthcoming album soundsarchetypally American, which struckme as odd given the Smith Westerns’well-documented Brit-Pop influence.But this is a new project and the soundreflects the journey. “We discoveredthis dude called Jim Ford halfwaythrough making the record and werealised his music is so awesome. Itfortified the idea that we already had inour heads about the record we were

making,” Julien tells me. “We wantedto write poppy songs that also kindasound like country songs.”

You can hear that country influencein Whitney’s music – it’s epic,transitory; there’s a sense of changeand movement, with an enchanting,narrative quality. It’s a cinematicsound. I tell them that ‘No Woman’,their latest single, could be on thesoundtrack to a Cohen brother’s filmand I’m relieved that they are pleasedby the comparison. “I completely seethat,” says Max. “I don’t think it wasnecessarily conscious, the transitional

thing – but writing the album we wereboth in moments of transition. Wewere in and out of relationships at thatpoint, we had both just left a band,things that had been steady in the pastwere gone.”

They are keen for Whitney to berecognised in country music circles.Max tells me that they sometimesdescribe themselves as a ‘country’band. “People tell us, ‘that doesn’tsound like country music to me,’ butto us this is what country music is. Forus it was the most authentic way tomake the kind of music we wanted tomake. With a different style of musicwe might have come off as cheesy oroverdramatic. Country has thisnonchalant way of being really serious,but it’s presented in a way that’slistenable, and really pretty.” Juliencuts in, as Max rolls his eyes, (‘here wego’), “We make a point in everyinterview to say we wanna playStagecoach, which is the countrymusic version of Coachella. It’s ourgoal to play there – but we know we’rein more of an Indie sphere, so we want

to get that into every interview untilthey see us.”

You want me to put that in print:Whitney wants to play Stagecoach? Iask him, because I can’t quite tell ifthey’re serious. They are. “Yeah.Definitely. That would be awesome.”

The lead single, ‘No Matter WhereWe Go’, is folky and pastoral, its on-the-road theme evoking vast Americanlandscapes. “We imagined making therecord as if we were – not in thewoods, that shit’s so played out – butsomewhere beautiful.” Julien tells me.They wrote some of the album at Max’sfamily cabin in Wisconsin, although Julien is quick to point out that any

Bon Iver connection is purelycoincidental. “Our lives were kind offucked, for a while we didn’t even havean apartment; we were finding placesto sleep in Chicago. We were recordingwhile we were more or less homelessfor a couple of months in the middleof winter last year. All we had waswriting this album.” The trips toWisconsin were a necessity rather thana choice, and although it can’t havebeen fun writing an album between-homes, the process sounds idyllic, toldretrospectively. “It was cool to be outthere, without any distractions. There

was a nice out of tune piano that wasfun to bang away on – it hadn’t beentuned in, like, fifty years.”

That nostalgic quality has seepedinto the music; listening, I drift intoimaginary lives: I’m a character in a John Steinbeck novel, dreaming of abetter future, or somebody’s high-school sweetheart, cruising the PacificCoast Highway in a Camaro at dusk.

Julien concedes that their unsettledpersonal lives have led to something ofa heartbreak album, in more ways thatone. “For me there was a specific girl;Max was also going through a weirdbreakup at the time. So, lyrically, there’sone girl. Some of the songs are aboutgetting drunk. But my grandpa passedaway in the middle of winter, while wewere homeless, and there’s a songwritten about him that they playedover speakers at his funeral, which waskind of…” he breaks off. “Yeah.Heartbreak in general I guess.”

But the heartbreak is over now,and Whitney are having fun. They aretouring Europe in the lead up to theiralbum release, and they arrive inEngland in mid February, playing atthe Moth Club and Soho House inLondon. ‘“We haven’t been to Englandsince 2013,” Max says, “and the bandwe were in wasn’t in a very happy funheadspace – but now everything’s180-ed and we’re having a blast at themoment.” And, to add to the fun, theyhope to bring a twist to the tour in theform of avoiding hotels and crashingwith fans and friends. “Every otherUK/Europe tour we’ve ever been onhas been hotels, and we’re trying tomake a point of crashing on people’s

couches and floors and stuff like we doin the States.”

I’m sceptical about how this willwork out, never having toured myself,but the band laugh at my concerns.They’ve done this kind of thing before,in Italy and the US. “Both of us havetoured enough,” Max reassures me.“We’ll maybe try and find places tostay from the stage. And I have thisgreat friend called Jack Shankly wholives in London. He has his own labelcalled Weird World. They put outawesome music – so shout out to JackShankly.” (I resolve to put this in the

write up of the interview because,frankly, I’m a little worried that if Jackdoesn’t step up, the boys might findthemselves homeless again.)

They are hoping to replicate someof the buzz around their US shows inEurope. “Our live show is reallyimportant to us. We put a lot of workinto making the live version of thesongs as powerful as they can be.” Julien gestures over at Will, who hasn’tspoken yet, apart from to debut hishaircut. “This guy, this guy right heredoes some crazy shit on horns. Heplays horns and keyboard at the sametime. You just have to see it. It’s a one-man horn section. He uses the keys toharmonise the horn while he’s playingthe horn. It’s crazy. That’s somethingspecific to our live show – thatexperimental stuff that should be funfor people to see.” But it’s not just theexperimental edge that they hope willattract people to their gigs. “We getreal emotional. It’s fun but emotional,” Julien says. “A girl fainted at our lastshow. We didn’t realise but there was areal buzz about it. It was sold out and a

girl fainted in the front row. That wasour first show in three months inChicago, our hometown. It is so greatto feel that support and that emotionalatmosphere.” He laughs. “I mean,fainting’s not healthy but we werepsyched that we’d created thatemotional connection.”

That emotion is there in the music,and it’s there when they talk about themusic too. “We want to create musicthat’s beautiful but not too crowded,”says Max, describing how Whitneyhave built on their experience playingin other bands to create the soundsthey make now. “Finding that balanceis really hard to do. I don’t know that

we’ve achieved it completely, but wearen’t taking this lightly. There’ssomething about our music thatresonates as soulful. We enjoy playingmusic. We love it.”

The atmosphere has becomeserious; the sincerity, that post-hipsterpassion for the work, is palpable. “Wejust want to keep playing music,” Julien says, looking me straight in theeyes. “We want to write songs that wewant to listen to over and over again.We like stuff that seems like it’ll lastforever. We just want to write songsthat’ll last forever.”

LEFT: JULIEN EHRLICH AND

MAX KAKACEK AT TEN TAT

TAVERN, CHICAGO

O

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“I’m not hiding anything. There’snothing hidden. There’s nothing morea perverted ear with a certain outlookcan find out from this record. There’snothing new to learn if you’re lookingfor some tragedy.”

Hiding just about anything haslong since been impossible for ThomasCohen. From the moment he marriedthe daughter of one of rock’s mostfamous elder statesmen, right throughto his young wife’s untimely death andeven now in trying to move on fromgrieving her passing, Cohen’s life hasbeen made public property by a rabidgutter press. Yet if the telephoto lenseswere predictably voyeuristic whenPeaches Geldof was alive, they’ve

become even more intrusive sinceshe’s been gone.

A widower by the age of 23 andwith two small children to look after,one might have hoped Cohen wouldhave been left alone to try andreassemble the shattered remains ofhis life. Unfortunately, we know all toowell how the British tabloids work. Soinstead, between Geldof’s death froma heroin overdose in April 2014 andtoday, the now-25 year-old has had todeal with a forensic examination ofthe relationship he shared with his latewife under the harsh glare of thepublic spotlight, the minutiae of acruelly curtailed marriage and

existence raked over by millions. It’s not as though Cohen’s

background especially prepared himfor the experience either. Rather thanbeing a member of the rock aristocracy,his dad is a social worker for Lewishamcouncil, while his mother is an artist.Growing up in south London within aloving Jewish home, Cohen’s firstexperience of the music scene was as ateenager, having formed post-punkband S.C.U.M. in 2008 with someschool friends. The group released analbum and a few singles, becomingassociated with the likes of TOY and

The Horrors in the process (not leastbecause former S.C.U.M. memberHuw Webb is the brother of RhysWebb) before folding in 2013, bywhich point Cohen had marriedGeldof.

Sitting opposite Cohen in an EastLondon photography studio for thefirst of two intimate interviews, theconfident figure before me seems tohave weathered his tumultuousemotional experiences well, at leastoutwardly. In fact, rakishly thin,dressed in all-black and enviablyhandsome, Cohen doesn’t look likeany kind of victim but a bona fide rockstar, right down to the oversized silverjewellery dripping from his fingers.

He reels off influences and speaks withconsidered confidence about ‘BloomForever’, his debut solo album set to bereleased in May on Stolen Recordings.Nearly two years after losing themother of his children, Cohen is backdoing what he so evidently loves:making music and talking about it.

“It’s brutally honest and there are afew reasons for that,” he says of thenew record. “First, I wanted it to be,but second, it had to be, really. I didn’twant to make something that wasdishonest; I started out with this recordwanting to do something in the vainof the musicians I love from theseventies. I mean go and listen to John

Lennon’s first album (‘John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band’) – it’s painful, it’sbrutal, it’s so honest.

“It was just the only way I couldcreate. It made sense to listen to arecord by (Texan singer-songwriter)Townes van Zandt, where he’s justtaking you through what you wouldperceive to be his depression. Now Idon’t have depression, but I did wantto face those things that I had to face– well, I had to write songs aboutthem.”

It doesn’t take much in the way ofsleuthing to start unpicking Cohen’s

lyrics when the album is, he says,sequenced in the order that it waswritten – between 2013 and 2015.The title track, for instance, which isthe second on the album, was writtenon the day his second son, Phaedra,was born in April 2013. “Obviously Ididn’t have my new-born son in onearm and my guitar in another,” hehelpfully clarifies.

By the time we reach ‘CountryHome’ though, Cohen’s words havebegun to take on a sense of darkpoignancy, as he sings: “Morning has gone/ turning so cold / keep your eyes closed / youcouldn’t make it through.” It turns out thatthe song represents the apex ofGeldof’s influence on the album. “I

thought about it and it didn’t feelwrong to write a whole record about itbut I just thought, if I put [my feelingsabout her death] all into one song onthe record then I will have reallyachieved something.”

The track holds particularsignificance for Cohen because itchronicles the time he and Geldofspent in their country retreat in Kent.It’s also where Geldof tragicallyoverdosed on heroin one evening inCohen’s absence. The whole family –Cohen included – had battled t irelessly

to prevent Geldof succumbing to herdemons and emulating her late motherPaula Yates in the process, but in April2014, her addiction finally got thebetter of her. In the months beforehand,she had allegedly also grown tired oflife in the countryside and expressed adesire to return to London – a positionapparently not endorsed by Cohen,not least because it would involveGeldof being within much closerreach of the city’s dangerous vices.

‘Country Home’ is certainly whereGeldof’s presence is most acutely feltbut she naturally casts a shadow over

other parts of the record too. On ‘Ain’tGonna Be No Rain’ Cohen seems toallude to some of her all-too-publicisedstruggles with the temptations ofLondon: “Take the city by its cold hand /What you been doing with your life?” Elsewhere, he seems to offer aprotective vigil: “Hold on darling / lay downtonight” he sings on ‘Only Us’. By finaltrack ‘Mother Mary’, it seems asthough Cohen if finally trying to let go(“Trying to leave part of me / in love withyou”), though the singer himselfsuggests ‘New Morning Comes’ ismore of a “conscious goodbye.”

Cohen suggests that the scatteredapproach to writing and recording thealbum has somewhat diluted its focus

on Geldof. All the same, I wonderwhether there’s any sense ofapprehension about releasing what issuch an honest album when there’llundoubtedly be a degree of pressscrutiny involved regardless, given thecircumstances. “Not at all,” Cohen saysfirmly. “I think there was a point whenI was [apprehensive], maybe straightafter I’d made it, but I don’t feel likethat anymore. Then again, this is justmy first interview.”

So there’s definitely no concernabout how the papers will interpret allthis then? “No, because I don’t care,”he says, slightly exasperatedly. “I thinkif I’d cared [about the press] and I’d

thought about it and it was part of mylife at the time when I was making therecord then yes, maybe. But I’d made– it wasn’t even a firm decision – theobvious thing to do was to just nothave that be a part of my life. Becausewhen you think about something elsewhen you’re creating, then you’re notactually doing what it is you should bedoing, which is creating!”

Cohen is still close to Sir Bob andthe wider family – he spent the winterholidays with them, along with newgirlfriend and friend of Peaches,model Daisy Lowe. Have they heard �

The ex-S.C.U.M. frontman who has nothing to hide

Thomas Cohen

PHOTOGRAPHY: PHIL SHARP / WRITER: JAMES F. THOMPSON

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THOMAS COHEN’S DEBUT

ALBUM WAS WRITTEN

BETWEEN 2013 AND 2015

AND RUNS CHRONOLOGICALLY

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the record? Yes, apparently. I askwhether anybody has offered an

opinion yet but I get given short shrift.“Yeah everyone’s heard it, no-one’sgiven me any thoughts,” begins therather terse reply. “Nobody has cometo me and said I’ve done this greatthing or had any opinion on it, sinceliterally the basis of creativity is yourexperience and your life and youtransform that and you turn it intosomething else.” Fair enough, thoughit’s still hard to imagine that the familywouldn’t express an opinion aboutsuch a direct record.

Unsurprisingly, efforts to tease outmuch else in the way of lyricalcommentary from Cohen are largelyunsuccessful, though he does say that

the candour of ‘Bloom Forever’ isn’t asrare as we might think. “I’m sure everymusician, pretty much whether they’remaking disco or grime or whatever,they’re all trying to be or actually arebeing honest,” Cohen argues. “That’smusic; that’s being a lyricist and that’sart. With their music there’s nothingnew, [the difference is] just that youdon’t already know their stories.They’re telling you for the first time. Alot of times with songs you’ll listen tosomething for ten years and only thenyou get what it’s about.”

Like David Bowie’s final work

before he died, I suggest, which wasmisconstrued when it was released –

or was it? “Exactly! I mean when heput ‘Blackstar’ out it was meant to beabout ISIS! It’s only when you listenback to the song now…”

If Cohen is slightly evasive indiscussing his lyrics, he’s far more atease talking about the new recordfrom a musical perspective. A few daysafter our initial conversation, he speaksanimatedly and candidly about hisinfluences. For instance, it was in2013, he says, listening to Scott Walkerincessantly, that the seeds for ‘BloomForever’ were planted.

“I think Scott Walker is a goodexample of somebody who left a bandand made music on their own terms,you know. That’s what I did. I verymuch wanted to make a record whichhad my name on it, had an image ofmyself on the cover, much like a ScottWalker record or any solo musician’srecord. I wanted the same level ofhonesty – no particular alter-ego.”

Like Walker’s masterpiece ‘Scott 4’,‘Bloom Forever’ is a proper singer-songwriter’s album, the kind of rarefull-scale affair that stands at odds withthe sparse, DIY-style productions

you’ll find on most solo recordsnowadays. For anybody who’s heardCohen’s work with his old band, thiswill all come as quite a shock: the icy,’80s-influenced post-punk of old hasmelted away and been replaced by’70s-tinged bluesy Americana andpiano ballads. “I was fully conscious ofthe fact when I was making the recordthat I was making an entirelyunfashionable, out-of-touch recordthat is really fucking weird,” he says.“But that’s what I am – entirelyunfashionable, highly out-of-touchand really fucking weird! I don’t fitinto this high-profile projection ofsomebody else’s concept of my life. Atall.”

So, people like Loudon WainwrightIII, his son Rufus and Alex Chiltonloom large, while Van Morrison wasanother major influence, Cohen says.

“I really got into him on the record,while making it. What I did whilemaking the record was find musicianswho I really trusted, speak to them abit, play them the songs, then allowthem to just improvise on the top of it.I think it was that kind of element ofthem emotionally responding to whatthey were hearing and just playing in acertain style that I’d requested. Thenwe just improvised and improvised onthe top – some of it was incredible andsome of it we wouldn’t use – and Ifound out later on that that was whatVan Morrison himself did.

“We tried to keep instrumentationto a real minimum, too. I don’t know if

there’s particularly any overdubbing orfilling out. What you’re hearing on therecord at all times is just two guitars,bass guitar, drums, one vocal, backingvocal, a Rhodes and then there’s asaxophone solo. For me that was anamazing way of making an albumbecause it meant every mistake youcould possibly make couldn’t reallyhappen, because you’re not allowingyourself to overindulge in anything.”

The album was written between2013 and 2015 but was recorded intwo stints in Reykjavik, Iceland – thefirst in August 2014, then again in

2015. The entire cast of sessionmusicians involved were Icelandic andcoupled with the tranquil environmentsurrounding the recording studio, it’sentirely understandable that a sense ofunhurried contemplation managed topermeate each of the nine tracks. Thequirky limitations of the studio itselfhelped to lend the record somecharacter too, Cohen says.

“We were in Reykjavik and I said,guys I really need a piano, but thestudio didn’t have one. We ended uplocating one via my engineer. Hisbrother owned the studio and hiswife’s great aunt had one, so we endedup heading over to her house – herpiano was pretty much the only grandpiano we could find in Reykjavik! Herhusband was in his nineties but theywere very sweet and accommodatingwhile we were recording.”

In keeping with the chronologicalsequencing, ‘Honeymoon’ was firstrecorded and released as a “non-single” back in 2013 before the rest – asix-minute, late-night stroll throughCohen’s mind, replete with a jazzysaxophone solo. “I spent four monthsworking on that one song, but that wasat a time when I was able to do that – Ihad absolutely zero pressure orwhatever,” he says of the track, alludingto events to come. “Plus I needed tocreate what it was that I wanted tocreate, and figure out how to get thereand do that. It was learning how toproduce the music that I wanted tocreate without a label, without a

manager or a band, and how you goabout creating a six-minute song witha saxophone solo without all of thosethings!”

Certainly nobody could ever accuseCohen of taking the easy route to solosuccess. Elsewhere across ‘BloomForever’ he takes in influences rangingfrom Big Star through to what he callsthe “insane piano” of cult baroquepop singer Judee Sill in developingincreasingly complex arrangements.“I’d much rather make a record thathas some sense of fucking delusion init than something that’s perfect.”

“I’m not hiding anything.

There’s nothing new to

learn if you’re looking for

some tragedy.”

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Anna

Something

PHOTOGRAPHY: GEM HARRIS


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Meredith

For Me

WRITER: SAM WALTON


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After years of only making music when

commissioned to work on classical

compositions, Anna Meredith has made an

experimental electronic album for herself

The first note of music Anna Meredithever wrote was for her ScottishStandard Grade music coursework. Itwas a composition for those beige,plastic, single-finger keyboards thatwere a fixture in every early-90s schoolmusic department – the ones whereeach key produced an entire chord in avariety of synthesised instruments thatwere selected via a bank of buttonsalong the top.

Her piece was called ‘Relfections’(she misspelled ‘Reflections’ on thecover sheet), and the quirk was thatthe performer was required to change

the instrument’s sounds throughoutusing his or her nose. “So it would belike, ‘Pipe Organ!’,” exclaims Meredith,amused by her own teenageridiculousness as she dips her nose tothe table like a chicken pecking atgrain. “Then, ‘Sea Shore!’” shechuckles, diving down again.

“So I wrote this piece,” shecontinues, “and apparently theexaminer was like, ‘what this kid’s got,you should keep an eye on.’” She raisesher eyebrows, as if skeptical of her ownstory. “So my teacher asked me if I’dthought about writing anything else.”

As it happens, Meredith hadn’t.Indeed, she’d only started playing theclarinet a couple of years earlier tomake friends, finding kindred spiritsin the after-school music groups ofEdinburgh. “I wasn’t very popular atschool,” she confesses with anapologetic smile. “I was a bit of aweirdo – big scarf, plaits, clarinetbadge, that kind of stuff – in an edgyschool, so music was where I foundpeople a bit more like me.”

She fell for the engulfing sound ofan orchestra at full tilt, but the ideathat it might be someone’s job to write

the music, or that you were evenallowed to do that kind of thing, neveroccurred to her. “As a teenager, I wasjust doing what I was told to,” sheremembers. “I don’t think I thought Iwas especially musically talented, andwasn’t taken too seriously, but Ienjoyed it.”

In fact, Meredith didn’t think aboutwriting anything else again until shewas once more required to for schoolcoursework, this time her ScottishHighers. Another idiosyncratic pieceof music received high praise, anotherwriting hiatus followed, and a pattern


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was formed that she took to the musicdepartment at the University of Yorkand through a masters degree at theRoyal College of Music: if it’s asked for,Meredith gladly delivers. Otherwise,she keeps herself to herself.

It’s a pattern that endures, in asense, today: for the last fifteen years orso, Meredith’s full-time day job hasbeen as a composer of music for otherpeople. She makes a living offcommissions from internationalorchestras, operas and culturalinstitutions, writing symphonies,songs and string quartets for bodypercussion, beatboxer andboomwhacker. She’s always fundedand fully briefed before a single clefhas been drawn, these days turningdown more approaches than sheaccepts. In short, everything Meredithwrites is requested, by someone,somewhere, all of which makes thelatest chapter in her compositionalhistory something of a first: nextmonth, her debut album, ‘Varmints’,will come out, and while it has enoughsupport to be released on a modest

indie record label (Moshi Moshi), noone approached her to write it. No oneasked her to sing and play on it. Noone paid her to do it, either.

“My composer mates go, ‘oh I seeyou’re doing some electronics, you’reselling out’,” she says with a smile,“and they have no idea – mycontemporary art music funds myelectronic pop.” In Meredith’s world,things don’t always operate asexpected.

But Anna Meredith’s appeal isn’tabout her imminent debut beingpunted into the record-buying publicwith crossed fingers, lots of goodwilland even more debt – that story gets

told every week. Nor is it about aneccentric musician established in onearea chancing her arm at somethingdifferent out of restlessness or curiosity– that’s been the preserve of highfalutinrock stars since the ’70s. Instead,Meredith’s appeal lies somewhere tothe left of all that, not just in her music– screwy and addictive anddisconcerting and eye-popping as it is– but in how her approach, her processand her background makes her one ofthe country’s most topsy-turvymusicians. The intrigue lies less in themusical whiplash inflicted by her

woozy polyrhythms, or her apparentlyunique ability to turn a drumbeat intoan earworm, and more in how shefound the belief to commission herselffor the first time: ‘Varmints’, it turnsout, is not just a knotty vine of intr icateelectronics, acoustics and animalisticbeats, but also a record borne ofenviable conviction, confidence andself-imposed accountability developedover a career of being told what towrite. It’s a story about what happenswhen a master architect decides todesign her own house – and how shelives in it afterwards.

Five miles outside the Suffolkseaside town of Aldeburgh, among theopen fenland of East Anglia’s SunshineCoast, sits a set of imposing Victorianbarley-malting houses. When themalting business dried up there in thelate sixties, Benjamin Brittenspearheaded a project to convert thelargest of the disused buildings into aconcert hall to house his then-

burgeoning annual Aldeburgh MusicFestival. Fifty years on, with several ofthe other buildings on the site nowconverted into rehearsal rooms,studios and performance spaces, theentire Snape Maltings complex ishome to Aldeburgh Music, aninternational creative centre forcontemporary music that hostsconcerts all year round and offersresidencies to composers and enablesthem to develop new work.

In the context of Austerity Britainand, more generally, the cultureindustry’s financial contraction overthe past two decades, it feels like aminor miracle that a place like

Aldeburgh Music exists at all.Bucolically flanked by the river Alde toone side and rolling barley fields to theother, with giant sculptures by HenryMoore and Barbara Hepworth dottingthe grounds, the entire site isinspiringly tranquil. Curious noisesemanate from the practice roomswithin the complex’s variousbuildings, amplifying the stirring,other-wordly feel, and the overalleffect is one of seductive dissociation:there’s a sense that the creativity-sapping drudgery of real life justdoesn’t happen here, that this place is a

greenhouse for those exotic musicalplants that would struggle to thriveanywhere else.

Anna Meredith has been in and outof Aldeburgh Music in one capacity oranother since graduating, be itteaching, studying, performing orwriting. She’s currently in residencethere to complete work on her re-imagining of Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’, acommission from Glasgow stringorchestra The Scottish Ensemble – notthat she’s too familiar with Vivaldi’soriginal. “When I got the score, I waslike, ‘I know the Four Seasons!’, andthen I realised I only know about halfof it, and some of it I don’t everremember hearing,” she admits, witha smile, as we sit in her long, attic-room studio. At one end is a grandpiano, a MIDI keyboard, somemanuscript paper covered in crypticscribbles, and Meredith’s MacBook onwhich the composition programSibelius idles patiently. At the other,almost laughably in contrast, are twoantique harpsichords and a smalllibrary of multi-volume composer

biographies and musicalencyclopaedias that look like they werelast read shortly after the Suez Crisis.

Meredith’s Vivaldi confession ismade breezily enough – there’s nosense of her rabble-rousing orattempting to be edgy. Indeed, giventhe style of her writing, there’s noreason that she should be any more aufait with a 17th-century baroquecomposer than Taylor Swift should bewith the Sun Ra Arkestra. Nonetheless,it’s a real-life confirmation of anotherfacet of Meredith’s unusual composerpersonality: she doesn’t really listen toother people’s music.

“Music was more of a social thing

to me, to be honest,” she remembers,of her formative musical experiences.“I wasn’t the kind of kid who was like,‘I must check out the other bits ofBeethoven’ – I had little interestbeyond the repertoire I was doing. Iloved the pieces I was playing, and Iwould listen to those obsessively onmy Walkman, but beyond that Iwouldn’t go out of my way.”

That initial ambivalence stuck:once she started composing moreregularly, Meredith discovered thatlistening to a lot of current music wasactually counterproductive to her own

creative process. “I found that if I heardsomething that I thought was good, I’dend up emulating it and making a shitversion of it,” she explains. “Like,when I first started messing around inelectronics, I wrote some stuff that wasbasically ‘shit James Blake’, but reallyI’m not someone who’s trying to makea genre. I’m not trying to make apastiche of this or that, or a bit of hip-hop or whatever. I’m just trying to domy own thing, which sounds maybe abit ego-y, but it’s the only way that Ican do it.”

“But it’s also about accountability,”she continues. “People say to me, ‘ohyou must’ve heard this’, but I’ve neverheard any of it, which is actuallyuseful, because I honestly want to sayI’ve made this stuff out of my ownpassion and excitement about themusical dots and material, rather thanfashion or trend.”

Of course, as the saying goes, oneshould never trust a thin chef – and it’sdifficult to think of another writer,filmmaker, artist or musician who’s soopen, and positive, about their own

(relative) isolationism. However, youneedn’t spend long in the company ofMeredith to realise that her reluctanceto devour hours upon hours of musicin the way that many other musiciansdo lies not in snobbery, nor laziness oreven being stuck in her ways, butsimply because her relationship withmusic appears to be fundamentallydifferent to most: where the majorityof the population might describe theirmost fulfilling musical experiences asinvolving some sort of abstractemotion evoked from hearing sound,Meredith’s are far more interactive.Listening to her talk, it seems that forher, music is about the giddy,

lightheaded feeling you get whenyou’re playing, exploring and creating;the addictive element for Meredith isthe interactivity she feels and thetaking part, the seamless flow andreciprocal synergy, rather than theone-way, insular act of simply payingattention to the music itself.

She describes getting physicalsensations when music is working forher. “Especially playing in anorchestra,” she remembers, “when Iget to the end of a piece, there’s aspecific rush of blood that runs frommy head to my toes to my back. When

LEFT: ANNA MEREDITH IN THE

ENTRANCE HALL OF SNAPE

MALTINGS, SUFFOLK

�


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I’m writing,” she goes on, “I canphysically tell if the material’s goodbecause I feel it very clearly in myhands.”

This almost synesthetic sensorycrossover is her yardstick – a now-familiar tool that she uses, instead ofcomparison to her peers, to assess herwork. “I’m always searching for thatfeeling of something being physically,viscerally right, and I now know howto actively search for it a bit more,” sheexplains. “So sometimes, when I’mtrying to work out a bit of music, I’llliterally audition ideas – singing themout to myself, one by one, and whenI’ve got the right one, I’ll know it’sright because I’ll physically latch ontoit.” She stops herself, tailing away,suddenly bashful. “It sounds a bit flaky,doesn’t it…”

Her moment of self-doubt istelling: Meredith in full-on writingmode would never call her processflaky. In contrast to more heart-on-sleeve musicians who try to rendertheir compositions as extensions ofthemselves, Meredith is open aboutneeding to get into a very specificheadspace before she writes. “I needto be somewhere like here, awayfrom distractions,” she explains of

her preparation, “and, most of all, Ineed to be feeling quite good aboutmyself – emotionally stable and feelingquite strong.

“I look to get into a mentalitywhere I can respond to the pressure ofsaying, ‘you will write somethinggood!’,” she continues. “It’s about

getting that mind-set, so that when Ihave an idea that makes me chortle,one that passes my audition, I know Ihave the balls to deal with it. I need tobe feeling quite wired – quite ‘comeon, let’s go!’ to make music,” she adds,clenching her fists like a tennis playerat break point.

“Quite often, though, it goes theother way around. I might not befeeling very confident or ballsy orenergised or angry or anything likethat, but the song has its own identityand in some ways, I’m subservient tothe thing that gets created.”

That wired sensibility spills onto‘Varmints’ in gloriously, splatting

rather than minutiae of production,”as Meredith puts it.

One of Meredith’s calling cardsfrom her classical work, that of almostperpetual rhythmic unpredictability, ispresent all over ‘Varmints’ too, whichadds a real impish joy. “There’s a realdelight when you’re listening to apiece of music and it completely pullsthe rug from under you,” she agrees. “Ireally enjoy misleading people, so thatyou feel like you’re in one feel, andthen,” she rocks her head back like acartoon witch preparing to cackle,“ahahaha! The other beat comes in!”

One track on ‘Varmints’, however,feels different to the rest. The closing

On one hand, Meredith’s relianceon her own internal barometer ofquality, coupled with her stated desireto capture music borne of a crack-free,bulletproof self-confidence, mightappear a touch bullish, even alienating.On the other, however, that outwarddisplay of mega-strength is balancedby an on-going reluctance toacknowledge wider success that wouldseem pathological if it wasn’t deliveredwith such affable self-effacement.Again and again during ourconversation, she talks in terms of“moving the goalposts as you reachthem” so as to avoid complacency, andnot allowing herself ever to think thatshe’s actually successful. “You alwayshave to feel as if there’s work to do orstuff to be done,” she insists,conscientiously. “You have to keepmoving forward – I can’t imagine evergoing, ‘well, I’ve made it now.’”

Given the circumstances of‘Varmints’, too, this aspect ofperfectionism looms larger than ever:“When I’m writing a commission,”she explains, “there’s a deadline:players are going to be waiting, aconcert’s been booked so you’ve got toget your parts written and there’s anelement of just going ‘ah, fuck it’. Butwith ‘Varmints’, I’ve done a bit less‘fuck it’ than usual because this is mything, so I’m accountable – for me,

doing a self-starting thing to this scaleis quite big in terms of the time andthe commitment that you put towardssomething that nobody’s asked for andnobody’s paid for.

“Everything else I do is peoplecoming to me and paying me to writestuff, so then to have to make the time,and ask my band members to give upmonths and months of time, is amassive effort, so it has to be goodenough to justify me asking so muchof them, and of myself too.”

“And yes,” she acknowledges, “I’mputting myself under quite a lot ofpressure, but I sort of have to: if I wantto do it, this is the way you do it. I

mean, I’ve been chucking in so muchtime and money to try and get thisalbum made, but I could never havelived with myself if I hadn’t made it. Ifeel like all my electronic stuff hasbeen riding up to here. If I’d been toocasual about it – ‘ah, yeah, let’s just dothis electronic pop’ – I don’t think Icould’ve justified it to myself, let aloneto other people giving up their time.”

“Anyway,” she adds, with afurrowed brow, “a bit of self-doubtcan be quite healthy…”

In the course of our day together,Meredith describes herself, variously,

“My composer mates have

no idea – my contemporary

art music funds my

electronic pop”

Technicolour as mazy instrumentalsthat squirm through impossiblecrevices and angles like some shape-shifting sea creature, or as superficiallydainty songs whose sometimes

worrisome lyrics contrast with theunyielding musical boldness thataccompanies them. Patterns emergeacross the album’s running time butare never duplicated, creating a senseof elegant structure and comfortinglymountainous, widescreen pacing – or“big brush strokes, big graphic shapes,

piece, ‘Blackfriars’, with its elegiacstrings and plaintive rhythm, has noneof the chaotic chutzpah of what’s gonebefore. Indeed, it makes for a somewhatsoothing epilogue. However, it’s of

note because it’s Meredith’s onlyexample of what she produces whenshe isn’t in her usual all-conqueringheadspace. “I had some crap stuffhappen last year and I was in a wobblierplace, and I wasn’t really able to do thething I normally do,” she says, detailingthe genesis of the track. “I was tryingto work that one out while not beingable to access the normal skills I neededin order to compose, not being able totap into the strength that I needed, andthat’s what came out.”

Far from disrupting the mood,though, ‘Blackfriars’ is perhaps the keyto the whole album. Not only does itcomplete the running order but it also

deepens ‘Varmints’, acting as a cipherthat demonstrates how the rest of therecord isn’t just the work of somebrash, hyper-confident maniac, but ofdifferent facets of Meredith’spersonality. That’s just as well: “It’s notlike I have a Sasha Fierce character tofall back on,” she jokes, referring toBéyonce’s notoriously bombastic alterego. “Whether it’s this stuff, a piece forkids, a piece with no instruments orwhatever it might be, MRI Scanners ora million harmonicas, it all comesfrom a really honest place. I have tobelieve in it fully.”

WHEN ANNA MEREDITH

LISTENS TO CURRENT MUSIC

HER OWN SONGS SOUND LIKE

“SHIT JAMES BLAKE”


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as not brilliant, vain, lazy, flaky,egotistical, frumpy, ridiculous,pretentious, ancient, uncool,

narcissistic and dickish. None of it istrue. In fact, such proclamations beliea self-awareness and sense of empathythat makes her such a warm personality.

More than that, though, it alsoserves as oblique proof of what it isthat Meredith actually uses music for:confidence. For Meredith, it seems thatmaking music acts foremost as apsychological shield against thegrittier, less comfortable things thatlife throws at her, giving her both adefence against the bad and theendorphin rush to enjoy the good; themore traditional reasons – expression

of emotion, desire to move people,intellectual exploration – comeafterwards.

What’s more, that shield effectbecomes a virtuous circle – when shelistens back to her own music, itdirectly empowers her to write more:“I can get quite psyched up listeningto something of my own,” she says.“Or if I’m trying to write somethingnew I can listen back and go ‘hey look!You managed to do this – look whatyou can do when you put your mindto it! Get on with it!’”

Frequently, she contrasts thatversion of herself with her normal,resting-state personality: “musicwriting brings out the most confident,

no-fucks-given version of myself, andthe normal, nicer, slightly moreanxious me will be a bit, ‘argh, maybe

we shouldn’t… hang on!’,” she tellsme at one point. At another, she says, “Ithink composing brings out the best inme. On the spectrum of my personality,the bit that provides the right energyto compose is the most confident, themost ‘fuck yeah!’, the most energised.But like everyone else I worry and Iprocrastinate and I feel insecure and Ifaff – I do all that business too.”

In that context, listening to‘Varmints’ becomes not just a sensoryday at the zoo, but also a rather catharticexperience: it becomes a literal recordof Meredith’s best moments, her

ultimate best-foot-forward, her at herhappiest and at her most courageous,and that realisation helps mutate analbum of enjoyably furtive, propulsivebut frequently abstract music into thatrare thing in the world of intelligentelectronica – a relatable, three-dimensional, honest experience.

“As you get into your 30s, yourealise you’re not really on the samepath as some of your friends, notmarried, no kids, doing your ownthing,” she responds, when askedabout that unusual candidacy. “And asyou peel away from that security thatyou got from doing the same stuff aseveryone else, you have to reallybelieve in your own trajectory andvalues. You have to just keep on going.The stuff that I don’t know about is allthe surface kind of stuff – life stuff –that I shouldn’t be worrying aboutanyway. But the music-writing meseems to know what I want.”

There’s a sense of steelygroundedness to Meredith as she saysthis – she’s not in her ultra-fearlesswriter mode now, but some of that stilllingers. Perhaps her foray into self-commissioning, rather than simplybeing told what to write, has beenmore empowering than anticipated.

“Well, I’ve definitely left this year abit more open than usual, to do morewith ‘Varmints’,” she says,

optimistically. “I’ve turned down quitea lot of work, which feels like quite,er… I’m not sure.” She falters for amoment, smiling apologetically oncemore. “It feels like there’s a lot of spacethis year now to make things happen.And maybe they won’t. Maybe I’ll justbe sat about. Worrying about stuff. Onmy own.” She pauses again. “Or Icould be touring the world with ananimatronic dragon!” she laughs,confidence flowing back through her.“Either way, I feel proud of this thing,no matter what happens to it.”

Earlier in the day, Meredithconfessed that if ‘Varmints’ doesn’tcome to much commercially, then

she’d have to reconsider what role thiskind of work has in her professionallife, because it takes up so much time.But if this kind of purity, satisfactionand musical accomplishment is whatshe achieves when she’s left to her owndevices, a more apt question might bewhether she can afford to stop.


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TELL ME ABOUT IT

“IT’S A TURD ROLLED IN

GLITTER.”

The T-shirt philosophers – the RussellHowards and Russell Kanes – I regaleagainst that, and sometimes in myshow I’ll go, ‘whose cock do I have tosuck to get on that panel show? Is thatwhat it’s really all about?!’ I can’t standthat everyman shit. I guess what made[Spaghetti For Breakfast] relatable wassomething that happened by accidentthis time last year as I was working onputting the show together. I had toearn money by doing the club circuithere in the UK and I don’t do straightstandup, so I didn’t want to bend totheir rules, so I put in the device‘Things that shit me’. It’s very relatablestuff, but it’s still in my world. Theseclub guys would be loving that and Irealised I could sneak in a really

subversive story here as well. So it’sshiny shit, shiny shit, shiny shit, oh,that was a bit weird, shiny shit, shinyshit. You just sugar up the dark shit,and I try to do that a lot. This year, thenew show is going to be more of myweird stuff.”

“I’M LOOKING FORWARD

TO GETTING OUT OF GRIM

ENGLAND.”

I do totally like it here though. I likeperforming for you, because I find itdifficult. I think there’s a bit of anti-colonial… how do I say this? …

Australians can beat you in sport, butthey can’t beat you in other things,especially the arts – Brits don’t likethat, so it’s harder for me to win anaudience over, I feel. It’s still there inthe muscle memory of the Brits thatyou banished us to paradise – there’s abit of resentment there. ‘You can beatus in sport, but don’t you dare beat usin philosophy of art!’ So I find that achallenge, but I LOVE it.”

“DAN KITSON IS THE HEAD OF

THE FUCKING COMEDY MAFIA,

THAT FUCK!”

He’s the head of the wooly mafia. I lovehim very much but he came and sawme very early in my career. I did ashow here called Fail and it was afucking terrible show, and I think hecame along and saw me once and justthought, ‘yeah, you’re no good.’ And Ijust want him to love me – ‘please loveme, Daniel’ – and he just doesn’t.Whenever I’m having a bad gig I say, ‘Ibet Daniel’s here.’ He has seen metwice actually. The other time he camewith Stewart Lee, and Stewart lefthalfway through, because he hastinnitus, or so he says (I’m friendswith him, so it’s fine), and my showwas too loud for him. There was a bitin the middle of the show with a little

bit of sentiment and Daniel heckledme… well, he went, ‘oh no!’ to reallyfeel the sentiment. He never sees medo any good, so if it’s going badly I say:‘tonight’s shit, Daniel Kitson must behere.’”

“MY HIT RATE IS ONE

IN FIVE.”

One in five gigs are just appalling.Absolutely. It doesn’t matter what I do– sometimes it’s me – I mean, youcan’t be funny every day of your life –and sometimes it’s an apatheticaudience. Fucking hell, man, posh

audiences – I get them here in Soho alot, and it’s fine, but it’s a bit ra-ra-rahregatta. You get the banker crowd in,but I love it – they’re really supportive.Saying that, there was one guy at theend of one of the shows who heckled:‘You fucking should have killedyourself!’ I was like: ‘Oh my god!’ Notthat that’s going to affect meemotionally, like, ‘yeah, I should have,’but the words hurt, like, ow! I justperformed for you for an hour!”

“AMERICANS ARE BETTER

PEOPLE THAN THE

AUSTRALIANS.”

And they’re better than people fromthe UK. Just in terms of being kind. Iknow they shoot each other, butthey’re kinder and more open to stuff.They’re a bit more can-do. So I’d havethem coming up to me after a showgoing: ‘Oh my god, man, I didn’tknow you could do that onstage. Soyou can do that? Oh my god. Good foryou.’ When you ask if comedy iscompetitive, it is there. ‘Silly’ is gettingultra competitive now. There’s a sillymafia here now; a little crew bubblingunderneath. I had an article written inthe Guardian about me by a guy calledBrian Logan that basically… the showhad a bit in it about child abuse [not somuch a joke, but a story that is true to

Simmons’ past], and he said that Ishouldn’t try to thread that into myabsurdity. I can do whatever I want,thank you very much! Also, he saidthat I shouldn’t denigrate otherstandups. Well, why are you telling mewhat I should and shouldn’t do? Like Ishould stay in my absurdist box andnot try anything new. Fuck that. I lovegoing on a rant. Bill Burr is myfavourite comedian – just an angryBostonian. And Romesh [Ranganathan]is the funniest guy in Britain. None ofthis ‘what did I learn’ shit – he’s justbitter!”

“THERE ARE COMEDY GANGS.”

I’m not really in a gang. I feel like a bitof a lone wolf over here – I feel likepeople appreciate what I do, and feellike I’ve done something a littledifferent in comedy, but I don’t feellike I’m part of a gang. The Kitsons andthe Stewart Lees and Josie Longs havebuilt careers without having to be ontelevision, and that’s prettyextraordinary. But I see respect out ofticket prices as well – if I’m chargingfive pounds for a work in progress I’mgoing to fuck around; if I’m charging

When I meet Sam Simmons in the barof Soho Theatre something happensthat wonderfully befits his standuppersona. A small plastic horse falls outof his pocket and skids toward thedoor. He chases after it. He skulls anespresso straight from the machineand we walk out into the rain for somephotographs. “Last night was fuckingterrible,” he insists in his pinched,Australian whine that helped land themost absurd of punch lines in his 2015Edinburgh Comedy Award-winningshow, Spaghetti For Breakfast. “Just awful!Seriously. It says on the poster that it’s‘work in fucking progress’, and ticketsare

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