Music

The Gossip

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 13:58:53 +0100

She’s a lesbian the size of a boat, she has a new solo EP out, and she’s on the toilet. Beth Ditto will soon wander out of her dunny to find me sat on her sofa, with a Dictaphone in one hand, and a sheet full of half-baked questions in the other. The last time I interviewed Beth, with her excellent band The Gossip, she told me how she has in the past used her own vomit as an assault weapon. If she doesn’t like someone she’ll stick her fingers down her throat and spew over them mid conversation. That’s perhaps why I’m nervous.
There’s a flush, a click of a door handle, and then suddenly Ditto fills the room. And I don’t mean that as some kind of crass fat joke – Beth is one of those people who fills every room they enter with sheer personality. She’s a brilliant utterly loveable blur of hugs, jokes, and noise, attempting the kind of terrible Aussie impression that can turn a handsome word like Australia, into an unfortunate Awstraylajah. ‘Sorry, let’s interview me,’ she says…

So why have you decided to go solo?
Wha? Solo? Me? What the fuck man? Nobody told me about this shit. I have an EP out? Oh God man. I knew nothing about this. No-th-ing.

Are you excited about it all?
Yah. Well, I guess I’m really excited, because it’s like a turning point for me really. I’m breaking away from The Gossip a little bit. I’ve always seen my band as a marriage, and making albums as having a baby. People who have actual babies may think that’s really stupid, but fuck them, I don’t really care. Anyway, so I’ve like been married since I was like 14, spitting out babies. This as my chance to have an affair and an illegitimate child with [the EP’s producers] Simian Mobile Disco.

How have Nathan and Hannah from The Gossip reacted to you cheating on them like this?
Everyone’s cool. Nathan listened to the EP and was like a proud step dad. I think that’s the beauty of coming from a punk scene. Back in Olympia when The Gossip were starting out, everyone I knew was in five bands, had a zine going, and were trying to get some organic muffin business off the ground all at the same time. Nathan and Hannah understand that you can’t be in just the one band too long.

But you are still in The Gossip right?
Hell yeah. I’m still in The Gossip, and I’ll probably still be in The Gossip when I’m 83 years old. I think we’ll be one of those bands that never break up. And that’s okay with me because I’m kind of addicted to work. Better to be addicted to that than anything else I guess.

Will you be going back in the studio with The Gossip sooner rather than later then?
Real soon. That’s where the others are right now actually. I’m like, ‘You guys write me some music, and then I’ll just roll on in when I’m done cheating on you.’ I feel bad because they do all the hard work, then I turn up and am like, ‘Pffffft. Forget all that.’ I’ll just take the tiny bits I like out of it, and dump the rest, which can be hard for them. I think sometimes when you’re in a moment, like they are when writing, it’s harder to have a judgemental ear. They have to trust me with what to lose.

How nervous were you making this EP without the backup of your band?
Pretty fucking nervous. The first time I went in the studio I had to get drunk. I dread to think what everyone thought of me, because I was completely shit faced. When you’re with new people just getting the words past your lips can be hard sometimes. If you sit down with lyrics on a piece of paper in front of you, they seem silly. Some lyrics, even of classic songs, are completely ridiculous when you read them out loud. ‘Rolling, rolling, rolling on the river. I left a good job in the city.’ It all seems so dumb.

You don’t seem the self-conscious type though.
Only in certain situations. If you were to ask me to sing me a song right now, I’d go all shy and say, ‘No way.’ If you were to ask me to show you my butt cheeks, I’d be like, ‘Sure, okay.’ It’s like easier for me to show someone my butt cheeks than to sing.

Specifically the butt cheeks, not the whole butt?
Yeah, just the cheeks babe. Butt. Cheeks. I do like butt cheeks, they’re hilarious. Butt cheeks are way funnier than whole butts, just remember that, whatever you do in life.

Okay. The EP is less punk more dance. Why did you decide to go in that direction?
I’ve always been straight up drums and guitars, so I thought the best route for me to go was electronic music. The other real option I thought I could perhaps attempt was country. I could totally imagine me doing a country album, but I don’t think country fans would like it as much as me.

Do you look good in a cowboy hat?
No. I look bad in most hats, due to my huge head. Take the real size of the moon, and put a real size Stetson on it, and that’s what I look like in a cowboy hat. It just disappears. Once I shaved my entire fringe and eyebrows off, and it made my face look even bigger than it actually is. I think it scared a lot of people. I looked like a dinner plate.

Finally, you’re about to turn 30, are you dreading the big three zero?
No, I’m stoked about it - can’t fucking wait. I’m not sad to see the end of my twenties at all. They were great, but I’m going to have a ball from here on. My thirties are going to be amazing.

Are you going to have a massive party for your birthday?
I don’t know. We went pretty wild for my 29th, which was in Australia actually. I’d always wanted a pool party, but never could because it’s always winter in America on my birthday. But last year we were in Aus on my special day, it was baking hot, so we had this roof top pool party, even though the people at the hotel said we couldn’t under any circumstance go in the pool. To be fair we weren’t staying at that hotel. I don’t even know how we got to that rooftop. But I was just like, ‘Can’t go in the pool? Watch me.’

Beastie Boys

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 13:54:39 +0100

On the week before Beastie Boy Adam “MCA” Yauch was diagnosed with “the big c”, we hung out with him and his fellow Beasties in Soho, London. He was complaining about a sore throat, talking about the future, laughing about the size of Barack Obama’s face. Hot Sauce Committee was in the bag, ready to drop, but there was a feeling something was up - we just didn’t know exactly what.
Eighteen months or so on, there’s no official news on Yauch’s health, the album is heading for daylight again, and I’ve got Ad-Rock on the phone from New York.
“Yauch’s getting better,” Ad tells me, talking about his boy MCA in the kind of encouraging words that even the band’s publicists haven’t heard yet. “He’s still in treatment, but things are going good, he’s getting better. It’d all been a case of look we’ll just drop everything, you get better, we’ll entertain ourselves for as long as it takes.”
“As long as it takes”, took just under two years. In that time, The Beasties sat on the album, we sat on our interview, thumbs were collectively twiddled. “I’m totally bummed that nobody leaked anything,” says Ad-Rock. “We’ve been sitting on this shit for years now, right? It’s kind of disappointing actually. What’s up with that? Nobody wants to leak our shit anymore? Fuck. Come on. We need to get some less trustworthy people around us. I think for the next album we’re going to need some shithead punk kids doing security.”
Hang-on, we thought the Beastie Boys were shithead punks? The very definition of shithead punks in fact. Look up shithead punks in the dictionary, there’s a picture of Mike D, right? Whatever. Here’s that interview, fresh(ish) from the mouth’s of Brooklyn’s finest…

[Mike D] Can someone please tell me what ever happened to Wimpy Burgers?
What is the point in coming to England now you’ve lost all your Wimpys? What the hell did you guys do to them? They were like a national treasure - I like a burger joint where you can also buy a treacle pudding. It’s a rarity. You Brits over cook your food, but that shit kind of works on your weird desserts, your Wimpy burgers, and maybe also Cornish pasties. I already spend far too much time worrying about that Naked Chef Jamie Oliver man messing with your soggy British cuisine. I will do that even more now I know Wimpy’s have gone.

[Ad-Rock] We like to treat interviews like going into a shrink’s office.
We all have a lot of issues, as you’ll probably find out in our time here together. It’s cheaper for us to discuss them with you rather than pay an actual professional. If a magazine or newspaper ever had the foresight to provide a leather couch or a bear skin rug for an interview, well we’d be in a position to open up a whole lot of something right now. Can I rest my head on your lap? Is this good for you?

[Mike D] We like London because it’s a bit like New York just with coffee that sucks.
MI5 needs to send out the spies to Milan. Go find the secret of good coffee from Italy lads. Get your boy James Bond on it, because over the past few decades I have tried every coffee house in London, and I’m still looking for that first good cup. It’s tasteless, and having looked into it a bit, I think it’s because of the lime you have in your water. I won’t complain too much as we’ve had some seriously good times in London despite the coffee. Like the time we through a whole cooked chicken out of a fourteenth storey window. We don’t do TVs out of windows. Roast chickens is our way.

[Ad-Rock] We hit Madame Tussauds wax museum every time we’re in the UK.
It’s a must do for us. Man that place is funny. We like to go there, do the tourist thing, and then, in contrast, I personally also like to hang out in dark alleys at night. See what really goes down in this London. I think it’s fair to say we all like to do that really, not just me. Lurk around in darkened areas a bit. And we like to go to all night peep shows and stuff like that too. It’s the non touristy thing to do, but we find you do actually get a lot of other tourists at these places. Usually German tourists.

[MCA] The first time we came to Britain was with LL Cool Jay and Run DMC.
That was a big deal for us – it was our first trip out of The States as The Beastie Boys. Our label Def Jam had just signed a deal with Colombia Records and so we got a load of money to come over here with LL and misbehave. People were fooled into believing we were these big stars and we were going on all these British TV shows just dressed like the bums we actually were. I remember being live on TV over here, and it was one of the very first interviews I’d ever done. The first question they asked was, ‘So, erm, that’s what you’re wearing?’ People couldn’t believe that we didn’t have a clothing allowance.

[Mike D] I think we once travelled to England specifically for scotch eggs.
You guys seriously know how to scotch an egg. We don’t get that enough in New York, the meat with the egg like that. It was scotch eggs that caused the chicken out of the window incident actually. We saw a guy in the street wearing a bowler hat – he was like a cartoon of what we Americans think English people look like. We found it hilarious, so we tried to knock his bowler hat off by throwing scotch eggs at his hat from our window. Naturally, shit spiralled, out went the chicken. That was like 1986. Good times.

[Ad-Rock] We used to hang out with Madness and The Clash a lot in the UK.
The first time we came over here Suggs took us out to the cinema with The Clash, which was pretty fucking odd. We all went to see Re-animator together. Joe Strummer came to our show in this tiny club, and we didn’t even really have any songs. It was like we can wing it normally but should we at least try to have something if Strummer’s watching. After we went to Mick Jones’s house, and Johnny Rotten came over too. We were just kids, and suddenly we were hanging out with these great punks – our heroes. It was so cool. It was all these people we had grown up on. Our friend Trish ended up marrying [Clash bassist] Paul Simonon.

[Mike D] There was a period where making this album was proving difficult because I kept breaking down in tears.
I was laughing so much at stuff, on a daily basis, it ended up where I couldn’t really do anything but cry. I was weeping like a baby. We had to start documenting it all and sending the proof to our manager, to show her why we still had no songs on tape. It was because I was hurting my diaphragm laughing so much, that I was just sobbing.

[MCA] Mike’s ongoing dental work was a major asset to this record.
He was on steroids for his dental work, which was making him all steroidy, angry and angsty. He was just screaming on the record like, ‘Come! On! Out!’ over and over. And then when he’d come back to the studio from the dentist, his mouth would be all numb you know. The numbness was making his tongue ever so marginally fatter so was causing him to lisp a tiny bit. That lisp is still on the record.

[Mike D] We still hate each other. We bicker, and fight, we bespite on a daily basis.
Often we’ll be fighting over whether the word bespite is actually a word or not. We do Grecho Roman wrestling to settle disputes, we have the full outfits and everything. I personally where a cup, what you may call a box, to the studio. You have to with these guys around because we do fight, and there’s not always much warning.

[Ad-Rock] We’re big pranksters, let me give you an example.
This is a true story. We were hanging out at an after show party in Chicago when this really creepy guy came up to me and says, I really want you to have my ring. I was like, ‘It’s yours, I don’t wear jewellery, dude, please keep it.’ But he got angry and forced me to take it. These two idiots found it really funny because this dude and his ring freaked me out. He was so creepy, I thought it was a cursed ring or something. He had a real Dungeons and Dragons vibe you know? So I hid it on top of a cupboard in my bedroom, told nobody. Weeks later we take a train to Philadelphia, I go to the bathroom on the train… the ring is in the sink. I like started hyperventilating, and these two still won’t admit they put it there. Seriously. Guys. Did you put the ring there? Because it’s time to tell me if you did.

[MCA] We didn’t put the ring on the train, but this story gets better.
So he’s freaking out on the train to Philly, like nearly having a heart attack. He comes out of the toilet, and he throws this fucking ring right down the carriage, really upset. He’s shouting at us, going nuts, for ages. But when he’s not looking I go off telling him I can’t take any more of the accusations, and go find where the ring has landed while he’s not looking. Like two weeks later we’re in a hotel in Europe, and he comes down to the lobby looking ghost white. He’s like, ‘Dudes, please just tell me, did one of you put the ring in my bag last night?’ I’m like, ‘Ring? What ring?’

[Mike D] Our fans can be really crazy at times.
I was at a gig watching Santigold recently and this dude comes up to me, says he loves the Beastie Boys all that. Then he goes, ‘Dude my ear plugs are really good, I want you to try them.’ He then takes these ear plugs out of his ears and hands them to me. I was like, ‘Thanks, but no thanks, I want to hear the show, and you know that’s also kind of disgusting.’ He was all, ‘No. Try. My. Earplugs. Dude, you have to try my earplugs! Put them in! They’re really good earplugs! Put them in!’ I had to run away. Like literally run.

[Ad-Rock] One time someone snuck in a whole whipped cream pie to one of our shows to throw at us.
You know, the kind of pie clowns have. It was a big one too as it had weight to it. It just makes me laugh, thinking of them at home baking the pie, carrying the pie all the way to the show, getting their early to get a got spot by the barrier with the pie, watching the support act with the pie, then we do the whole of our first and WHAM. It hits [keyboardist Money] Mark right in the face. Happy days.

[Ad Rock] We were big backers of Barack Obama in the US election, but the thing the strikes me about him now is the size of his head.
I never noticed before but that is a big head he has. We call a head that size a domeski, as in, Obama’s an utter domeski. Clinton? Another domeski. I think a big head helps you get elected, it looks good on TV. You need something to anchor you in the frame. He really wants to meet us actually, but we’ve been really busy. He asked Run DMC to play the Whitehouse. And The Foo Fighters. I don’t know about what kind of heads the Foo Fighters have, but again DMC… big heads. Domeskis look out for one another.

[Mike D] I’ve had a lot of people try to get me to give up music and go into politics.
A lot of people trust me with big decisions. If I could get my head enlarged a bit, some silicon injections into the forehead, the Domeski procedure, I could get elected to office. Change my skull cap for a dome cap.

Gorillaz

Sun, 14 Aug 2011 14:15:29 +0100

My plane is shaking. It’s rattling like a maraca, in the clouds above Toronto, with Gorillaz on board. Shit, oh shit.
Few people can tell you what it feels like to be in a plane crash. When you fall from the sky in a crumbling ball of 20,000 tons of flying fibreglass and steel, you rarely live to tell the tale. I’m too young to die, Gorillaz too cool. If a jet carrying even a tiny fraction of that lot were to go down, it would be a rock ‘n’ roll disaster that would make Buddy Holly and The Big Bopper’s epic aircraft fail, look pedestrian.
As chunks of ice start to fall from the plane’s roof above us, I start to breathe hard, worry. This is it. I’m going to meet my maker, croak, die in ridiculous circumstances, and nobody will even morn my death. They’ll all be too pre-occupied sobbing about fallen heroes to the tearful soundtrack of a very hastily released Gorillaz Greatest Hits. Bastards.
Suddenly everything goes still, we stop wobbling, start soaring. The jets’ engines begin sounding like jets’ engines should sound, ice stops falling on my silly head, and Gorillaz’s tour manager stops worriedly looking down the plane towards her rock star’s “slightly posher” seats. There’s a reassuring smile from the plump Canadian stewardess, and before you can say, ‘Oh my God, we were never actually going to crash horribly, it was just a spot of mild turbulence, and a bit of an air-conditioning problem,’ the round Canadian trolley dolly is handing out nuts like none of the above ever happened.
Cue Montreal, date number one, in the first ever tour, of the most interesting super group since Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young… or at very least Kylie & Jason. The core band consists of 50% of The Clash, 25 % of Blur, 100% of De La Soul and all 210% of Bobby Womack. That’s before you consider the regularly present collaborators like Snoop Dogg, Bashy, Little Dragon, Kano, Mos Def, Lou Reed, Shaun Ryder, Mark E Smith… we could go on, and probably should. It’s hard to believe any of these names could be circumnavigating the planet in the same tour bus (well, busses), but this tour is happening, and it feels incredibly fresh, despite the band having a combined age of about 3002.
Having touched down safely, it’s Canada, it’s cold, and Gorillaz (all eight bus loads of them) have at last arrived at the venue of their first gig of a tour, of their first ever tour – an epic journey that reaches 60,000 or so Australians in December.
‘We’re at the beginning of this incredible trip we’re going on, and yeah, I’m kind of excited, kind of stressed, but mostly just wanting to get on with things now,’ Damon tells me, his voice already a bit croaky. ‘It’s good to be back on the road, it really is. I’ve been doing this for long enough not to get too freaked out by it all now, we’ve got some incredible people on this tour, and when you surround yourself with people like we’ve got out here, nothing to major can ever really go wrong. It’s going to be great fun, fingers crossed, and we’re going to do some recording out on the road too.’
It’s been twelve years since Damon last embarked on a proper world tour. ‘I’ve been busy doing the whole having kids thing, so the months away on end, the going around the world on a bus, all that’s not really been an option,’ says Damon. ‘It seems like forever since I’ve been on the road, but here we are… Montreal, then Boston, New York… and we’ll get to Australia soon enough.’
Gorillaz, begun life as a Blur side project for Damon in 1998. Instead of consisting of singing flesh and bone, the band initially comprised of four fictional, and gloriously foul band members - 2-D (vocals, keyboard), Murdoc Niccals (bass), Noodle (guitar, vocals) and Russel Hobbs (drums). The dark and grumpy cartoon rockers have since seen their band slowly taken over by real life people, real life legends, many of whom are equally sordid and mysterious - Damon, Del La Soul, the incredible Mos Def and the two most important surviving members of The Clash - Paul Simonon and Mick Jones are the tip of an incredible iceberg. The band were apparently formed after a drunken conversation between the “Brit Pop” legend Damon, and Jamie Hewlett, co-creator of the comic book Tank Girl. They had been drinking, watching MTV, hating every video that came on, and saying how they needed to take pop music some place different. Some place better. They’ve arguably done that to an extent at least, but the often dark and frankly odd nature of this band has often taken it beyond a mere pop audience.
As the audience, an eccletic mix of young rockers, hip-hop fans, pop groupies, and aging Clash punks start to arrive at the Montreal venue, it’s pretty clear that Gorillaz are perhaps the least likely band to have ever been booked to play Montreal’s giant brown hockey stadium...

For the rest of this article please contact lee@leecoan.com

Pete Doherty

Thu, 27 May 2010 18:35:46 +0100

Love him or loath him, Peter Doherty ticks every box on the rock royalty application form. I spent three days in his iconic shadow, then torched his guitar…

British rock Gods used to be better. While Strummer, Moon, and Page packed their spare time with politics, narcotics and Satan, today’s idols embrace corporate gigs, advertise pet insurance, and check themselves into rehab at the mere whiff of a wine-gum. There is however one last eccentric who has not been cast from the mould of your average modern rock disappointment. Having survived The Libertines and Babyshambles that 30-year-old poet has just penned a fantastic solo album despite his well-publicised crack, smack and trilby hat addictions. His name is Peter Doherty, he writes implicitly English songs about drinking gin from teacups, and he’s sat in front of me, on a ping-pong table, eating chilli with a plastic fork. This is hour one, of our three days in Doherty’s company and every mangy, bruised inch of him looks iconic – like he could die or elope to Vegas to marry a prostitute at any second.

‘Pete, are you okay to have this chat?’ I ask. He’s not, he’s nervous – Doherty doesn’t do interviews. ‘I just need to pop to the loo first,’ he croaks with a trademark slur. Five, ten, fifteen minutes pass with Peter locked away in a tiny Hackney crapper. Just as I fear he’s done a bunk, he stumbles out, swigging a tin of chocolate Nurishment like a common park tramp. Jesus. We’ve all read the stories about him leading Kate Moss astray, feeding his cat cocaine, bleeding on Amy Winehouse’s face, but I want to get to the real Pete. The funny Pete, the political Pete, the Doherty of Time For Heroes, and Last Of The English Roses. As his eyes roll around, and he coughs up his lungs all over me, I fear that might not be an easy task…

Were you a target in prison because of who you are?
Prison? Yeah. Of course. What do you reckon? It was a nightmare in there. I was definitely a target for the, shall we say, less pleasant people in there. The nastier people. My toenail’s falling off.

Your toenail’s falling off?
Yeah. Arrgh! I’ve been playing football for two hours in boots two sizes too small for me, and it has knackered my foot to pieces. Arrgh! It’s peeling off.

That’s rank. How good are you at football?
No good. Not any more. I was good at school, but I’m not very healthy these days. My brain knows what I want to do with the ball but, my body’s all over the place. All I ever wanted to do was play for QPR, and when it sunk in that it was never going to happen it was heartbreaking. There comes a time in every young man’s life where they have to face the fact that they will never play the game professionally, and I don’t think I ever recovered from that. I will never play for Rangers.

Were you in the Wormwood Scrubs team?
Nah. They wouldn’t don’t let the likes of me play in prison. A few years ago they tried it out for people who were on privileges, but everyone got a bit carried away. They tried to escape during a corner, that kind of thing. So they had to stop. No football, no guitars.

Do you write better songs on or off drugs?
Drugs don't make me write better songs. You can't pick up a guitar and try to make sense of it. I don’t know - nobody’s in my shoes. You can definitely get strength by coming through something, but a lot of time if you’re in a dark place the last thing you want to do is write. You’re just too sad. For me, to not be writing, to not be creating creates more of a dark place, so it’s a real downward spiral.

How paranoid do you get?
Yeah, it’s true I get very paranoid. There was the time I thought the IRA were on my roof, trying to break in. You laugh, but it was scary, in my mind the IRA were outside trying to get me. It’s crack psychosis. The only way to get through it is by lying on your belly for two days. When you have the crack shakes you think everyone you know is going to kill you.

How hard is it to read stories about your imminent death?
I don’t know. I just ignore it I guess. What can you do? I don’t want to see it really, but I can’t stop it.

What about your friends and family – your mum wrote that book on you?
To be honest I don’t know why they bother. When I was growing up I never once saw my mum reading the Daily Star or any of that rubbish. Now all of sudden the paper has become gospel you know what I mean? It hurts that.

What has been your greatest ever gig?
There’s so many. I’ve had some amazing gigs. I think the ones that stick in the mind are from back when The Libertines first started getting support slots. We supported The Sex Pistols, Morrissey, The Strokes, it was amazing.

Did you hang out with them?
With The Strokes yeah. I actually already knew them before I was in a band or anything. It was back when I was working in a bar pulling pints. I used to sell a few little things on the side, you know. They were on their first tour, and were like just a few American lads in London looking for a good time. They met a friend of mine, who said I could get them a few bits and bobs. I think I sold them a load of acid, they gave me tickets to their gig, I got them some more acid and it went from there.

You just gave a talk on philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin – did they warm to you?
They have had various luminaries do talks - Oscar Wilde, Al Pacino, all kinds. I went down alright. One Irish guy at the front goes, [terrible Irish accent], “Pete! Pete! Can I ask you one quick question there? Have you ever committed suicide?” Then the little fella next to him started shouting, “You idiot! If he ever committed suicide, he’d be dead so he would!” Only if I’d been successful though. Only if I’d been successful.

Do the public give you grief about Kate Moss?
I'd say eight out of ten people on the street don't give me stick, but then there's the two. But that's not because of Kate, people have always wanted to beat me up. They call me a queer. I’ll be walking around Hackney and someone will shout, “Poof!” They don’t even know who I am, just think I’m a bit poofy for some reason. I’m not queer, and even if I was mate, someone who shouted poof at me would be the last person I’d go with. Football is where I really don’t feel safe. I’ll walk around east London at midnight and feel safer than I do at a match in the view of 20,000 people and the police. At football everyone is, “F*ck off you crack-head c*nt!”

[PART TWO OF Q&A]
The next time I see Peter, he’s on stage at London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire - Blur’s Graham Coxon discretely following hidden guitar instructions to the right of him, Babyshambles’ drummer Drew McConnell keeping time in his wake. As he elegantly stumbles through his mellow / mature new material, his fans lap it up. Peter had told me he was nervous about how his new songs would be received, but The Evening Standard describe tonight as, “Musically fearless,” and Rodger “F*cking” Daultry could be seen applauding from the sold-out crowd. No wonder Peter is in a much more chipper, compos-mentis state when I meet up with him again, the following day, to chat and burn some guitars…

There were a lot of fans dressed like you last night. Would you regard yourself as a style icon?
It’s hard because I don’t want to sound like an utter knob. [Posh accent] “Oh yes, I’m a style icon. Look at me.” No thanks. But secretly yeah, I think I might be. I walk down the street and I see people in a trilby hat with a syringe sticking out of their arm, and I think I recognise that look.

Are you clean right now?
As the whistle. I think its all about my confidence. With the new album, it’s all quite mellow, and I’m a shy man. When you’re wasted it becomes even more petrifying to go out with just an acoustic guitar. When you’re in that place its easier to hide behind a massive wall of noise. That’s not there right now.

Are you completely over Kate Moss?
Erm. Yeah. Well, yeah. To be honest with you I just hope she’s doing okay you know. She’s having a baby now isn’t she? So good luck to her. I don’t really want to talk about love and all that to be honest.

Why do you cut yourself and paint in blood?
I just feel like putting needle to canvas. Sometimes blood is the only thing to hand. Saves on paint. I’ve just done a painting for every song on the album actually. I wanted them come as a booklet with the CD, but my label said no because they’d take up 16 pages, and Coldplay were only allowed a 12. I was like, I’ll take my ball home then. No pages, no album. I got the pages, but now they won’t let me have the cover I wanted. There’s this old picture of Elvis kissing a girl on a staircase and his tongue looks like this big piece of ham. Parlophone said it was too expensive but I don’t know if I believe them.

If there was ever a movie about your life, who should play you?
I could do a decent job of playing myself. I’d love to do some acting. When I was younger me and my mate had a comedy stand-up act called Mr Spaniel and Mr Spaniel. We used to think we were really funny. The thing is, we would go around all the comedy clubs, get booed off every time, but I still loved it. I’d like to do something like that again. What I’d really love is to go on The Catherine Tate Show, but the offers aren’t coming in thick or fast right now.

What has been your biggest regret?
I stage dived in Dundee and got a wedgie. That was awful. I ran off the stage and hid in the tour bus crying. The gig was going great, so I thought I’ll dive in, and this big Scotsman just grabbed hold of my pants and said, “Cop a load of this Doherty!” Those were his exact words. Cop a load of this. When they found me on the bus I was crying my eyes out going, “The band’s not working out. I think we should split up.” Nobody believed that was what’s wrong, and eventually I snapped, “Alright! I got a wedgie okay!”

Just how boring is rehab?
It’s impossibly dull. When I go it’s usually because I’ve been given the choice of rehab or jail. When you’re there, its not even giving up drugs that’s hard, it’s that you have to give up everything. If you could sit there and read a book it would be fine, but you’re not allowed to do anything other than focus on your recovery. Once a week I was allowed to play my guitar.

Did you form a band with members of The Darkness and Keane in The Priory?
Yeah, and it’s all coming to fruition now. The other week Keane were playing in France, and I came on and sung Karma Chameleon. The thing was they gave him a piano in rehab, which wasn’t fair. I couldn’t have my guitar. He was locked away in his room playing a piano. They tried there best to keep me away from him - I wasn’t allowed near him or his piano most of the time. It was good to meet up again in France.

Will The Libertines reform?
Well its up to him [former band-mate Carl Barat] isn’t it.

If Carl wants to play, the band’s back together?
I’d love to play those songs again. But, it’s up to him. I never thought I’d say this but its all just kind of dissolved into the past now. I don’t feel anger, everything that happened I couldn’t give a toss about really. I badly want to play those songs, so lets get on with it and rake it in.

How much money is on offer then?
I’m not sure he feels the same way I do, but there’s £2milllion. Now do you see what I mean? He’s, he’s mad. When we approached him about it, I don’t think he really believed me, but it’s £2million to headline Reading. It’s crazy because I’ve never really had a commercial success. The first Libertines album sold only 5000 in the first month. Even the last Babyshambles album sold more copies in France than England. That’s why I’m nervous and excited about my new record, this could be a big album for me.

And then, how do we get The Libertines back together?
He [Carl] wants me to go and see his energy consultant. Energy consultant? He says that he wants to be certain that I am no longer surrounded by the dark forces. I have a dark energy around my aura, and he can’t be near me until I’ve sorted that. I’ll go see this energy guru I guess. Yeah, why not. It might be a giggle.

Dave Grohl

Thu, 27 May 2010 18:31:17 +0100

Have you made more money out of Foo Fighters or Nirvana?
Look, here’s the thing - before I had money I had nothing at all. Then Nevermind happened over night. One day somebody handed me an ATM card - I was fucking amazed there was this thing you could stick in the wall then $400 comes out! So, now that I’ve got money, I live pretty modestly, like a regular Joe. I don’t do all that flashy car and jewellery shit. I do have a thing for buying private jets though.

Yeah, ha! And Faberge eggs!
What?

Oh, you’re being serious?
Yeah, I love private jets – can’t get enough of them. I like to avoid commercial flight – don’t trust it - so just kind of do my own thing. You’ve got to spend your cash on something.

Do you ever take control?
Of my planes? Oh hells to the no! Are you fucking insane? No thank you. I’m not about jump in the fucking cockpit of anything. I like to arrive alive.

Talking of death, haven’t you been gigging at old people’s homes lately?
Oh yeah, I’ll do anything - send me to a fucking retirement home, I’ll rock it! I went out on the campaign trail with John Kerry when he was running for president and I did a few acoustic songs after he talked to the locals.

Did anyone die mid-song?
No. Well, I don’t think so. I had to close my eyes while singing so it could have happened. Most of the people didn’t know who the fuck I was. I was serenading war veterans and if I’d had my eyes open, I would have been looking at old people thinking, “who the fuck did they say this guy was? Bruce Springsteen?”

I once saw a band in Essex called The Poo Fighters. Ever been in a poo fight?
What? Have I ever thrown shit at someone? Or had poo thrown in my face? Hell no! Actually, saying that… my diohrea once caused a riot in Japan. I had to retreat from a live performance because of “technical difficulties”. I knew I was in big trouble when I walked on stage, what I didn’t realise was that seven songs in, I’d have to cut the set short because I was about to spill my dyper in front of 3000 people.

Ha! You were wearing a dyper?
What? Listen! I tried to explain to the audience, “okay I’m just going to take a break and I’ll be right back. Just stay where you are, everything’s going to be fine.” I ran into the toilet at the side of the stage and there was no way I was coming out of that bathroom. I remember someone knocking on the door saying, “Dave, are you okay?” I said, “I don’t think so, this isn’t good.” About a minute later someone announced, [does terrible Japanese accent], “Hu youn si gowi! Shi mu Foo! Mushi! Mush!” Then I just heard this huge “Booooo!” There was nothing I could do - I just sat there shitting as they went mad.

As the much-touted “nicest man in rock” is that the meanest thing you’ve ever done?
I don’t know about this nicest man in rock thing. I’m glad people think that I’m nice, but have you ever met those guys in Coldplay? They’re really nice! Then there’s Travis! Great guys! And Motorhead! Lemmy is the sweetest guy in the world. If I had to leave my mother with anyone for a day, it’d be Lemmy.

But my Editor once sniffed speed off Lemmy’s finger. You wouldn’t want your mum doing that shit…
Oh God no. But I’m sure my mum would politely say, “no thanks Lemmy”, then they’d spend the afternoon chatting about the American civil war.

Is it true that Kurt Cobain thought you sucked as a drummer?
Well… yeah. I get this all the time now because I fucking opened my mouth and told someone! There were times when Kurt felt I wasn’t the right drummer for the band. When you’re in a relationship with two other people in a band, you have good days and bad days. So yeah, I fucking blabbed about the few times I heard him say I sucked, now everyone wants to know about it. He never said it to me! I mean… [Burps ridiculously loudly].

Christ! Do you have a gas problem?
I don’t know, I burp a lot during gigs too. It’s better that it always comes out of that end. If I do it on stage, it’s because I’m singing from my diaphragm. That or because of all the gallons of whisky I’ve put in my fucking guts for the last 20 years.

What’s the most drunken night on whisky you can remember?
Probably a night in London spent mixing it with absinthe and beer. I remember nothing apart from picking up this table, throwing it into a crowded bar and screaming. I woke up the next day with burn marks all over my arms. No idea where they came from. Shit like that really.

Is it strictly booze on the Foo Fighters bus or do you still dabble in drugs?
Not really, I mean five or six years ago, we used to be out of control.
There was a tour we did with the Chilli Peppers back in 1999 and you could have mistaken us for Van Halen. I used to drink a bottle of Crown whisky a night and carry it on stage with me. At this point our drug of choice was “Liver Right”. It’s a homeopathic liver repair drug that’s messed up. That shit got abused more than anything else.

And now? It’s all backstage crochet?
We still have our moments. After we’d finished this record we had a party in the studio. I was really nervous because it was the first time anyone had heard the new stuff, so I started drinking whisky from a vase that still had flowers in it. I just filled it up with Crown because it could hold more than a glass. I ended up diving into some tables like a stunt man. Tables with like glass, fucking silverware and candles all over them. I still have scars from that actually.

Is it true you can marry people?
Yeah but only in the state of New York.

Well, that’s a start...
Yeah. You have to apply for the privilege in every state in order to become a true Justice of Peace. There’s a whole bunch of paper work and…it’s not worth it. I’ve married a few people, and once you’ve done it once the novelty wears off. I only do strangers too – never friends.

Finally, we found a mentalist on the net named “Mrs Grohl” - she’s clearly obsessed with you. Do you have a stalker problem?
Six months ago there was some fucking lunatic who wanted to fly out to LA with a knife. She had a map of my house and said she was going to kill me, then herself. On the upside she said it was going to be, “quick and easy.” The FBI locked her up. I was like, “What? What’s going on? I didn’t fuck her did I?”

Have you spread the love amongst many groupies then?
Nah. I’ve never been into that. I hate to sound boring but I can’t remember a time when I’ve seen a groupie backstage do something exciting. I’ve seen these other bands eat luncheon meat off chicks’ tits but we never reached that level.

On the subject of insane rock chicks, how’s your spat with Courtney Love?
Pretty quiet. I’m sure I’ll have to speak to her again soon, but it’s quiet right now. I read recently that we were having a new feud but if I remember correctly it takes two people to constitute a feud. Sorry, I’ve got to go! I’m off to get my portrait painted with my dog! Don’t worry we’re not going to be nude. It’s classy…

Ice Cube

Thu, 27 May 2010 18:29:11 +0100

How much money would it take for you to make peace with Dr Dre and reform NWA?
You what?

Come on, there must be a record exec out there with a big bag of cash on the table?
Well, nobody has offered me no money yet. You know what, the thing is a lot of people have got to come together from a lot of different areas to make it happen. So…

But you would consider it?
I really don’t think anyone has carved up the formula of how a record would work. I think it could never be done until someone can make the whole thing make sense for everybody involved.

When you first set out with NWA in the late eighties, did you think you’d still be around in 2006?
Oh yeah. I definitely did. Where I came from, failure was not an option. I might have struggled here and there, but I’ve made a lot of good records, and that’s what it’s all about. It’s no surprise to me at all.

You’re a very angry man, what do you do to relax?
I’m relaxed all the time. All. The. Time. You know, my common day chillin’ is just sitting around my home doing nothing. I just stay home, handle my business over the phone and just kick it with my kids and family. I most definitely take the time to smell the roses.

Do you have any surprising hobbies like golf or windsurfing?
Nah, I’ve been creating music since I was 14, and you know that in a way is my hobby. Everything else that I kind of do, like my movies, is my work. A little basketball game every now and then doesn’t hurt anybody, but I’m so into what I’m doing right now I put all my energy into it. You’ve got to realise, you only get out, what you put into shit.

You lay into Arnold Schwarzenegger on your new album…
Yup.

Why do you hate Arnie?
He pisses me off just by the fact that he is the Governor of California. That’s enough. That man should just focus his shit in California and what he’s gonna do about poverty. It’s rabid in the inner city. He needs to be worried about that, not anything on a national or global level. You’ve got to realise, there’s a lot of money in California but it suffers from economic greed. Nobody wants to give up their piece of the pie, so nobody can live real good without resorting to killing each other. That’s why Schwarzenegger made the album.

But as a budding action movie star, he must be a bit of a role model to you?
Well, I don’t know about a role model but I’m definitely a fan of some of his movies.

Could you take him in a fight?
Yes.

Would you ever consider a move into politics yourself?
No, never. To go into politics, you have to consider everybody’s problems. It’s hard for me even to be able to consider my family's business right now. Most of my people are really suffering, so I can’t concern myself with what’s going on across the street. You can’t help everybody, so I’ll just stick to worrying about what’s going on in my backyard.

Do you think there will ever be a black President?
There’s no telling, but it’ll make no difference. It doesn’t matter who’s in there, you’ve still got to get up and go to work in the morning. All that shit doesn’t concern me or the people in the inner cities. Okay, it matters because of the significance in history, but life is still painful right now and we’ve got black people in positions of power right by the side of the President. Just because the President’s black, doesn’t mean he’s going to make the change.

Back to music, why do hip-hop’s A-list love Tim Westwood so much when he’s clearly a tit?
Tim Whatwood? Who’s that? I don’t know this guy. Nah, I’ve never been hip to him. But I’m coming over to England so you’ve got to put me up on him man.

What do you make of the new breed of gangster rappers clearly influenced by you and NWA?
I just concentrate on me, they’re no concern to my business.

But what do you make of 50 Cent and The Game banging on about how many times they’ve been shot all the time?
That doesn’t bother me because people have got to do whatever they go to do out there. If that helps you sell records that’s fine for you. I don’t even trip on that kind of stuff. I just do my thing.

But do you actually like any of these guys?
You don’t need to worry about nobody but Ice Cube right now. Listen to what I’m telling you. Homie, trust me, just look out for Cube. I’m going to be here until my tonsils fall out.

When you eventually snuff it, which lyric would you most like to be remembered by?
Fuck tha police, coming straight from the underground. Young nigga got it bad because I’m brown.

Have you ever literally fucked the police?
As in had sexual intercourse with a policewoman? Ha! Ummm, you know, I don’t think so…

Do you regret any of your more controversial lyrics like “fuck the police?”
Nope.

But you’ve upset a lot of people over the years…
Yup.

You don’t care?
Nope. Listen, hip-hop is really just about a moment in time that happens to be recorded. All my music is just about how I felt at a certain point. And you know people on the streets don’t give me grief, I get love man. Nothing but love. And that’s the God’s honest truth - people don’t really have a problem with me because they know what I’m doing is alright. The stuff I’m saying needs to be said by somebody somewhere and it’s all fun man…

What about the things you’ve said about Koreans? You called them “oriental penny countin’ motherfuckers” and said you’ll “mother-fuck” them, then burn their shops down…
I said my piece. It’s done. I’m not trying to start any international shit, I said what I wanted to say and that’s it. If there’s still a problem, it’s their problem.

Is there anyone you wouldn’t insult?
Nah, the whole world is fair game. Male, female, black, white… Korean. Whatever you are, gay or straight, you gonna get it. Everybody can be criticised, even myself, nobody has got a free pass.

Do you find it strange that white English kids love your music, when the subject matter’s a million miles from their life in Buckinghamshire?
Yeah that has always surprised me. People half way around the world are interested in the experience of inner-city hip-hop that’s mad. It’s a real good thing though. Real good.

How long do you think a middle class English chap could survive mooching through the streets of Compton?
Depends on how tough he is inside. Everybody in the ghetto ain’t a tough guy. I ain’t no gangster, I ain’t no bad guy, I’m ain’t nobody who is going to hurt you. Most the people in South Central say are just cool people. They survive through pure mental strength, nothing else. There’s a lot of psychological things going on down there. You have to be sharp or you’re in trouble.

How often do you go back?
My family still live in South Central - I’m the only one who made it out. I’ve still got my ties down there, so I go back quite a lot. But it’s not scary, there’s nothing but love for me out there. People want me to sign their CDs and shirts and that, but I don’t have any problems with it. I’m always approachable.

So there’s never a scary moment?
Well, people squeeze me a little too tight sometimes. The craziest fan I ever came across was actually this chick. She was totally obsessed with me and what I do to a mad point. I just wasn’t feeling that, so I slapped a restraining order on her ass.

Do you take security guards everywhere you go?
Nah. Just two or three guys.

Are they armed with guns?
Yeah. When they have to be.

Finally, how many times a day do people say, “I love you Ice T!”
Quite a lot but it doesn’t piss me off because T is my homeboy.

NER*D

Thu, 27 May 2010 18:27:55 +0100

Madonna recently said you made her cry. What did you do to the poor woman?
Pharrell: I just said some really nasty stuff I guess. And yeah, she cried, she cried for a long time actually. To be honest, I can’t believe she told someone about it. The whole situation was quite intense. It’s totally weird to make Madonna sob, but even stranger when she goes telling everyone, “Pharrell made me cry.”
Chad: Hang on. What? You made Madonna cry? Why haven’t I heard about this?
Pharrell: I didn’t tell you? I totally made her cry. Like a baby. I had to get her a towel. We were alone recording the album and she kept talking a lot of rubbish, so I shouted a lot of rubbish and she started crying her eyes out.

What do you do to stop Madonna crying once she’s started?
Shae: Good question. Did you hug her? Did you get any hug action from Madonna?
Pharrell: No man. It was no time for any of that stuff – it was full on war. I tell you what, Madonna is one mean lady. She’s a little baby tiger cub on the inside but outside she’s as tough as anything. Once you’re fighting with her you can’t let you’re guard down, she’d beat your ass to a pulp. She could definitely beat me up. But you know, making Madonna cry has just cemented our relationship. We’re tight now. Seriously tight. She’s probably the best person I’ve ever collaborated with.
Chad: Two things. One, I can’t believe you made Madonna cry. Two, I can’t believe everyone knows about it but me.

What other strange celebrity encounters have you had lately?
C: We were backstage at our gig the other night and Lionel Ritchie was sat there just relaxing. No matter where you are in the world, you’re never quite ready to see Lionel Ritchie hanging out with his buddies.
P: To be fair I think he was there to see Kanye, not us. We’re on tour with Lupe [Fiasco] and Kanye at the moment, and he could have just as easily have been there to see them.
C: What I like about the Ritchie is, it was our show, but we still couldn’t get close to hang out with him. Nobody can get close to Ritchie. He has his own private section, even at your show.
S: Lionel Ritchie was at our show? I knew about Madonna crying, but not this.

It’s been three years since your last album – why the wait?
C: Three years? Nah.
P: Two years.
C: It’s been a week at most.
P: Seriously we’ve been quite busy in that time. I can’t remember more than maybe four days off in those three years. The word “rest” just isn’t in our vocabulary. There’s been side project after side project. When we got a spare moment, we had a quick sleep, watched a few hours of TV, maybe had a massage then flew to Miami to begin this album.

The new single has an almost drum and base feel. Were you inspired by that very British scene?
P: Yeah, totally. It’s pretty much a tiny underground scene in the US, but I love a lot of British drum and base. I went to a really wild club in Bristol a few months ago, and that was a crazy night. I can’t remember the name of the place, but it was great. I love Bristol.

The single also hints at drug use…
C: Look, we’re in the entertainment business. We’re not about promoting drugs. It’s just a song. It’s entertainment, you can read into it what you like, and it’s quite easy to do that.

You’re playing UK dates, including festivals. How do you find the UK crowds?
P: Great most of the time. There are some fantastic women in Britain.
S: But it’s not always cool. We did some gig with David Bowie and that was a strange one. Those Bowie people did not like our music. I’m telling you those Bowie folks aren’t into N*E*R*D one little bit. They were throwing rubbish at us from everywhere - big ugly bottles and fruit. You’d think that kind of thing would fire you up, until your actually on stage dodging shoes. It was ugly.

What’s your favourite thing about the UK apart from the “friendly” people then?
P: That one week of sunshine you get a year. What’s with all that rain? No wonder people are angry.
C: What I like most about the UK is the Jamaican food. There’s a restaurant in London called Mr Jerk, and I sweat the second the plane hits British ground, I thinking about that place.

You’ve said you’re not doing this new record for the money – do you have a point to make with it?
C: Are we not doing it for the money any more? I thought it was for the money? Guys? Money, money, money? Are we not getting paid or something?
S: Ignore him. We’re doing this record for the love of making music. And for the pussy.
P: Shae! Honestly. For the pussy? Please. You didn’t just say that did you?
C: Brilliant Shae.
P: As much as I can’t believe Shae just said he made this album for the pussy, I guess he kind of has a point. Making a record for that reason is nothing to be ashamed of. Some of the greatest rock albums ever recorded were made to get laid.

Do you get embarrassed by the female attention you get at gigs?
P: Shae gets the best groupies. I’ve seen Shae sat on a couch after a show in little more than a towel as these beautiful groupie girls literally fan him. It’s like something out of Roman times, these women with big ferns keeping him cool. All he needs is some grapes for them to feed him and he’d be made.
C: Pharrell’s assistant Mick gets the worst groupies. The one’s who drink too much, and have no teeth, end up with the assistant.
P: But he’s happy with that. He wouldn’t have it any other way.

Kanye’s got his own travel agency – is there any area of business you’d like to try next?
P: I don’t know. There’s a lot in the pipeline. Too much to even think about right now. Hang on, what’s that smell?
C: It smells like burning, but more to the point, where’s Shae gone? Is something on fire? Help! Help! Fire! Fire dude. I think Shae’s in some kind of trouble. Shae!
S: Hold tight, I’m okay. It’s just my home boy over there. He’s having some issue. He smells like a dead deer and the whole stink is causing me problems with this interview situation. I think he’s trying to burn away the smell.
C: Oh man, we better move on. This is too weird. Next question.

Pharrell and Chad – you also work together as The Neptunes. Is it like being married?
P: Yeah we can get on each others nerves, but not as much as you’d think. The problem is Chad borrows your stuff and then leaves it in say, Salt Lake City. The other week I leant him my phone charger, he totally lost it and then tried charge my phone by hooking it up to the battery on the tour bus.
S: He’s got through six passports. Who has six passports? The government now think Chad is a terrorist. We had to smuggle him into Canada yesterday. He’s an illegal immigrant right now.

How did you smuggle Chad across the border?
P: On the bus. We had to hide him in a bag and put him in the luggage compartment with all our smelly clothes.
C: It was dark, and lonely down there. But it just makes me want to lose more passports. Whoever’s now got mine won’t have to sneak across borders in the belly of a bus.

Lily Allen

Thu, 27 May 2010 18:27:01 +0100

Lily is one of the most sincere pop stars I have ever met. Seriously. More than the holiest Jonas Brother and Barry from The Bee Gees combined. Where most will say, “I’ll give you a call,” just to be polite, surprisingly, 23 year old Li’l Lil’ actually rings. Today she’s locked herself out of her flat, it’s snowing in London, she’s lost her front doors keys, the notorious British paparazzi are on her tail, she’s about to miss a flight to Dubai, but her number is still flashing up as “incoming call” on my phone. With 1000 excuses not to dial my miserable number, Lily has (at great personal expense) checked into a hotel to find a refuge from the paps, warm and quiet enough for her to chat with me in peace. What’s more, she’s called, at the precise moment she said she would. ‘I’m a little stressed, but I’ll live,’ she laughs in her unmistakable squeaky cockney accent. As she chats, she’s slurping into a big fat bowl of room service soup, ordered to “warm her cockles” as they say in “Landan Taan”. She’s so painfully adorable, it’s enough to make a grown journalist lie about being a trained locksmith, just so he can save her from her sticky situation. ‘I’ve been wandering the streets, just spending money until now,’ cheeps Lily, ‘so it was the sensible thing for me to check in here. I’ll sort out getting into my flat later. Hopefully!’

From her down to earth attitude, it’s sometimes easy to forget what a ridiculously huge deal Lily is in her beloved hometown of London. When the Royal family are hiding behind castle walls, Amy Winehouse is in rehab, and Pete Doherty’s behind bars, Lily is 2009’s number one prime target for the notorious British paparazzi and the thirsty tabloid media. ‘It’s a ridiculous daily battle,’ laughs Lily, before letting out a big fat sigh. ‘They’re there outside my front door every single night and day without fail. They’ll be outside the hotel now. You know, I can’t complain too much, because if I wasn’t famous, people wouldn’t care about me and then I’d really hate it.’ Lily’s all but screaming with frustration by now, completely aware of her daft Catch 22 situation. ‘I want to be looked at and loved. Absolutely. I’m an attention seeker, so I can’t moan when I get too much attention. That said, do I get on with them? I’d say on the whole… no! They drive me mad.’

For the rest of my Lily Allen exclusive please either contact me or check out Rollingstone.com

Mark Ronson

Thu, 27 May 2010 18:25:15 +0100

Here’s a chunk of my Mark Ronson cover story for ShortList. For the full thing please go to Shortlist.com.

Can you sing?
Not very well. I do some backing vocals every now and then but that’s about it. It’s hard to do any more when you work with such amazing artists. I’ll be singing along in the studio, thinking you know what I’m not that bad, then Amy will come in and do her part. When you work with a voice like that it really puts you in your place. Maybe if I went around producing The Pussycat Dolls I’d be alright. I’d be in the studio listening to them squawk thinking, ‘You know what, maybe I could do that.’

Your fellow producer Pharrell Williams recently told me he made Madonna cry in the studio. Have you ever had a similar moment?
Have I ever made Madonna cry? Well, I did, but not it the studio. It was a completely different scenario - she was in my car and I ran a red light. But never has she shed a tear in the studio with me. To be honest I’m kind of more into diplomacy in the studio. I know The Neptunes make a lot of people cry. Gwen Stefani once told me that recording her song Hella Good with them was one of the most terrible experiences of her life. But they came out of the studio with the most brilliant, brilliant song – so it obviously does work for Pharrell. For me I guess that’s not really how I work.

There must have been a few tears during Amy Winehouse’s Back To Black album though?
Well recording with me tends to be quite serious. If we were making My Humps I guess we would have been having a barrel of laughs, but when you’ve just laid down Love Is A Losing Game, you’re not about to high five each other and go, ‘That was f*cking hilarious man!’ Some of the lyrics were pretty heavy. We all got a bit teary to be honest.

Your famed for your use of trumpets. Is there any song a horn section can’t improve?
Well, I’ve just done the new Kaiser Chiefs album and they put a horn embargo on me. I was a bit upset about that, but when you get the album you’ll see I snuck a few in by the end. I thought they’d love my horns, but they were like, ‘Oh that’s too much trombone for the first track on the album,’ or isn’t that a bit too “Mark Ronson”. Come on! It’s not like I invented the saxophone. I think I just found a few instruments that had been under used for a while. The horn players in my band who I use all the time keep looking at me funny now. They’re like, ‘We can see it coming Mark. We’re going to be out of work.’

What is the strangest number in your phone?
Let me look. Oh yeah, this guy… Antoine Soap. I put false names in for famous people in case my phone ever gets stolen. The problem is I can never remember who they are. There’s this guy called Antoine Soap, but I’ve forgotten who he really is. I had to change the names because I left my last phone in a London cab somewhere. These kids found it and kept prank calling Busta Rhymes…

Dizzee Rascal

Thu, 27 May 2010 18:22:33 +0100

Dylan Mills has an excellent toilet. As you stand there tapping a kidney in the loo of his home studio, the British rapper more commonly known as Dizzee Rascal, has provided you with a framed letter to read. It’s from his royal highness, and future face of the five Aussie dollar note, Prince Charles. There’s also a small pile of dirty magazines to peruse, but it’s the framed letter from the Queen’s eldest son, thanking Dylan for a gig he played for him, that catches the eye. Such royal letters wouldn’t be entirely surprising if Mr Rascal was a jazz musician, or even an aging rock star, but this is the rapper who penned the lyrics, ‘I don’t take no shite, so just know I might, punch you in the moosh, I war like George Bush,’ for a track called Suk My Dick. He is not the kind of musician you’d normally associate with Princess Diana’s jug eared ex-husband. For Christ’s sake, outside of the toilet are framed shooting range silhouettes showing off what a great shot he is with a pistol.
But Charles isn’t the only member of the monarchy getting down with the Dizz. “Prince Harry, came to my show the other night,” Dizzee tells me, whilst chewing on the bones of a KFC. “We let him stand there on the side of our stage, and he was right proper raving man. He was loving our shit. We hung out in my dressing room after and he’s one of the lads now.”
Dizzee laughs, knowing full well, how surreal this situation is. It seems only yesterday that he was an underground star in east-London’s Grime scene, causing mayhem on illegal radio stations, and only making headlines when getting stabbed in Ayia Napa [Cyprus], over an alleged war with rival hip-hop outfit So Solid Crew. Now he has his own record label, his own studio, international fame, and the confidence to tick off Princes when the say he his show has been just, “pretty good”.
“Pretty good? What do you mean pretty good?” Dizzee says he told the ginger Prince. “It was amazing man,” he continued, “if you weren't royalty, I'd have punched you in the face by now!” Dizzee then tested the might of Harry’s security by waving a butter knife at his security guard in jest. “There was just this one old guy protecting him,” says Dizzee. “And he was pretty small, we were like, that’s it? I guess there were probably a couple of other security guards hiding in the rooftops with snipers or something too. But they knew I was just having a laugh anyway, it was all good man.”
The confidence Dizzee has right now, stems from his completion of album number four, Tongue N Cheek. It’s a record going for the mainstream’s jugular, and is a long way from the heated tracks that filled his last release Maths & English. “I’ve always had that bit of aggression in there,” he tells me. “I remember the first lyric I came up with, ‘Like Spiderman I’m out to kill, fuck with me and blood will spill. I was like twelve writing lyrics at my church’s Sunday school. I don’t think they were very pleased about me writing about Spiderman and killing people when I supposed to be drawing pictures of Noah’s Ark, but fuck it. I got kicked out.”
Yet the anger has largely gone from this, arguably his best, album since his debut, Boy In Da Corner.

Please email me for the rest of the article (lee.coan@gmail.com)

P!nk

Thu, 27 May 2010 18:20:22 +0100

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing P!nk for both Rolling Stone and FHM. The Q&A somehow spiraled into becoming a news item in itself, clocking up over 4,000 separate news stories on Google News within 24 hours of being published.

Here’s The Sun’s take on what happened in our feature,...

WE'VE had NOEL v LIAM and LILY v almost everyone - now it's PINK's turn for a feud.
The veggie pop star is fuming about KANYE WEST's views on fur.
Pink blasted: "Kanye West is the person p***ing me off right now.
"I was at STELLA McCARTNEY's Paris fashion show with the vice president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, PAUL McCARTNEY and Kanye West.

"The entire time Kanye is going, 'They need more fur in this show'. He just wouldn't shut up about how he loved fur. I mean, he's saying this to me, the PETA guy and Paul McCartney!
"I was just so grossed out by him. I'm like, 'You're an idiot!'
"There are so many people who I think are a waste of skin and he's up there. I should wear him.
"Go on, donate yourself Kanye. People can wear your fur."
Pink knows she's seen as a "crazy, wild, take-no-s***-female". But she tells Australia's FHM mag she has a softer side. "Really, I'm just a girly girl too. I like running on the beach and gardening. I like baking and picking flowers." But it doesn't take long for the angry Pink to re-appear.
The singer, who recently reunited with hubby CAREY HART, said: "I once chartered a yacht through the Mediterranean. But in the end I tried to jump off the boat and kill myself because I wasn't getting along with the captain.
"The idea was we'd go to port every night so we wouldn't be rocking like The Perfect Storm, but he had other ideas.
"We were out in the ocean riding the waves. I got sick and couldn't take it.
"I got my favourite dress in one hand, a bottle of wine in the other and I was ready to jump in the ocean and die.
"Luckily Carey talked me down."
But Pink - who has TWO albums in the Top Ten - can do some mad stuff herself.
"I got to let my bulldog fly a private jet," she said. "We were in the air and I let him sit at the controls."
Remind me not to get on a plane with her.

Green Day

Thu, 27 May 2010 18:15:47 +0100

If I could get you two minutes with George W Bush, what would you do to him?
Umm. I don’t know. What could I possibly say to him?

A slap says a thousand words…
Yeah, well to be honest, when you asked the question, the first thought that went into my brain was, “I’d like to choke him. Choke him!” I thought I better not say it to be honest, but what the hell - it would be fun to choke George Bush a little. I’d like to grab hold of his neck and shake some sense into him. Though even that would be a lost cause at this point.

Have you had any scary moments where the US government have been upset by your protest songs?
You mean like the CIA?

Yeah, they’ll do…
I can’t be sure, but I don’t doubt it at all. I’m pretty positive there’s someone looking into what I’m saying here and there. But I’m not an assassin or telling people to kill anyone, so I’m sure they’re not going too nuts…

Do you think someone’s listening to us right now?
Ha! I guess it’s possible.

[Whispers] What shall we say to them?
When it comes down to it, I’m just a rock and roll singer. I think that their gang could have my gang, so I’m sure they’re not worrying too much.

Ever done something like worn a balaclava outside Semtex R Us, just to mess with them?
I’ve made an entire career of doing that kinda shit. I love winding people up. I like to start to push people’s buttons a bit, and if someone gets upset, I guess that I’m doing my job right. So…yeah.

You’ve been around forever, just how much do you hate the sight of your sorry band-mates?
For me I’m having the most fun I’ve had so far in my entire career. The shows have been so good. Success is a lot sweeter this time around – we can spot when people are speaking a load of shit. We know how to stick to each other and stay united.

But you must want to hurt them a tad? Especially your drummer…
Okay, its definitely got heated between us before now, but actual fighting has never happened. I think it has got pretty close sometimes – but I’d never disrespect Mike or Tre by punching them. I think I’m intelligent enough to restrain myself.

Tre once punched me in the face when I tried to steal his drumsticks at a gig…
You were unlucky - he doesn’t lash out that often. But then again, I’ve seen him strangle a couple of people before, so I suppose on the other hand you got off quite lightly.

How rich is he? Would it be worth me calling Claims Direct and suing him?
I don’t know man - he’s already going through not one but two really messy divorces at the moment. There’s going to be little left after all that. Can’t you just leave him alone? Let it go man, just let it go.

Is it true you hate the name Green Day?
Yeah. But you know, I’m kinda growing to like it a little bit more again these days. Lately it’s beginning to sound like it kinda represents a political party. Where as before it was just about drugs smoking or something. That’s where it came from - being young and smoking drugs.

Do Green Day stay off the drugs these days then?
Pretty much. I prefer drinking loads of beer – its much more fun. And then I’ll smoke an occasional spliff, but that is pretty much it for me.

Your son has the infinitely better name of Jacob Danger. Could you rename me something like that?
Sure. Let me see…I think you should change your middle name to Luscious. You can’t fail to be cool when you’re middle name’s Danger or Luscious. Women love it. Lee Luscious Coan – you should go for it. Seriously.

Do your fans still spit a lot at your gigs?
Nooooo.

How many liters of gob do you think has been spat at Green Day gigs over the years?
Umm. Loads – way, way too much. I didn’t like it at all – it got a little crazy for a while all those kids spitting at each other. It doesn’t happen at all any more…thank God. Why would anyone want to get spat in the face? It was horrible, especially when the fans directed their flem towards the band. The last thing you want on tour is a bout of Hepatitis.

Has a fan’s greenie ever flown into your mouth whilst you were singing?
Yeah it did happen. At some of the small gigs where there wasn’t a big barrier between the fans, and us so they could get us with their gob. But not anymore. No more!

You’re responsible for millions of teenagers dying their hair green. Have you ever been attacked by an angry mum?
You know not so much for dying their hair. But there have been a couple of times when mums have freaked out at me for leading their kids astray. A few mums had bought their kids Dookie, thinking it was a children’s record because it had a Ernie from Sesame street on the sleeve. When their toddlers were listening to punk, they got pissed. We had to take poor Ernie off because we got so much shit from mad parents.

Would you ever do a duet with Ernie or The Count?
Well I think Sesame Street is one of the better kids shows for sure, but…no. I’d like to sing a song with Oscar the Grouch. It would be Oscar or nobody. He’s a real favourite of mine - a dirty, grumpy old man with serious issues. I bet he’s a great crooner too.

Do pop bands annoy you when they try to be punk?
Well, luckily I’ve never heard this band or seen them, but it doesn’t matter - I can well imagine what they’re like. People get annoyed with these bands because they’re so pretty, but I mean The Sex Pistols were pretty cute too. I kinda feel bad for them, because they’re probably sincerely into decent music, but they’re so young, that they don’t know what they’re doing yet. You should just give them a couple more years and a dirty pillow to sleep on - then let them make a proper record.

Finally, last time we spoke, you’d just had sex with a 250-pound woman in a Honda Civic. Is it true that once you’ve had fat you’ll never go back?
Oh God…I remember. Umm no. Sincerely I haven’t. Honest. I’ve been too busy with being a rock star to get up to any mischief like that. It’s probably a good thing. And once you’ve had fat you do go back. When you’ve been with a 250-pound woman, you’re eager to get back to regular sized girls, especially if you’re going to be doing them in Hondas. Fat girls and Hondas don’t mix well.

Arctic monkeys

Thu, 25 May 2006 15:10:24 +0100

My world exclusive Q&A with The Arctic Monkeys is out now in Rolling Stone. Here's a quick slice of it...

In the flesh Alex Turner is tiny, gawky and awkward. When he’s got the giggles, he grins like that naughty kid at school who got the whole class detention.
“He were in the studio next to ours, out in LA,” explains Alex. “The Prime Minister of England. Gordon. We thought, bloody hell, that’s weird, but he was in there finishing off his Krunk LP. He says LP, but we know he means a more modern word than that. So he hears we’re next door, comes in, gets me in a headlock, and pretends to rough me up a bit. He was just really showing off like.”
Nick, the Monkeys’ bassist takes over. “The sad thing is, I think he were only in there because of us. He didn’t have an album at all, he was just pretending to record Krunk, so he could get the publicity off of the back of getting, Al in a head lock. That was a bit shit to be honest, him trying to make out like he was just hanging out in the studio anyway. But we figured each other about in the end just got our feelings down on tape.”
“He just had all these words and that he wanted to put to our music,” explains Alex, “and it was a bit mad, but like okay. Would you say he’s rapping or just singing quite slowly, Nick?”
“It’s probably a rap. Maybe more manifesting than rapping. It freaked us out at first but when we got the right beats he was just going with his flow like.”
Suddenly, there’s not a smirk, a snigger, even a smile in the room. As a rare outsider allowed into the inner circle, it’s both bizarre and brilliant to watch Nick and Alex in action like this. You could half believe Gordon is rapping on “Humbug”. The guys’ sense of humour is so dry, and quick, and in tune with one another you can understand so clearly how they produce such smart, witty records. What’s more, this humour helps them deal with the silliness of being so globally huge these days. They claim it’s what keeps them sane, and more importantly what keeps them as buddies not just colleagues.
“The band is not the reason we are mates,” explains Alex. “We all grew up on like the same street and we were all mates before, and I hope, we’ll still be mates after. We’ve never seen this as the reason we’re friends.”
I have been lucky enough to be the first journalist in the world to have heard their new album, “Humbug”, in its entirety, so we best talk about it sensibly. Just for a second at least. No mentions of Gordon Brown or Barack Obama.
“Humbug” was half recorded in the infamous Joshua Tree Studios in California with Josh Homme (Queens of The Stone Age), and half with James Ford (Simian Mobile Disco) in Brooklyn. In parts it sounds like Metallica attempting the theme tune from a James Bond movie. It’s brilliant, but different. Brilliantly different.
“I don’t think we have actually gone too much heavier,” explains Alex, who despite that bold claim, has a new AC/DC style, shabby, shoulder length hair and trousers Jimmy Page wouldn’t be ashamed of. “I think that it was perhaps the intention when we went into the studio – to be heavier. But once we got started working tunes out, we, ah, abandoned the idea of that being the thread of it all. This album, definitely is not all about being heavy. I think we just thought it would be better to do something a bit diverse but still have good songs on there. I certainly think it’s more of a guitar record than the other two, but it’s not… heavy heavier, if that makes sense.”
“We had a scream making it,” says Nick. “It was the most fun we’ve had making a record for sure. We’ve never been fans of metal. Not even when we were like 14 and confused. But we’ve all always loved Queens of The Stone Age, and there’s their influence in here for sure.”