Iggy’s subsequent decision to reconvene the band’s second line-up — and coax legendary guitarist James Williamson out of retirement — was less expected. While the original combo had never enjoyed any success during its fleeting existence, the infamous second incarnation of The Stooges, born circa 1972, was doomed from the outset and soon became a byword for druggy self-destruction. Although all just about escaped with their lives, this was the unlikeliest reunion.

Back in the day, The Stooges Mk 2 were augmented by James Williamson, a fabulously talented guitarist, whose savage, mangled riffing on the band’s lone album, 1973′s Raw Power, was a perfect foil for Iggy’s incandescent lyricism. Their brutality was way ahead of its time: only once they’d imploded, and Iggy had checked himself into a Californian psychiatric unit, would both incarnations of the band become a key influence on punk rock.

Their story is singular enough, even without the added spice that Williamson quit music altogether circa 1980, and spent the intervening 30 years working successfully as an electrical engineer in Silicon Valley in California. His return in 2009 couldn’t have been less foreseeable, but subsequent tours showcasing Raw Power and 1975′s Pop/Williamson collaboration, Kill City, found his playing remarkably unspoiled — and undiluted.

It remains as such on Iggy & The Stooges’ remarkable comeback record, whose title, Ready to Die, is a fittingly gnarly statement from unrepentant rockers in their mid 60s. Its 10 tracks balance swinging riffage with near-the-knuckle balladry, while Iggy holds forth on gun control, underpaid labor, abundant female breasts and, indeed, death. In exclusive conversation with eMusic’s Andrew Perry, these legends are implausibly invigorated.

For a peek into the Stooges’ record collection, click here.

Iggy, how did you persuade James to rejoin the band, after so long out of the game?

Iggy Pop: After Ron Asheton passed away in 2009, I talked to James about possibly coming in for some gigs that we had booked already, and I also talked to a friend of Ron’s who was in a Stooges tribute band, [Radio Birdman's] Deniz Tek. I ended up canceling the gigs, but James and I stayed in touch, and toward the end of that year, I had an offer that was too good to refuse. And James was up for it.

James had to do a lot of rehearsal to relearn how to play the guitar after 37 years, and in the course of doing so he sent me a very nice piece of dobro blues music — he called it “Ron’s Tune.” And he began and ended the tune with a slide-guitar rendition of “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” which is Ron’s greatest and best known riff.

James, you’d not been playing in public for all that time, but had you been doing music privately, just for your own enjoyment?

James Williamson: Not really, no. I wrote one song when we were doing New Values [Iggy's 1979 solo album], and that was it. After the really bad experience we had on Soldier [Iggy's 1980 solo album], I just said, “Screw this, I’ve gotta focus on technology.” I just put the guitar down. There was the odd time or two, when I’d pull it out and try and impress my son, but by then I was pretty rusty, so he was kinda like, [skeptical] “Really, dad?!” So I just stopped altogether.

But then, about a year and a half before I got the call to rejoin the band, I happened to be at a flea market, and came across this old guitar. I didn’t know what [brand] it was, but it sounded amazing, and I bought it for a song basically, because the guy who was selling it didn’t know what it was either. It turned out to be made by a guy from the 1920s and ’30s, named Hermann Weissenborn. He made Spanish-necked guitars, as well as lap steels, back in the heyday of Hawaian music, and was really a master.

So that inspired me to play a little bit. Granted, that was acoustic, so it was not the same as playing in The Stooges, although I wrote most of the songs [for The Stooges] on acoustic.

So did it take quite a bit of practice to get “match fit” for those first shows in ’09?

Williamson: It’s funny, if you ever could play guitar in the first place, you have the same synapses and muscle memory and all that stuff — it all comes back. I did have to work pretty hard to get it up to a kind of professional level, but I had six months to do it. We rehearsed a lot, and I did one show with a local band, just to get the feel of it. Almost all of our set is my stuff, and then the earlier Stooges stuff is pretty simple.

But in terms of writing, I had not done that at all, so going into this album was a little daunting at first, but then things got going so well, you couldn’t hardly stop it.

Some reactivated bands, like the Pixies, believe that it’s okay for them to play shows for people to enjoy the old material, but that they shouldn’t make new records, because they can never match up — they can only tarnish their own legacy. You obviously disagree…

Pop: My motivation in making any record with a group at this point is no longer personal, it’s just a pigheaded fucking thing I have, that a real fucking group, when they’re an older group, they also make fucking records. They don’t just twiddle around onstage to just make a bunch of money and then go, “Oh, it wouldn’t be as good.” This is not the fucking Smashing Pumpkins, you know? No. So this is the key, the only thing I really have left to say is, The Stooges are a real group.

Williamson: The first priority when we reformed was to get the band cracking, and in tour shape. And I think you saw the results of that. Then after about 2011 or so, we started thinking, Well, you know, shouldn’t we make a record? But we weren’t sure we could do it. The previous album, The Weirdness [released by The Stooges Mk 1 in '07] didn’t come out too well, or at least the critics didn’t like it much, and so I was determined that we would make a record that we felt was really representative of us, and that we liked.

So I started writing with Ig, and that was the first revelation — it’s funny, but we have some kind of chemistry, for lack of a better word, where we can actually write songs fairly quickly. So we started doing that when we had time, and little by little some of them started sounding pretty good. It took quite a long time, because we were still touring, but we made a concerted effort in 2012, and eventually we came up with 15 songs, and then pared them down to 10 that went on the album.

Were there any ground rules for making it? Anything you wanted to avoid? Or was it just the music that came out?

Williamson: It was pretty much just the music that came out. We really were keenly aware that, this being the 40th anniversary of Raw Power, all this stuff would get compared. So we didn’t wanna write in the rearview mirror, if you will. If you fall into that trap, you start to be a caricature of yourself. We wanted to be authentic, as we are now, and that’s what you’ve got — songs about today, and I think it ended up being some very topical material, that covers gun control, immigration, sex, money — you know, all the keen topics. And the music sounds like us. I think we couldn’t help but be us really.

We kinda still maintained the old school way. We used tape on a lot of stuff, and a lot of analogue outboard equipment, like Neave 10-73 pre-amps. That’s the killer sound, maybe a little bit of a throwback to the ’70s, but I think Ig stepped up and really sang his ass off. And I played hard.

Have you felt any obligation maybe to reinhabit your state of mind as you remember it from the early ’70s, to be true to the original Stooges, to be the “streetwalking cheetah” from the classic song “Search & Destroy,” but updated for today? On several songs you actually seem in quite a dark place: on ‘Unfriendly World’, you sing, “Fame and fortune make me sick, and I can’t get out.” In short, not the streetwalking cheetah…

Pop: Well, unfortunately for me, I’ve hit a point in my life where I’m kinda famous, and I’m not used to that, ’cause I couldn’t get arrested my whole fucking life. Nobody knew who I was, except for a few crazy people. So I got to be like 50 and still living like outside of crappy areas in New York City, and nobody knew who I was. I got used to that, so, no, I’m not used to who I am now, and it’s not in my interest to express myself, some days. I’m not like most people, I don’t share the acceptable thoughts on society; mine are unacceptable. So it’s become harder and harder for me to give in a lyric. Also I may just be out of things [to say] — as you get older you notice your vocabulary stays the same.

So I have to be careful because if I say what’s really on my mind I might get laughed at or locked up, or cause other problems around me. And the world has changed and I’m a person who’s very fortunate to be walking around healthy, free, and respectable; in terms of what I did, way back when, and I know it, I have this mentality.

Looking back at Raw Power, it was always doomed to commercial failure, at the time at least. You came in on guitar, James, and Ron Asheton came back in at the last minute, but relegated to bass, with his brother Scott on drums. Any human resources manager would’ve told you, that’s not a band that’s going to thrive and conquer the world, there will be arguments…

Williamson: And that’s exactly what our management thought! [The Stooges were signed up by David Bowie's management company, at the behest of Bowie, who was obsessed with Iggy. —Ed.] Going over to London, just me and Iggy at first, at that particular time — it was sort of ground zero for the glam thing, and here we are, some midwestern US guys who’d never been out of the US before, and we got parachuted in to Bowie’s world, and T Rex’s world — Marc Bolan was on fire when we got there.

We’d never seen anything like that since The Beatles. The girls were flinging themselves against the chain-link fences, and crying and screaming, and we were thinking, “Wow, okay, this is pretty cool,” but when we went to find musicians, it was like we just couldn’t relate to the guys. There was guys ruffled cuffs and collars and flowers and stuff, and it wasn’t us.

Our management wanted us to be like pop stars, like Bowie. That was the model they had, and in fact they didn’t even want me to come over. They just wanted Iggy, so they kind of begrudgingly let this surly-looking, pimply, long-haired guy come along with him, and then pretty soon there were four of us [when the Ashetons arrived], haha! So every time we’d bring a demo to MainMan, the management, they would reject it. “I Got A Right,” “I’m Sick Of You” — all those great songs were done before Raw Power, and they didn’t like them.

So our job was to try to come up with some material that they would like, but the real break we got was that David Bowie suddenly started getting very popular, so that took all the focus off of us, and they just didn’t have time to deal with us. But we owed an album to CBS, so they let us just go in the studio on our own, and make it. I don’t think Raw Power would’ve been made otherwise, or at least it certainly wouldn’t have been the same.

In the end, though, MainMan, took Bowie into the studio to remix the album, in the hope of making something palatable out of it, and the released version came out pretty tinny. Did that upset you?

Williamson: The good news was, we were left alone without any adult supervision. The bad news is, this is my first album, so I assumed Iggy knew what he was doing, but Iggy’s not a technical guy, and so I think we made the engineer do a lot of things he didn’t really wanna do. The basic tracks — bass and drums, and probably some guitar — were all done live in the room together, so the isolation wasn’t very good, so there’s a lot of bass in the drums.

It’s a mess really, in some ways, so I think when David Bowie went to mix it, he didn’t have much to work with. He probably had to take the bass and drums down quite a bit, like he did, in order not to hear all that stuff. But of course he made me sound great, because basically it’s just guitars and vocals — which is what Jack White has made a career out of, by the way! So it’s not all lost.

Steve Jones of The Sex Pistols always says he learnt to play guitar by playing along to Raw Power in his bedroom (on speed!). When you first heard British punk rock, did you think, “Hang on, they’re ripping us off”?

Pop: Williamson has such a strong energy, he’s a Scorpio, and he has powerful waves of negative repellent energy in his playing. So it’s no accident that it was his playing that ignited certain sparks that led to English punk rock, no accident at all.

Williamson: I hear him say that, and I’m like, “Really?! Because I consider myself a positive force.” The only way I can interpret that is he’s saying I’m like a bad-ass guitar player, in which case I consider it a compliment.

Pop: Someone put it this way in a recent book, that the original Stooges with Ron, Scott, myself and Dave, were like lone artisans, working away in isolation, crafting away the templates for the content of punk rock. But nobody knew the tree was falling in the forest. It took a combination of James Williamson and David Bowie. They both served similar roles in my life and it took the platform that we got from Bowie’s people, and the negative waves from Williamson, to put us in touch with the generation that really articulated punk.

So did it feel like a vindication?

Williamson: By the time all that stuff had started happening, I was pretty much out of music, so I wasn’t really paying much attention to it, but of course it was hard to miss The Sex Pistols, so I did notice a kind of similarity, and I thought to myself, “Good for these guys, they were able to put it together, and market it successfully.” They were doing stuff right. That was one of the regrets that I think I’ve always had about the early Stooges — we were just too fucked-up to be successful [laughs]. We just didn’t care about that kind of stuff. In the end it broke up the band, because people just couldn’t go on.

Iggy, your lifestyle problems ran on well into the 1990s, as has been well documented over the years. But James, how did you manage to extricate yourself, straighten up and hold down a challenging, cutting-edge job for so long?

Williamson: I think he has a different kind of vulnerability to these things than I do. I wasn’t as bad as people make me out to be in terms of drug usage and debauchery and all this sort of stuff. I always had girlfriends who were usually pretty clean, and so once I stopped doing music it wasn’t too hard for me to get cleaned up. That’s not the hardest part, though. The hardest part is getting your mind wrapped around different concepts. It was a rather large existential gap, between The Stooges and calculus, for example.

Where exactly did you work? Legend has it you ended up working for Sony in computer programming.

Williamson: No, no, I went back to school, to become an electrical engineer, because I was fascinated by the personal computer. It was the very beginning of that, and it was much more exciting to me than what rock ‘n’ roll had become. It was really tough, but when I was finished, I got hired to a company called Advanced Micro-Devices up in Silicon Valley, which is where I still live, and from there I worked through a succession of jobs. It was a really exciting run — the PC, and eventually the internet, waves and waves of different technology from brilliant people that I got to work with. So I never really regretted any of it.

Is it true you’d been presented with a retirement package just around the time you got the call from Iggy?

Williamson: Yeah, the timing of it was just unbelievable. For all its success, the company was not immune to this current economic situation, so they were handing out those packages. I looked at the package, and at first I wasn’t sure I wanted to take it, but eventually I thought, “You know what, I can’t actually afford not to take this.” So coincidentally Ig had called, and initially I just told him, “No,” but then a little while went by, and I decided to take the package. I had also given Ig’s call a lot of thought, and soul-searching, and I felt like I kind of owed it to those guys. We went back a long way. They were fresh out of Stooges — I was kind of the only one left, so I called him back and said, “Let’s do it.”

Was there some patching up to do between you? Iggy, you’ve said that you hung up the phone after James accepted your offer, and suddenly panicked, “Hang on, but James is the devil!”

Williamson: I don’t know where all that devil stuff comes from exactly, but yes we did have some patching up to do. The thing is, when people die, there’s also this funny thing that happens, and a lot of stuff suddenly isn’t that important, that has been going on all those years. We didn’t really talk much after Soldier for 20, 25 years. Only the odd phone call for publishing or whatever. After Ron died, we got together down in L.A. when Ig was doing a benefit show with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. We chewed the fat for a little bit. It was no big deal, but I think it made it easier for both of us to go forward from there.

Your lives have been so different in the intervening years. Does that give an extra frisson to The Stooges now?

Pop: To deal with him, the bar was higher. And it was also higher for me because this has got my name on it — it’s Iggy & the Stooges [just as the band was billed for Raw Power], so I had to live up.

Williamson: The thing is, you can’t help but be who you are. The first two years of touring together, we covered a lot of ground about different experiences we’d had over the years, but basically the two of us know each other since we were in our 20s, and so we go back a long way, and I don’t care what you do in your life, there’s some things that never change about people. That person’s personality was developed early in life, way before your 20s, and they’re pretty much always that same person. When you know somebody for that long, you dial into the commonality, rather than the difference.

Is it an odd feeling to be a celebrated guitar hero now, James, when all you’d ever known before was being in that loser band from Detroit all those years ago?

Williamson: It’s just unbelievable. I can’t begin to tell you what it’s like now. The largest show I ever played in the five years I was first in The Stooges was less than 2,000 seats. The first show I played back with The Stooges was 40,000 people in Sao Paolo, Brazil. Just, what?! People are crazy about us. Twenty-somethings are out there in the audience, and we even got in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The last four or five years have been like victory laps. And we’ve made a new album which was really a defining full-circle moment for the band. I’m very proud of it.

Andrew Perry interviews the band about their remarkable comeback album here.

Hatched in near-total isolation, this remarkable combo, who sound very approximately like Black Sabbath, Alice Cooper and Slade all at once, have made all the more impact. Word began to spread of their amazing entrail-splattered riffola on the doom metal scene in late 2011, after initial pressings of their second album, Blood Lust, sold out immediately, and began to change hands on eBay for an astonishing £700.

But Uncle Acid’s music is fully deserving of such pecuniary folly. Raunchy and demented, yet deceptively crafted to the point of mastery in their tunes and harmonies, Blood Lust and its newly released sequel Mind Control would already be massive hits in a better world. In hell, they probably already are.

Yet, even as their renown spreads, Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats remain shrouded in mystery. Via their new label, Rise Above, eMusic’s Andrew Perry was merely forwarded a mobile number, and a time to call it. Who knew what lurked in the shadows at the end of the telephonic corridor…

Hi there, is that Uncle Acid?

Haha, yeah.

Nobody seems to know if that’s how you want to be addressed, or…

You can call me Kevin if you want.

Kevin, your music has been blowing our minds. When my buddy Todd first put me onto you, I couldn’t quite understand why you’d make music so melodically rich, yet only release it in such tiny quantities. But then obviously its extreme collectability has helped spread a buzz about the band. Was that your master plan?

No, not at all, we didn’t think anybody wanted our stuff, that was the problem, so we just printed as much as we could afford — really small runs, because we could only afford to get booklets printed up in batches of 50 or 25. I thought, have we really got much of a fanbase beyond that?

So that’s how we started, and it built up and up, and we started pressing more CDs, and then it just got to where we couldn’t keep up with it anymore, so luckily at that point, Lee [Dorrian, of Napalm Death] stepped in and Rise Above [Dorrian's label] took over, and they’ve helped push us further. So we didn’t plan it to be like that, we just weren’t aware what kind of audience we had, or might have, so we just did what we thought we could sell, which was not very much.

Have you emerged from a thriving doom-metal subculture in Cambridge?

No, we happened in isolation. There’s not really a music scene in Cambridge. It’s an academic place, there are no real music venues for bands to play. It was a struggle to get any musicians involved, so we started just as a three-piece, then we tried doing a bit of gigging, but it didn’t sound very good with just the three of us, so we decided that we’d just be a studio band, and do albums, but now we’ve got a new line-up, we’re more focused now. Everyone else is in London, and I’m the only one that lives in Cambridge, so it’s a little bit different, but it’s the same idea. We’re still outsiders, wherever we choose to reside.

Your sound is so evocative of vintage Black Sabbath and turn-of-the-1970s heavy rock, it almost seems like an implicit criticism of contemporary metal. Correct?

Yeah, most of our influences are from the ’60s, ’70s and maybe early ’80s, and that’s pretty much it. That’s what we absorb, and it just comes out as whatever. One of the things we took from [Black Sabbath] is the idea of having the riff, and the heaviness, but having a really good melody on top, which is what a lot of the modern metal bands seem to have lost. We’re bringing back melodies. I love Electric Wizard and Blood Ceremony and bands like that, but I don’t really think we have a lot in common with them. I think there’s something else to our sound, we’re not as heavy as that. The Beatles are a big influence on us also, so… How can you compare to that, you know?

You yourself play the same Les Paul Junior guitar as Johnny Thunders. Is he a hero?

I love him. He’s one of my biggest influences, even though you probably can’t hear it in the music. I’m a big fan so I had to get the same guitar as him. It’s just got a very distinct sound to it. It’s just a really raw, rock ‘n’ roll sound.

We heard that your second album, Blood Lust, was supposed to be based on an imaginary horror B-movie. Confirm or deny!

Yeah! The story is supposed to be a long-lost horror film from the early ’70s. The plot follows a Witchfinder General kind of guy, who goes around torturing women — that’s how he gets his thrills. He kills people all around the country, and at the end he meets the Devil. It’s not a great story [unrepentant laugh], but it was kind of good thinking of a B-movie, and what would happen in a really terrible B-movie, which I would love to watch, and basing an album around that. That’s the kind of crap that I watch, rubbish like that with no real plotline.

Are you properly into the occult? Or are you just adopting the language of metal with all the Satanic stuff?

With us, it’s more about the film side. The occult thing, that doesn’t have anything to do with it. This is just thinking of things like B-movies, or old Hammer Horror films, and just trying to recreate that vibe in the form of music, rather than anything that these occult bands are doing. We’re not taking it too seriously.

Not with a name like Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats…

Exactly!

I’m guessing the new record, Mind Control, is a similar imaginary movie, but one about the Manson Family?

That was the starting point for the concept, which obviously was to do with mind control, and the story narrative is some guy who starts a super-cult out in the desert, and they steal motorcycles, and he’s got all these girls around, and they do drugs — it’s kind of Charles Manson meets Jim Jones — and obviously, there has to be a big murder spree at the end. So it’s more the American exploitation films of the early ’70s. I find writing lyrics hard, so to make things easier for myself, I come up with these stories.

Have you got rooms full of this nonsense at home on VHS?

I do really enjoy terrible movies. Rubbish films are an escape as well, it gets you away from all the bullshit.

Some of Mind Control has a mellower vibe. Was the idea to let some light into the sound this time?

The idea was to mix it up a little, and maybe not give people what they want or expect, which would maybe be Blood Lust Pt 2, because that did so well.

The production is still, um, fairly murky.

Part of that was due to the fact that we didn’t really have any budget to start with. The new record, we got to use more expensive valve mics, but it still sounds raw because there’s not really anything else done with it. It’s us live in the studio, then we just balanced it all in the mix, and that was it. There are no fancy effects on it. Part of our whole thing is small valve amps that don’t really work properly. We just tried to keep it as loud as possible.

Emerging from nowhere to deliver his 2011 debut at the ripe age of 62, Charles Bradley has quickly become one of the most talked about and beloved artists of the decade. With a rich, raspy voice fit to compare with the greats of the golden era in the 1960s and early ’70s, Bradley, almost overnight, has become soul’s leading ambassador in the new millennium.

His live performances routinely unfold as touchy-feely love-ins between artist and audience. Behind this in-the-now euphoria is a life story of deprivation, itinerancy and bitter failure. As illustrated in a new documentary about him called Soul Of America, Bradley, like the subject of a Curtis Mayfield song, has lived most of his life beneath the poverty line, relying on charity from soup kitchens, sleeping rough, with no fixed abode.

After settling in Brooklyn, he plied a meager trade for many years as a James Brown impersonator in the Black Velvet revue. His fortunes only began to reverse when he hooked up with Gabe Roth from New York’s R&B imprint, Daptone, who in turn introduced him to aspiring band leader, producer and songwriter, Thomas Brenneck. From unsteady, no-budget beginnings, the duo worked at realizing Bradley’s higher talent.

Backed by Brenneck’s Menahan Street Band, Bradley released “No Time for Dreaming,” about his own private hardships, to huge global acclaim. He duly wowed the world on tour, and now returns with Victim Of Love — a record of exquisite joy, hope and gratitude, which pushes at the boundaries of conventional R&B like some lost treasure of early-’70s psychedelic soul. When eMusic hooks up with him and Brenneck on their latest ambassadorial London visit, Bradley’s voice is hoarse from so much testifying and giving. But now, at last, is the time for dreaming.

Yours is an incredible story, Charles: all that power to move people has been bottled up inside you all these years. Did you always know it was in there?

Charles Bradley: True artists, that sing from their soul and heart — nobody knows the depths they go under for a length of time trying to hold onto the honesty and decency and respect inside them. A person don’t get that easy. They work their asses off. I’m saying if you wanna be a career singer, you gotta take that hurt with ya.

But it was all this guy [pointing at Brenneck], helping me get heard. I say this to all my interviews — he’s gonna get tired of me thanking him. Then I’ll say, he might as well get used to it, because I can’t tell him enough where I would’ve been at right now — calling people and getting nowhere, doing my James Brown show still, keeping alive the dream, hoping it’s not too late.

Did you ever audition for TV talent contests, hoping to become a Susan Boyle-style “senior” success?

Bradley: I tried to get on all those things. Then I saw Jennifer Hudson [low-ranking finalist on the third season of American Idol, who went onto recording and acting mega-success] — I was angry at her! How did she get the chance? Overnight she just flew up, and I’ve been trying to get there for years? I was having doubts about everything. But my time came, in its own way.

The first album, No Time For Dreaming, documents the pain and hardship of your life, in a gritty funk style. Was it a kind of exorcism for you?

Bradley: I say, what is soul? Soul don’t have no creed or color. It’s what you been through, your hardship deep in your soul. You gotta reach down there where people’s never been half as deep, and pull it out. So the more I’m going deep into myself — that’s what soul’s about. Me and Tommy, we didn’t let go, we kept digging at one another, and that turned into that first record.

Was it a DIY effort, between the two of you?

Thomas Brenneck: 100 percent. I wrote all the songs with Charles, produced it, recorded it in my bedroom at the time — our humble beginnings. Gabe actually bought me a half-inch 8-track machine, which I kept right next to my bed, with a little stereo and a piano, and I chipped away, played stuff for Charles, and he loved it.

The years have been nice and we’ve got a recording studio now. We toured the first record, wrote a bunch of other songs, then went to the studio and recorded them with a much bigger sonic palette to choose from.

Did you know Daptone’s stuff before that, Charles?

Bradley: I knew Tom going on a lotta years.

Brenneck: We had recorded two singles, prior to the first album, with a different group. We first got introduced by Gabe from Daptone. I had an instrumental group called Dirt Rifle & The Funky Bullets, based on The Meters, James Brown, Dyke & The Blazers and such. Charles had knocked on Gabe’s door, saying, Hi, I’m a singer, you make records — are you looking for singers?

So Gabe introduced us, and we recorded two singles for Daptone that Gabe produced, as Charles Bradley & The Poets. The two singles were extremely derivative. It took five years after that, I’d say, of growth for myself, maturing in taste of music, for me to record some Menahan Street Band stuff that was much deeper music, it wasn’t just funky on the surface. It was slower and much deeper.

When Charles heard that music, he got inspired, and I think all his inspiration was really coming from all his trials and tribulations, and from living a life of struggle and poverty, and moving around, and not really having a home, and so that first album is really just Charles singing about the darkness, about the world from his perspective.

So that was Ground Zero?

Brenneck: Yeah, exactly, and now he’s felt warmth from people all around the world, and it’s because of those stories that people can relate to Charles — they’re drawn to him, and they love him, and he’s not just an entertainer up there that’s singing somebody else’s songs.

We write these songs together, they come from a really deep place, and now his inspiration is being drawn from some of these positive things that have happened in his life, and it still lends itself to be beautiful, soulful songs. They don’t just have to be tough, gritty and raw, they can be beautiful and psychedelic and soulful at the same time.

Some of your live shows have become the stuff of legend. One that often gets mentioned was at an outdoor festival in Utopia, Texas, where the heavens opened for a biblical downpour, and you went out and hugged crowd members in the rain…

Bradley: Yeah, that was a show! There’s nothing on earth like being on stage. To me, stage is home. If I see the people standing outside in the rain, getting wet, to watch me perform — I said, “Naaah, that not fair!” I had to jump off the stage and get out in the mud and get wet with ‘em! That’s when everybody went crazy. I said, “You gettin’ wet out there watchin’ me perform — can I come out, too?” Yeeah! It was a tear-dropper. There was warmth, kindness, hurt, love, and, in the midst of it, it was beautiful.

Does it feel massively different to you, doing your own show, with your own music, compared to doing your old James Brown show?

Bradley: I think they’re loving me more because I’m singing my song, and I’m singing from the heart, rather than doing James Brown and trying to manifest on his style.

Victim Of Love feels like a watershed record for Daptone. People were sometimes sniffy about it at first, like it was pointless and copyist. Has it all been a process of winning people over?

Brenneck: Yeah, to modern soulful music. With this album, I was really trying to push outside of the boundaries of the normal Daptone production by adding elements that you wouldn’t hear on Sharon Jones records and such. We’re trying to make soul music in 2013, and embrace all our influences that are outside of just directly James Brown or Otis Redding or any Motown Detroit artist. But once he sings on it, it’s impossible to call it anything but a soul record.

Bradley: Tommy said, “You wanna move on from James Brown?” And he’s doing it by putting in that music that I like. Once my spirit gets into the depths of the music when I hear it, it all happens. I don’t wanna do James Brown no more, because I’m feeling that feeling I’ve been wanting for a long time, and the more you put it on me, and when I get into it when you give it to me, the more I want it. That’s just the bottom line.

Now we’re doing funk and rock. We’re gonna find a new mixture. We’re heading into a mixture that nobody’s doin’, our own creation.

Brenneck: It’s not gonna be fresh by doing a hip-hop song. It’s gonna be by him doing his own song, that embraces all that and lots else beside. Bradley could take a Black Sabbath song and turn it into a soul song.

You might go heavy metal next time? Like with Jimmy Page guitar?

Brenneck: Jimmy Page is cool, but that’s not heavy metal, it’s rock ‘n’ roll, and that’s where we’re going. Bradley can do a good Robert Plant impersonation, and he doesn’t even know it!

Bradley: Yeah, and one song we play is Neil Young’s “Heart Of Gold.” I lu-u-urve doing that song. It feels good, it fits right in.

How has your life changed since your upturn in fortunes, Charles? Do you have a decent lifestyle now?

Bradley: Not totally. I’m working on it.

Do you have a family, with kids to provide for?

Bradley: I made a vow to myself when I was 14 years old, and I lived that commitment from that date right up to today: No child of mine is comin’ into this world. I’m gonna keep seeking, but right now at my age, 64, it’s too late for me to have kids.

But surely your story proves that it’s never too late for anything?

Bradley: No, man, it’s best to have kids at Tommy’s age. He can grow up with his kids, be young with ‘em, play with ‘em. My playin’ — I wanna do it onstage. I’m gonna be godfather to a lotta kids [gesturing out into imaginary audience, smiling], and I’m gonna teach them to the best of my ability. Same thing with Oprah [Winfrey]: She never had no kids, but she’s like the motherhood of all kids. So I’m gonna be a godfather!

And you’re going to be a movie star, too, with your own documentary…

Brenneck: That’s not gonna make Bradley a movie star, that’s just gonna make him a topic of conversation. It’s more about his life than his music. Where it ends, another documentary could start, because the last few years have been crazy, successful, amazing — but with that success, after 60 years of being down in the dumps, your shit doesn’t change overnight, even if the money starts coming your way. It’s still hard to change what you’re used to, psychologically, even if physically it’s easier to get material things.

There’s a lot of people around Charles trying to help him out, and Charles is trying to steer on the right path, not listen to people around him who’re trying to just leech onto him. It’s hard.

Bradley: One thing my mother taught me, I won’t forget: Go out and make money, but never let money make you. And I won’t. The only thing material things can do for me, is buy things I don’t have, and get me outta that level that I’m live in.

But this new record is about documenting the changes that are underway, and expressing your hope, love and gratitude?

Bradley: This new record is coming out of the darkness into the light, and meeting new peoples. I’ve been meeting lots of positive people, and they’ve been making me more sure of myself. [smiles] It’s a beautiful thing.

Duncan Wallis, Dutch Uncles’ singer/pianist, has a rep for being both brainy and “sexually interesting,” if a little tetchy on hearing his band being compared to Hot Chip. Andrew Perry tracked him down to see if any of these theories really hold water.

Dutch Uncles hail from Manchester. But rather like New Order, you don’t sound like the classic post-punk “miserable Manc” band…

We’re all originally from Marple [suburb, near Stockport], but I live in Chorlton [trendier hood] now, and will do for the foreseeable future. It’s good here. There are a lot of musicians around — you see Damon Gough [aka Badly Drawn Boy] every now and then. There’s a record shop at the end of my street, which is great because I DJ a lot, and I always do it off vinyl. I spend most of my time in the ’80s section. You can’t beat a bit of Wang Chung — “Dance Hall Days,” what a single!

You can certainly hear such preferences in Dutch Uncles’ sound.

Sure! I love a lot of stuff that came out in the ’80s. We’re definitely influenced by the xylophone sounds of Japan’s Tin Drum, and the string presence on Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love. One track on the album, “Flexxin,” sounds like Prince. We wrote it after we played on the same day as him at a festival. I don’t mind people saying we sound like him, ’cause he’s a genius. It’s not so good when people say we sound like Hot Chip. I actually really like Hot Chip, but it’s gone way too far now, it’s just become what everybody says. It’s made me scared to look on Twitter.

In the past, you’ve said Talking Heads are your favorite band. Why them?

The first five albums just show the most brilliant progression, especially through their relationship with Eno. Then Eno left the mix, and they did Speaking In Tongues and, that could be their best album actually, with the complete pop sensibility they brought to it — the whole “Stop Making Sense” aesthetic. After that it kind of veers off, but Talking Heads were always the band to look back on for us, because they had five completely different albums there, each one flawless in its own respect. Such an artistic variety coming out of one band. Ridiculous!

Have you tried to replicate that restless spirit in Dutch Uncles, to keep moving from album to album?

Yes, and they’re definitely all different. The first one, self-titled, was literally a live album slated up in two weeks in Germany, completely minimal. The second, Cadenza was us first beginning to realize the idea of instrumentation. It was the first time we had a producer, who unfortunately stepped in too late in the mix, because all the tracks had been pretty much road-tested by that point.

This time round we had our producer, Brendan, with us from the very first notes. We always knew that we wanted the album to be a complete surprise to people who already knew us — a surprise to them and us, really. You increasingly realise with pop music that everything’s been done, so you have to just have fun with it. So this album feels like less of a statement than the last two did, for me. It feels like, Look, this is something we’ve done in a year. Give us another year, we’ll do something else. These are all just parts of the story now. It’s not trying to make a full stop on anything.

You’ve said that the lyrics on Out Of Touch, In The Wild are loosely themed around addiction and friendship…

I’m not sure that’s quite right, on reflection. An album of bad habits — that would be a more accurate generalisation. “Nometo” is about an old guy who regrets the habits he had earlier in his life. But it’s not a drugs album — it’s a third of a drugs album, perhaps. It gets a bit psychedelic in the production side, and lyrically it gets more abstract the more psychedelic it gets.

It’s focused more on negative ways of thinking, but there are some upsides. The last song, ‘Brio’ is all about the naughty excitement of getting caught with pornography, and building a habit round that. But that’s not based on personal experience! It’s been said that a lot of our older material was about porn. I wanted to make a nod to the older songs — to the history of Dutch Uncles.

Do you crave chart success?

All bands do. It’s not like you’re gonna put a gun to anyone’s head for it. It’s just, “We want it, now how are we gonna get it?” “I don’t know, I guess we’ll have to be really lucky.” It’s hopeless to focus on it, so we just keep going, and try to get better. Every time, we want to make the listener’s first listen with us better.

A bold new evolution in a truly singular alt-rock coupling

The reunification of House of Love’s Guy Chadwick and Terry Bickers for 2005′s Days Run Away was an unlikely development from the unlikeliest partnership in first-wave shoegaze/indie.

Formed in 1987 in low-rent Camberwell, South London, two or three years after The Jesus & Mary Chain had electrified the city with feedback and leather-trousered cool, their band marked a return to the JAMC’s narcotically enhanced, Velvet Underground-inspired art-rock perspective, after two years of dainty C86 combos. Though much fêted in the UK music press, they, like the Velvets, didn’t quite make the grade commercially, only later to be cherished as a bridging influence on My Bloody Valentine, Ride and all their lesser noise-pop successors.

Chadwick and Bickers parted company after just one tempestuous, self-titled album. Bookish Chadwick soldiered on with more neo-classical art-rock HoL line-ups, while space-cadet Bickers drifted off into the ether with his Levitation.

That this self-defeating chalk-and-cheese duo should now strike back with their second reunion effort, albeit eight years on from the last, but with original production foil Pat Collier in tow, is a dream come true for disciples and nu-gazers alike. Listening to “PKR” — aka “Purple Killer Rose,” an old Chadwick/Vickers gem which slipped between the cracks in their partnership back in the day — it’s like being transported to House Of Love’s late-’80s majesty, as Bickers’s lyrical, FX-drenched guitar strains at the leash of Chadwick’s compositional control. Other tracks like the opening, exquisitely starlit “A Baby Got Back On Its Feet” thrillingly reignite the tension between singer/guitarist Chadwick’s simmering poetry and Bickers’ fluid virtuosity.

With the wisdom of their mature years, though, it’s clear that the ever-volatile duo have come to appreciate and accommodate each other’s respective talents. Where Bickers’s rampant amp abuse used to threaten to eclipse Chadwick’s more formal songwriterliness, here, as per album title, he’s far more sympathetic in splashing colors in between Chadwick’s intense lyrics.

Often, their music has an uncharacteristically rootsy quality: “Lost in the Blues” actually hints more towards precise Nashville country, while the harmonies and finger-picking on “Low Black Clouds” have an almost baroque folky splendor. “Never Again,” by contrast, verges on skiffle. Elsewhere, the title track’s jangling arpeggios are pure Byrdsian folk-rock, and “Hemingway” — the boozy man of letters is a quintessential Chadwick hero — showcases the kind of literary-minded songcraft which fired early Belle & Sebastian. With all its references ancient and modern, She Paints Words In Red signals a bold new evolution in a truly singular alt-rock coupling.

A trip through the grouchy Texan's macabre and somewhat bleak world

A grouchy Texan with a fathoms-deep voice, Lee Hazlewood was one of American pop music’s great outsiders. He’s best known for masterminding Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made For Walkin’” in 1966, then cutting a couple of brilliant, if risquéé duet albums with Old Blue Eyes’ daughter.

Before that, he was best described as a hustler, who’d enjoyed success producing fellow Texan Duane Eddy’s twangy guitar instrumentals, but had failed in his quest to make it as a radio DJ, and a solo artist. This first installment in a reissue campaign from Light In The Attic, the illustrious label responsible for Rodriguez, The Monks and many more, tells of his early steps in the latter direction.

Trouble Is A Lonesome Town was released by Mercury in ’63, which majored in country music at the time, but it didn’t trouble the scorers. Each of its 10 tracks features a spoken introduction from Hazlewood, in which, with typically mordant wit, he lays out a background narrative about Trouble, a fictional sleepy railroad town in the old Wild West, and the cowboy characters who inhabit it — all by way of preparation for their exploits in the songs that follow.

“The people that live in Trouble do lots of remembering — I guess that’s because they ain’t got much to look forward to,” he quips at the beginning, before an acoustic guitar strums, his rumbling singing voice takes over, and we’re off into Hazlewood’s macabre and somewhat bleak world. Along the way, we meet Sleepy the undertaker, who only smiles “when he sees one of the old folks looking pale” (“We All Make The Flowers Grow”), and the town’s glamour puss, Anna Mae Stilwell, whose husband woefully informs some jealous menfolk that “she can’t cook, she can’t love, she ain’t worth a dime” (“Look At That Woman”).

Trouble was certainly conceived in pre-PC days. Its format was hardly groundbreaking — Hazlewood, then a wily 34-year-old, borrowed it from Johnny Cash’s 1960 travelogue, Ride This Train — yet his style of campfire storytelling is uniquely his. Even on a cold winter’s night in Blighty, it can transport you to the dusty canyons of Nevada. Though, as with much country, it’s not for those prone to depression, it’s a record which provides a rare sense of one-on-one company.

The idiosyncrasy of Hazlewood’s vision is underlined across this superlative re-release’s 15 bonus tracks, most of which haven’t been heard in 40 years — if at all. Some were released under the prosaic, short-lived pseudonym, Mark Robinson, while two others were cut with Duane Eddy & His Orchestra.

On “It’s An Actuality,” an unreleased demo from as early as 1955-56, Hazlewood served up the couplet, “Normal people love perfection/ They read Playboy’s middle section.” He would rattle many a feminist’s cage right up to his death in ’07, but, just like esteemed men of letters like Norman Mailer and Henry Miller, he was a true American classic.

It has been five years since Nick Cave last corralled his ever-changing Bad Seeds line-up — which, by the by, is now approaching its 30th anniversary. In the interim, Cave has been far from idle: There has been a rip-roaring, blues-mangling second Grinderman album, a couple of movie soundtracks and even another novel, all not only proving his unflagging creative vigor, but also bolstering his standing as perhaps alt-rock’s ultimate icon.

So, the arrival of Push The Sky Away, the 15th Bad Seeds album, is a real event: Where next for this fearsomely stagnation-resistant musical auteur? The answer, in short, is deeper into the psycho-sexual imagination of 2008′s Dig Lazarus, Dig!!!, where an unforeseen, if ever volcanically smouldering calm now reigns. As with 1997′s The Boatman’s Call, it strips away the usual electrifying clamor which surrounds Cave’s baritone croon, leaving the listener to plunge deep into his lyrics of violence, sexual tension, redemption and songwriting itself.

Cave has jokingly noted that if this album is “the ghost-baby in the incubator, then Warren Ellis’s loops are its tiny, trembling heartbeat.” Ellis, who joined the band in ’95 as a violinist, has risen through the ranks to become Cave’s right-hand man, this time laying the sonic foundation-stone for many of the tracks with the bizarre self-concocted loops that click, crack and rattle away beneath the conventional instrumentation.

Talking to eMusic’s Andrew Perry about this dazzling new opus, Cave and Ellis reveal that its loose, spontaneous sound was the culmination of a long and arduous creative process. Yet, unlike so many ‘mature’ rockers, they ultimately let their instincts — however much honed by years of experience — run riot…

As ever, your songs on Push The Sky Away have a rollicking narrative dynamic to them. How do they start off down that road?

Nick Cave: The way I take in the world is by seeing it; that is very much evident in the songs that I write. I’m unable to really write the kind of song that doesn’t have a visual element, which most songs don’t. There’s that kind of song, “Whoah baby, I love you,” which doesn’t have a visual element, but a very strong emotional element, and these are the great songs to me — those ones that you put them on and they just make you feel great, or whatever.

One of my regrets, if I have any, is that I’ve never been able to write those sorts of songs. I have to be able to see the thing that’s going on that I’m writing about, or else it just doesn’t make any sense to me. So, unfortunately, I personally don’t like other people doing those kinds of songs. I don’t like those songs where you have to listen to a story to get into them. I don’t want to have to pay attention to music in that way, I just want it to hit me in the heart and do what music’s supposed to do.

So I’ve had to try and find a way over the years of writing narratively that doesn’t really require you to sit down and work out what the story’s about. You’re brought into a sort of sequence of images that have that emotional resonance, but it’s kind of irrelevant what the actual story is. It’s taken me maybe 13 albums or something to work that out.

Was there any apprehension about making the first Bad Seeds album in five years?

Warren Ellis: Not so much apprehension, but there was a certain excitement, because things have been in a state of flux, with Grinderman and various projects going on. And remarkably it has been five years since the last album, which I didn’t realize. And obviously with [long-serving Bad Seeds band leader] Mick Harvey leaving, there were a lot of different things going on.

But you don’t go into war thinking you’re going to get killed in the first hour. You have to kind of go in, chin up, back straight. You can’t go into it thinking it’s not gonna work. There’s always that sneaking suspicion that you don’t know if it will work or not, but you have to go in with a certain amount of blind confidence and uncertainty. It’s always that mix.

Primarily, obviously, the Bad Seeds exist to accompany Nick’s songs. How did you start it off this time, Nick?

Cave: The way I go about writing records is that I make a calendar date to start the new record, so I have nothing. I don’t have a bunch of notes that I bring into the office, I start with nothing at all. And I actually had a notebook that was made for me by a girl from Sydney: she’d made this kind of boutique notebook for me, because she’d heard me complaining about the fact that notebooks don’t open flat — I write in them, then try and play the lyrics on the piano, but they [claps his hands shut]. So she made, designed, a notebook that would open flat so that I could play the piano and sing from the notebook.

So that was this empty notebook that I took into the studio on that particular day and started writing the record. And as it turned out that notebook became kind of essential in the process of making the record and ended up documenting the writing of these songs in a very minute way.

I’ve always done a lot of research and stuff around the songs that I write so there are pages and pages of writing and you can kind of see these songs emerging. And when they got to a place that where I thought they were ready, I would type them out on my typewriter on the back sheets of old books — I tore out the back sheets — type them and then glue it into the book. So you had these kind of anatomies of songs in this book.

Two of the preceding three non-soundtrack records you’d made were Grinderman albums. Did you have to put your Bad Seeds head back on? Is that how it works?

Cave: Anything that I’m doing I’m writing specifically for a particular project. So I’m sitting down in the office and writing songs for the next Bad Seeds record. I’m not going “Oh, that’s a Grinderman one” and putting that aside for when we do Grinderman, I just don’t work in that way. I wasn’t trying to write anything remotely like Grinderman anyway, so if I started writing something that felt like a Grinderman song, I would dismiss it immediately.

Once the songs were written, the band withdrew to La Fabrique, a 19th-century mansion in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in France, to record them. Why?

Ellis: We wanted to look elsewhere for the formation of the middle ground of the music, to look for another sound. We wanted to record it in a different way, and go and live in this studio for a couple of weeks, and see how that impacted on the recording process, and the evolution of the material. That was something we’d never done before, certainly not in my time in the band. To be in one place for that whole period of time — just ensconce ourselves somewhere, and eat, drink, and think the album. It had a real significant effect on the album, I think.

How did you get that one past your wives? Was it like going off to a holiday camp?

Ellis: No, man, it was boot camp! In the South of France, with lots of cigars. Obviously, the things you’ve done before inform where you don’t wanna go. As much as there had been this sudden urge for wanting to make albums like Grinderman, after a couple of years of that…[we wanted a change]. Also, there have been a couple of soundtracks that Nick and I have done in the meantime, which have been very different, and also impact on the way things go, or where you see you can take the musical journey.

The reduction in the quantity of sound you generated — you saw that coming?

Ellis: Well, yeah, things have been very full for a while. There was a real desire to pull it all back, and let the songs speak in a different way. It’s why you hopefully don’t make the same record twice. This record sounds like the Bad Seeds to me, but different again — almost a marriage between the atmospherics of Your Funeral…My Trial, but with the sparseness of The Boatman’s Call, but nothing like either of those, in terms of the content or emotional impact.

So you turn up at La Fabrique, Nick’s got his batch of songs, you set all the gear up — what happens next?

Cave: Some of these songs, people hadn’t even played them through when we recorded them. Like “Higgs Boson Blues,” I’d never sung the whole song through, right, because especially with something like “Higgs Boson Blues” — it’s a journey, that particular song. Lyrically it’s a journey, and musically it’s a journey as well, a slow-building thing. And that sense of not knowing where the song’s going makes it really interesting to listen to — and we would’ve lost that if we’d tried it two or three times once we’d worked it all out.

So The Bad Seeds are just following the singing, and I don’t even know what the singing is supposed to be doing anyway, I’ve just got a bunch of lyrics which I’m actually editing as I’m singing. So the whole thing is…there’s a sense of newness and adventure and spontaneity to the recordings.

Warren, you’re as close to Nick as anybody: do you ask him what his lyrics are about, so you can get the right mood?

Ellis: Not really, no. The occasional question might get asked, but it’s generally not really the time. You’re not in there to do an interview with the guy. Nick continues to be a writer who very much is concerned with what’s going on with him now. He’s not trying to write a song like he’s 20 anymore — never has, in fact. He’s always been writing about that particular point in time, and it’s a continued journey for him. The narrative is evolving, how he wants it to.

For a single, “We No Who U R” is very brooding and unsettling. What is it about?

Cave: I don’t really want to pin down what was going on when I wrote that song, but I knew what the little birds were, and I knew who the trees were and all the rest of it. But once the music got put to it, it opened up a lot and it became about a much wider, more interesting, ambiguous sort of thing. I know I’m not really telling you anything about it, but it’s not just, “Hey we know who you are and we’re going to come and get you.”

The editing of a song is largely what makes the song for me and I think that actually if I had started going like ‘I want you to burn’ [as he had in a discarded lyric] it would have pinned that song down to a particular thing and made that song a smaller idea than what it is. By leaving that off it’s much more open, broader.

Certain songs seem to be partly about the songwriting process itself. A couple of tracks after “Jubilee Street,” you get “Finishing Jubilee Street,” where “you” — the songwriter — finish that song, as per song title, then go to your bedroom for a lie down, and have a dream about your imaginary child bride. Did you relish the idea of messing with convention, taking the listener out of usual framework of “first this song, next another song”?

Cave: A lot of them were very much connected to being in my office in Brighton and writing. And for some of them, it was the summer so I was outside in my basement patio which is mentioned on occasions, writing the stuff out there as well. So ultimately the record is about a time and place but it’s also about the nature of songwriting as well, on some level. The songs are very often about the process of writing the song I’m singing, if you know what I mean.

There is a real Jubilee Street in Brighton. Was it the inspiration, or maybe the backdrop, for what unfolds in either song?

Cave: To be honest, I thought Jubilee Street was a different street! [laughs] I got it wrong. And then I found out that Jubilee Street was the street with Carluccio’s and the library, and it didn’t really match the street that I was trying to conjure up. So it’s a Jubilee Street of the imagination, shall we say, and obviously the street that this guy’s walking up, with this sorry whatever-she-is, working girl…All I can say is, don’t go down to that Jubilee Street to find any action like that, [laughs] you’re going to be very disappointed!

With that overlapping of songs, it really feels like there’s a narrative flow to the whole album, like everything is inter-connected. Was that the idea?

Cave: The sequencing came about a lot easier than on some of the other records. It had its natural flow that we sort of discovered when we were actually recording stuff, but the songs for sure do have a vague kind of abstracted narrative within the sequencing. So they’re kind of joining hands, and characters flip from one to the other.

Mostly because of the atmospheric consistency of the sound, it ended up very much like a record that you put on, and you enter, and you go through a sequence of songs and you go into a new world, a different world, and the final song kind of releases you from that world. It’s an old school record, in the sense that the songs bolster each other up and refer to each other, and on some level need to be listened to as a bunch of songs.

Ellis: Yeah, it’s like you’re on a journey with the writer. It feels quite surreal, at times. It’s sort of hovering around somewhere. I like that, that it’s open-ended and not very clear-cut, because it keeps you guessing. Hopefully it feels like you’re in the moment with the song, because the songs are real snapshots of that particular moment, when we’re making it. I think the sound of it has that, too. Nick Launay [producer] did a really mighty job with the sound of it, it’s very ‘present’. You feel like you’re sitting on the stool with Nick singing.

On the title track at the end, there’s the lyric, “Some people say it’s just rock ‘n’ roll but it gets you right down to your soul.” Did you intend that line to sum up the whole record?

Cave: There’s something really reductive about that line after this kind of — like, “Higgs Boson Blues,” and all of this journeying through time and place. It kind of telescopes down into something fundamental, and I was very, very pleased with that as a line, to be released from the record, even though it’s kind of throwaway, and not the sort of line I write, and not a visual line.

So, while picking up on some of the threads on Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, your style of writing is still on the move — continuity within change?

Ellis: All creative people are like that, there are always themes that run through, like that’s your signpost that it’s them. That’s always the challenge — you want it to be different, but you don’t want it to be willfully different, so that it doesn’t feel sincere. You’re always looking for that feeling where you still feel like it’s being true to your voice, but it’s gone somewhere else.

Wonderful as Status Quo are, that’s the example of getting stuck in a rut — although they were quite exciting in their early days. But you wouldn’t want them to do a rap record — for a start, they wouldn’t be able to play the next Jubilee party for the Queen, would they?

Rekinding his punk roots and evoking the sleazy rock of his pre-fame era

A swashbuckling stalwart of the post-punk era, Adam Ant has suffered unimaginable trials in the 17 years since his last album, 1995′s Strip. Arrested and later sectioned after an altercation in North London, his life-long struggles with mental health have become agonizingly public — too much so, one imagined, for a viable comeback. But this ever-colorful and inventive artist was not to be so easily silenced.

Having spent the last three years reminding live audiences of his unrivalled onstage magnetism, Adam’s studio relaunch is every bit as epic as its pseudo-cinematic title. The loose concept behind Adam Ant Is… is to tell of the further adventures of his “Prince Charming” cavalryman character. This, for the most part, is a fiction which doesn’t intrude on the more serious matter of exorcising the many demons he’s acquired in real life.

Mostly recorded with Morrissey’s long-serving sidekick Boz Boorer, its 17 tracks largely spurn the tribal pummel of Adam’s early-’80s hits. Now, as then, this inveterate fan of David Bowie and Roxy Music loves a good makeover, and clearly relishes making his grand re-entrance with “Cool Zombie,” a swampy Tennessee blues which nobody might remotely have expected of him (it’s a throwback, apparently, to his times of marital retreat in the mountains near Nashville, in the mid 1990s).

Elsewhere, Adam rekindles the energy of his punk roots, venting his anger over his treatment by the medical profession on unreconstructed blasts like “Shrink,” while “Stay In The Game” evokes the sleazy post-punk rock of his pre-fame Dirk Wears White Sox era. In the (partial) title track, there’s even a strong whiff of electro — overall, it’s a fabulously varied bill of fare.

On “Vince Taylor,” our hero pays tribute to the wayward British ’50s rock ‘n’ roller responsible for “Brand New Cadillac” (as covered by The Clash), who died in obscurity amid psychiatric problems and drug abuse. When Adam archly croons, “I nearly done a Vince Taylor,” it’s only partly for laughs. Just imagine if he hadn’t made it through to serve up this hilarious, rollicking slice of Ant-ness in 2013. That, really and truly, would be our loss.

His 2012 album remixed with a galaxy of stellar collaborators

A true genius of the post-punk era, Mark Stewart first appeared in agit-combo the Pop Group, whose ground-breaking sound furthered the Clash’s political punky-reggae by adding an ass-quakin’ dose of James Brown-style funk. Then with his own Maffia band, comprised of the Sugar Hill Gang rhythm section that played on countless proto-hip-hop, he continued to spew forth his apocalyptic screed, with a forward-looking tilt towards the emerging sound of electro.

Since the mid ’80s, Stewart has dispatched occasional mind-blowing postcards from the edge, a man out of time, screaming out his visions of global corruption like a Cassandra to whom only the dedicated and deranged listen. This year’s The Politics Of Envy album tipped the balance back in Stewart’s favor, thanks in part to its galaxy of stellar collaborators, including Primal Scream, Lee “Scratch” Perry, and even the legendary satanic art-movie director, Kenneth Anger.

It’s a terrific, if oddly conventional, idea to keep up that momentum with a remix album. With thrilling perversity, however, this one has been conducted, not by another A-list cast of DJ’s and mixers, but by the singer himself. Where, overall, Politics played up his pop-disco side, Exorcism is way more experimental, touching on his gnarly late-’80s industrialism in places, and throughout on his pedigree as an Adrian Sherwood-partnering scientist of dub.

The opening “Baby Cino” reimagines “Baby Bourgeois” with all manner of police sirens, echo and FX sailing in and out of the mix. Dub logic is applied to “Stereotype”‘s rave/nu-disco revelry (“Sexorcist”); to the slow-thumping, tekknoid “Method To The Madness” in its spaced-out-I-Threes “Twisted Logic Version”; and, most corrosively, to the lumbering, Lee Perry-featuring “Gang War” on “Mirror Wars,” which briefly (and bafflingly!) switches tempo midway through into a hectic rap from Bristol’s Xacute.

But Exorcism Of Envy is not about foregrounding any one musical genre. From the gleeful electro cut-up of “Want (Greedy Greedy Beat)” to the simmering Afro-bongo re-reading of “Apocalypse Hotel,” it’s all about different musics being forced to co-exist under the same roof for a few minutes. The fact is, they get along just fine.

As with all the best dub/remix records, the original tracks’ purpose comes through louder and clearer than ever, as fragments of Stewart’s withering, wailing messages about consumerism-gone-mad and corporate greed ricochet around your cranium. Thirty-plus years on from his inception, this wild-eyed post-punk prophet is soundtrack our desperate, post-millennial times as thrillingly and inventively as anyone else out there.

A quiet lament for the human imagination, all but snuffed out in a digitized world

After paving the way for Britpop in his influential combo the Auteurs, and then documenting the ensuing phenomenon in his scathing Britpop chronicle, Bad Vibes, Luke Haines has beaten an increasingly eccentric – and fascinating – path.

Home-recorded solo records like last year’s 9½ Psychedelic Meditations on British Wrestling of the 1970s and Early ’80s have showcased a uniquely imaginative vision, which has less to do with contemporary pop than the magic-realist satirical fiction of German post-war author Günter Grass – or, in spirit, if not in sound, the rock follies of mid-’70s prog/metal.

The North Sea Scrolls pursues another hare-brained concept beyond the bounds of rational explanation. A collaborative record, made alongside Cathal Coughlan (ex-Microndisney and Fatima Mansions, who penned and sang a handful of the songs) and rock journalist (and eMusic writer!) Andrew Mueller (who narrates), its deranged premise is that the three of them have taken possession of some documents – à la the Dead Sea Scrolls – which tell a weird alternative history of Britain.

One of the key changes to accepted reality is that Oswald Mosley, the British fascist leader who courted Hitler in the 1930s, actually got to form two governments. His ministers include Enoch Powell, the notorious racist politician who by some strange chicanery ends up joining the prog-rock band, Gong, and Tim Hardin, the heroin-addicted late-’60s singer-songwriter, who becomes Mosley’s Culture Secretary.

In isolation, the songs about these implausible developments – the wry chucklemaster Haines on Powell; the pithier Coughlan on Hardin – are baffling, and leave you hanging on for every line in disbelief. Elsewhere, Haines has Ian Ball, the man who attempted to kidnap Princess Anne in 1974, sitting in Broadmoor psychiatric prison, mistakenly believing himself to be the same Ian Ball who sang in the Mercury Prize-winning alt-blues combo, Gomez.

Mueller’s spoken-word “Scroll (Number)” tracks help ease the listener into this absurd parallel universe, but initially it’s all too much to take in at once. With time, however, these become pop songs that you hum along to, just like any other pop song, skillfully crafted, subtly textured over acoustic guitars with moody synths and muted strings. Eventually, you find yourself getting into the swing of it, imitating Haines’s malevolent whine, as he intones, say, “I know where my heart lies/ It’s back on the Broadmoor blues delta.”

What it’s all about is not so easy to discern. In the case of the Ian Ball song, Haines clearly enjoys poking fun at Gomez, who were his label-mates in the late ’90s, and who were prioritized over him in the wake of their award success.

With equal relish, Haines has pointed out that The North Sea Scrolls is “Google-proof,” by which he means that the answers to the riddles it contains are not to be found, unlike all others these days, on the internet. As such, if there is any rhyme or reason to it, we should understand it as a quiet lament for the human imagination, all but snuffed out in a digitized world – but one which gains in power and purpose with every listen.

An intriguing collision of country music and Tim Burgess's more esoteric interests

Madchester contender, Britpop pin-up, reformed coke addict, Transcendental Meditater, bestselling autobiographer – Tim Burgess has ticked many boxes on the rock superstar checklist in his two decades with The Charlatans. A solo career, initiated with 2003′s I Believe, however, seemed to have stalled right there, as his energies were consumed by the Charlies, who enjoyed an unforeseen purple patch through the Noughties.

After the break-up of the marriage that took him to California – he now lives back in North London – the chipmunk-chirpy singer obviously had a little more time on his hands, and resolved to record this second solo offering, parallel to writing his memoir. Recalling an encounter with Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner, where they’d vaguely agreed to write a song together, he duly made contact again and flew to Wagner’s hometown, Nashville. There, they entered into an unusual creative partnership, meeting for coffee every morning before going off to work on each other’s ideas separately until the next morning’s summit. The music was largely done by Tim, the words by Kurt, who sought, apparently, “to be Burgess’s mirror.”
Listening to Oh No I Love You, it certainly sounds as if Wagner accurately reflected the singer’s turbulent state. Lyrically, the opener “White (Heartbreak On Hold)” captures all the bruised optimism of finding new love after a painful romantic ending; its sound, meanwhile, is all jaunty acoustic guitars and warm saxophone – a throwback, perhaps, to Lambchop’s most upbeat and beloved record, 1999′s Nixon.

Elsewhere, as on “A Case For Vinyl” (Burgess is a notorious vinyl junkie), there’s more a vibe of Lambchop’s 2002 album Is A Woman – the music is sparse to the point of emptiness and heavy with piano-resonating sadness. It was Wagner who corralled the studio band from the ‘Chop’s ranks and from Nashville session royalty: It features Chris Scruggs, the grandson of legendary bluegrass banjo-picker, Earl Scruggs.

As a whole, though, Oh No I Love You is an intriguing collision of country music, and Burgess’s more esoteric, Charlatans-incompatible interests. “Tobacco Fields” floats off on a note of funereal, ivory-chord melancholy, initially very Bill Callahan, but gradually elevates to a near-ecstatic mood vaguely reminiscent of David Bowie’s “Heroes,” complete with Eno- resembling synth melodrama.

This is an album where, very understatedly, miracles happen. Among the occasionally orchestrated Nashville grandeur, there are echoes, too, of post-punk trailblazing, with strange drum-machine programming from Factory Floor’s Gabe Gurnsey and Nik Colk Void (she is the relevant new flame in “White…”). Then, at the last, “A Gain” presents an unexpected new development – a choir! – whose refrain, “I’ll not brave the depth’s floor for you (again)”, signals Burgess’s ultimate extrication, and self-reassertion.

Roaring forth with all the heedless carnal immediacy of their prime

“Aaaaaw, you gotta try a little bit harder, yeah, to get the beef on it,” hollers Jon Spencer on “Bag Of Bones,” a rollicking cut from his first Blues Explosion record in eight years, “You gotta git yo’ head outta the past!” Lest we confuse the supercharged NYC trio’s return with some retroactive heritage-rock lamefest, Meat + Bone roars forth with all the heedless carnal immediacy of primetime JSBX. In a nutshell: yowza!

To recap: Spencer, fellow guitarist Judah Bauer and sticksman Russell Simins emerged circa 1990 with a scuzzy, punk-hotwired take on Delta/early rock ‘n’ roll stylings, in a vacuum era for such pleasures. “Do you remember the 1990s? 1980s? 1970s?” quizzes Spencer elsewhere on “Bag Of Bones,” remembering the decades which slowly eradicated rockin’ decency. “Too many squares! Too much mediocrity!”

Across chaotic, basement classics like Extra Width (1993), Orange (1994) and the deep-funk-infused Acme (1998), the band carried the torch for rock ‘n’ roll pretty much solo, until The White Stripes landed in 2001. At that point, they’d been touring for 12 years solid, and on record had lost their way, perhaps honorably aiming to disentangle their sprawling thang into digestible chunks, but ultimately mislaying their mojo. There were no hits. Reunion gigs in 2011 were an exercise in reacquiring/unleashing it again. Meat + Bone duly, gleefully pitches headfirst into the mind-altering primordial soup, whence all those ’90s albums came.

“Black Mold” opens at warp intensity, listing some characteristically outré heroes including Art Blakey, Graham Greene and, most foreseeably, “the explosive Little Richard.” “Boot Cut,” fabulously for fans, tightens vintage anthem “Bellbottoms” to snapping point, while “Get Your Pants Off” and “Zimgar” revisit Acme‘s scratchy, proto-hip hop, beats-’n'-pieces vibe. Most full-bloodedly, “Danger” marries pedal- to-the-metal DC hardcore to Jerry Lee Lewis boogie-woogie. For 40 blistering minutes, the legendary JSBX energy rush never lets up.

The dream scenario, when a band reappears after a lay-off, is that they zero in on what made them ace back when, and that they then smash people with it afresh. Meat + Bone, unequivocally, does exactly that.

A full-tilt lysergic trip

When Toy were first scoped by the wider public as handpicked tour support to The Horrors in October 2011, they seemed almost too good to be true. Sallow of complexion and extravagantly hirsute, they resembled five psychedelic love-children spawned from Mick Jagger’s pervy basement in Performance.

They sounded even better: twin feedback guitars with droning echoes of My Bloody Valentine; horizon-fixed motorik beats à la Krautrockers Neu!; a variety of sounds (elegant strings, lunar bloops, etc) from a vintage Korg Delta synth; all topped off with intriguingly downbeat musings from frontman Tom Dougall on romance mislaid, getting wasted and other delights. Less than 12 months later, the four-boy-one-girl quintet from Brighton, now relocated to East London, have accrued enviable media hype, but they fully deliver, with a 58-minute debut bursting with memorable tunes, FX and ideas.

“Colours Running Out” introduces a sound-palette of heavily-treated shoegaze-y guitars, rooted by quietly metronomic drumming and an irresistibly acidic vocal melody. Through the ensuing tracks, the listener is tossed between poppy bliss and trancey disorientation. “Lose My Way” and “My Heart Skips A Beat” verge on a New Order-esque stateliness, bittersweet reflections on love gone wrong couched in beautiful, ineffably catchy music. The eight-minute “Dead & Gone,” by contrast, initially cracks along at a euphoric motorik clip, but soon drifts into vague uncertainty, only to kick back in with redoubled, amps-at-11 glee. “Kopter,” similarly, closes out on a lengthily plotted, but ultimately sky-scraping high.

Though it’s centred around those seemingly opposing poles, Toy somehow adds up to an integrated whole – and an unremittingly thrilling one. It’s a full-tilt lysergic trip whose repercussions remain with you long after its last deafening chords have died out. In a word: invest!

Now in his early 50s, Sherwood maintains an exhausting work ethic. When eMusic tracked him down in his recently deployed hometown of Ramsgate, on the North Kent coast, he was on the hoof between sessions, one of which is for a debut album by his daughter, Denise. “She sang on a Gary Clail album when she was five years of age,” he notes, “she’s got a wicked voice.”

As per the title of his latest solo album, Survival & Resistance, Sherwood has upheld a spirit of defiant musical independence. He proudly recalls how he has kept his On-U ship afloat, against the tide of such adverse musical epochs as the MTV-crazed mid ’80s, and the Britpop-addled mid ’90s. In between those lean years, he has been hailed as a seminal influence, the implications of his pioneering exploration of electronic frequencies felt everywhere from The Orb to contemporary dubstep. His vast catalogue is riper than ever for discovery…

After three undefeated decades of On-U Sound, how come you’re releasing your latest solo record through Warp?

I’ve known the Warp boys for years. As far as I’m concerned, they’re probably the best independent label around, so it’s the perfect match for me. Ray, my manager, said, “Look, this is what you should do now.” Fingers crossed we can keep working with them, because it’s perfect runnings.

If a man of your experience in the independent sector says Warp are bossing it, they must be doing something right…

Yeah, I’ve been running a cottage industry all my life. I kept thinking On-U would become 10 times bigger than it ever did. I kept doing jobs and ploughing money into the label, because I believed that instead of selling 20-odd, I’d sell 200, and all that. But I never really did the right moves, like making videos or promoting properly. I’m not, to be honest, the best businessman on earth, but I was determined to stay running a label, because at least I can go “Bollocks!” to anybody, and do whatever I want.

The title of the album is Survival & Resistance – has that been the name of the game for On-U?

Yeah, it’s been my lot in life. A lot of people did sell out their labels, and their dreams. I’m pretty pleased that I stuck to my guns as much as possible. A lot of good things have sprung out of On-U, and the people who work there. I’m proud of that legacy. It’s not some corny speech – I really am. I certainly know how not to run a label.

Your first years in the game, from 1978-82 – the post-punk years – are now looked back upon as an incredibly fertile and frenetic time for British music. Is that how you remember it?

In 1978 I started a distribution company, and used to drive round to a network of shops, selling my imports myself, because no-one would touch you with a bargepole, selling reggae. Then I got involved with Rough Trade. You’d go in there, and it would be like, OK, if people want to buy tunes, they’ve got to phone us up to buy them. Like, we’re the vendors of good taste! But that period, it wasn’t easy putting tunes out, because there were lots of people doing it, and the big companies just weren’t interested in the underbelly. If you couldn’t sell 300,000, they weren’t interested.

But musically, that made for a wonderful diversity. Everything had been blown wide open by punk…

It was uncharted. There was an innocence that’s gone. People thought they could change the world with a record in those days.

You were a key figure in the merging of styles that we now refer to as “post-punk.” At that time, you were exploring the boundaries of dub and roots reggae, but soon touched on other ethnic music…

You’d had the North American soul and R&B stuff coming in [to Britain] all throughout the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, but suddenly you had stuff coming in from Jamaica, and from other parts of the former British Empire, like India and Africa. Then people started getting into bass, then after a while, along came acid house, which kind of took people away from the football violence and stuff. They started taking E and psychedelics and getting into dancing. That was great!

How did you get involved with Jamaican musicians in the late ’70s?

I was just a fan who’d got his hands on the mixing desk, as one journalist once described me. I took that as a compliment! I was living in High Wycombe, and Prince Far-I, Bim Sherman and everybody used to stay at my Mum’s house when they came over. She was a very open-minded lady, my mother. Far-I used to call her Mummy.

One time, I turned up with him to a gig and stood next to this fat white sound man, who obviously wasn’t used to reggae, and I was like, “Turn the hi-hat up, turn the rimshot up – more bass!” until eventually he goes, “OK, you do it.” So I got thrown in the deep end. From there, I started running studio sessions. I wasn’t a musician, so I’d just hum the bassline to get what I wanted.

You never went for a purist sound. Did you set out to use reggae as a launchpad to do your own thing?

I wasn’t trying to emulate Jamaican music. You’ve got to walk an original path, if you can. Because if you get stuck copying everyone else, your time’s gonna be limited, because someone’ll supercede you.

I learned that really early on from the reggae producers. They all prided themselves on having an identifiable sound. That’s still something you should aspire to. You hear the good producers now – someone like Burial – he’s got a sonic, that fella. You listen to Digital Mystikz, or Pinch, you can hear something that identifies them from the bunch. It means you have a longer shelf-life.

In the mid ’80s, you seemed to turn your back on reggae, and get into a much heavier, proto-industrial groove. Why was that?

I’d got my credibility from working with Far-I, and he was murdered in Jamaica, so I got pissed off and disillusioned with all the violence over there. That coincided with me working with Mark Stewart, and then meeting the Tackhead lads the year after. So between ’84 and ’90 I didn’t do that many reggae records. I bounced into funk and industrial, and did loads of remixes. I was really doing all that to prop up the label. That was the plan.

Some of those Tackhead records were brutal!

I just wanted that stuff to leap out of the speakers. We weren’t into making pretty-pretty stuff, it was basically full-on, in-your-face. With Mark Stewart, I was experimenting with distortion overloading, and really vicious EQs, and I just applied that to a lot of my productions, because I was really into it. Even the reggae and dub stuff I did around then was much darker in flavor.

Among your occasional reggae stuff, you cut Time Boom De Devil Dead with Lee “Scratch” Perry’ in ’87, which many people regard as his best album after he left Jamaica. What’s he like?

He’s a great person to work with. He has a really naughty sense of humor. He’s also got really maverick ideas, always. I’ve worked with him now for over 25 years, and I think I’ve got his trust. He knows I’ll keep pushing with whatever little bit of money we’ve got to make it good. Also we’ve done good shows together, and I’ve put out some good compilations via the Pressure Sounds label – all really healthy activities. I learnt so much from him, like try and make everyone in the studio believe you’re doing something magic.

After house music hit in ’88, you were taken to the bosom of the emerging electronic scene, and had unlikely hit records with Tackhead’s MC, Gary Clail. After that, what went wrong?

Well, Tackhead imploded. We made a horrible, cocaine-induced, shit album, I’m ashamed to say. We lost the plot. It’s a horrible thing to admit, but it’s the truth. Also, my marriage ended, and after that, you had to regroup and get on with your life, so I did the first Little Axe album, and Bim Sherman’s Miracle, and a few other good albums, but ended up having to give them to other labels because of the economics.

How did you build up On-U again?

Sheer determination. [long silence] And the movement going on around me [dubstep] kind of suits me at the moment. It’s very bass-heavy, bass-friendly. With that lot, we put out the Nu Sound & Version album of Lee Perry tracks. It was a bit more than a remix album, because I oversaw it. I was trying to get Lee in with a more contemporary crowd. I think the people we got on board were really good: Moody Boyz, Kode 9. I’m doing a proper collaborative album with Pinch – I’m really pleased with how that’s going.

With a title like Survival & Resistance, your own solo record sounds like it could be a crazy, noisy, militant affair. It’s actually very classy!

Yeah, [laughs] it’s quite musical. The record will stand the test of time, I think. Me and my engineer Matt Smyth were experimenting drastically with tuning. All the things on there that sound like synthesizers are made out of massively down-tuned, twisted and edited bits of Turkish and Brazilian rapid percussion, and then were fine-tuned to sound like b-lines and pianos and stuff. Musicians won’t be able to figure out what on earth any of the sounds come from, because they’re not from any known synthesized source.

Having said that, there’s synth on a couple of tracks with Adamski, who’s my mate, who’s done a couple of cool old-school things on there. I see it as a modern dub record, but it’s not copping anything off a new producer or anything. What I had in my head to start with was to make a record you get zonked out and meditate to, late at night.

Do you always think about how your music will be utilized by the listener?

You’ve got to. All the dub albums are very easy – you get stoned and listen to them. Or, get stoned and dance to them. Or, don’t get stoned, but imagine you are. That was the thing with those Dub Syndicate and African Headcharge albums. I could imagine the people who would buy them and how they’d be listening to them, because it was probably how I’d be listening to them. Not that I’m a big stoner. You almost feel high listening to the moving sonic.

But then, the first solo record I made for RealWorld [2003's Never Trust A Hippy], I made that like a sound system album, so I could play it out. This one – “chill-out” is the wrong word, but it’s more meditative, intense dub.

You mentioned earlier that you wanted to establish your own sound, but you’ve made records all over the map – reggae, industrial, African, jazz, folk, blues, funk. Aren’t you actually one of modern production’s great unsung polymaths?

But I apply the same technique to everything I do. I like uncluttered productions. I’ve got to hear the space and movement in sound. What I took from Jamaican music was space – that tonality, particularly when they started shaping the sound with reverbs, delays and everything else.

You learn to apply that to your own production. It might all be very wet with fazers one minute, then suddenly you make it completely dry and empty, and bang into a reverb. I love that, creating a healthy tension. [Pause] I sound like a complete wanker talking about this. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?

Hoop comes well recommended, too. After escaping from her Mormon parents in her early teens, she fled to the countryside, where she eventually wound up working as a nanny to Tom Waits’s three children. After guiding her creatively and career-wise, he rubber-stamped her songcraft as “like a four-sided coin…like going swimming in a lake at night.”

Her first record, Kismet, soon found its way to Elbow’s Guy Garvey, who invited her out on tour. She duly fell in love with Elbow’s manager, moved toManchester to be with him, and now finds herself touted as the new Kate Bush, a songstress of unfathomable wonder…

“Powder horn pepperbox boom,” you sing on “Peacemaker.” Your music’s still in pursuit of the inexplicable, then!

I’ve been calling it avant-pop lately. It’s strange pop music, but no more strange than — and I’m not comparing myself with him, but! — the likes of David Bowie, who used to make just strange pop music. It’s just that pop has gone in a direction where it’s more like easy listening, so I’m relatively strange for this day and age. But humans are strange. Humans are innately very weird creatures.

That whole idea in “Hospital (Win Your Love),” that a person might injure themselves in order to woo their object of desire, suggests that people can be pretty crackers…

Yeah, whether you go that far or not, I think there are elements within human nature that either thrive on drama, or feed off of pain or seek attention through affliction. I always knew I wanted to write a song about this. I was reaching the end of my writing cycle, and then I was reminded by one of my younger friends, who’s 12 years old and came home with a big gash on his knee. Of course, he was uncomfortable to some degree, but he was also relishing the rewards of being injured, so I was like, “Ding! Go write your song!”

There are also some more stripped-down and harrowing songs, like the title track and “DNR,” which are about your difficult relationship with your father, and your conflicted emotions when he passed away. Were they different and difficult to write?

You’ve gotta write from what you know and have. I found that when I was writing songs for my father, I was oddly enough sort of writing in the alt-country or folk vein, in terms of them just being simple plain stories sung over a guitar. My dad loved country music, folk music. My dad’s very last words to me were, “Remember Bonnie Raitt!” He listened to a lot of Bonnie Raitt when we were growing up, and wanted to encourage me, because she wasn’t getting her breaks until she was in her 30s, so it was a way of him telling me to be patient.

Still, “DNR” isn’t the usual navel-contemplating, woe-is-me type affair one normally expects from a singer-songwriter…

It’s not a confessional; it’s not like a diary. It does draw from experience, but there’s nothing to confess. It is a very clear communication, about what life can be like, and what life was like for me. In a couple of the stories, it’s just telling it how it was, in a very plain or explicit fashion. But it isn’t like Hoop tells all. It’s more like, “This is an account of something that happened, and I feel personally inclined to be honest and open about things.” We need spokesmen, I think.

We like to hear songwriters telling us stories about their lives, or others’ lives…

Yeah, we wanna know what’s going on on Planet Earth, and that’s really all that it is — life as it is lived by so many, me included.

Your life has been pretty remarkable. You were brought up in the Mormon faith, and you and younger siblings quit the faith.

Yeah, I broke the Mormon chain, and my younger sister and brother followed.

Did you reach your early teens, and suddenly find it repressive?

Yeah, it’s under Christ, which would suggest that it is. It’s also a patriarchal religion. They are all, to some degree. My elder brothers and sisters seem to do okay, and I wouldn’t try to talk them out of living the way they’re living. I just don’t care to join that club. I don’t need a club…not like that one, anyway.

Was it difficult to disentangle yourself?

Yeah. It took a good while to feel secure enough in my own life choices that I wouldn’t return to it, that I wouldn’t do what they said, which was to go down a spiraling road to eternal damnation. [Laughing] Which I could very well be on, I don’t know.

From there, you went to enjoy your freedom in rural Northern California, doing odd jobs in the great outdoors. Was it a matter of letting the light into a dark, dusty room?

I tried my hand at a lot of different things — building, farming, all sorts. Any way I could make a little bit of cash, but then also just anything that could increase my level of independent stability, as a young woman in the world. I tried all sorts of earthen skills.

It’s said that you lived under a tree for several years. Would you recommend alfresco living?

Yeah! It was a very free period of time. I wasn’t career-driven; I was focused on sustainable living — you live on a plot of land, and work toward owning it. Very, very simple. All that matters is you have a small plot of land that you can grow food on, and you have a community through which you can work and live and thrive, and that was as basic as I needed life, for a good 10 years after I left.

But at a certain point, at about 24, I made the shift of deciding that I was going to approach music for a living, which is a more complicated life, in a real lighthearted way at first, but it’s been a serious level of work for a good decade now.

How did you end up working for Tom Waits? Through a “nanny wanted” ad?

The only thing I can say about that is, the process of sharing my music with Tom, over a course of time, was incredibly valuable to me, and to be given a quote to help turn people onto my music was incredibly valuable. The feedback on my music was incredibly useful.

Tom Waits famously called your music a “four-sided coin.” How can music be like a four-sided coin?

I don’t know! I think his music is like a four-sided coin.

So you think it’s a compliment!

It is! The way I take it, it’s like you can see it in many different ways. You can turn it on its head, or on its tail, or on its side, and look at it in many different ways.

Then, in another felicitous break, Guy Garvey heard your first CD, and you ended up living in a bohemian suburb of Manchester. Was it a massive culture shock moving here?

Certainly, yes, but really it was just wanting to live a more broad existence, and try something totally different.

How much stuff had you released before you came here?

I’d made my first full-length, Kismet, and the Kismet Acoustic EP. I was touring with Elbow with that little EP, but when I actually moved here, I came with Hunting My Dress ready, which was my second record — I decided that I was gonna have to come with a finished record, so I made it in three months, and just finished it the night before I got on the plane.

So this new one is your first foray into Great British Music!

Yeah, ha! It was written here, but I actually recorded it inLos Angeles.

Do you notice a difference from your previous stuff? Does environment change things?

It’s really hard to weigh what exactly is affecting my writing. It’s like when you’re taking all sorts of vitamins, you can’t tell what’s working on what. I know that environment plays a part, and overall health and wellbeing, and the conversations you’ve been having, and the daily experiences you’re going through.

“Ode To Banksy” suggests that British art’s rubbed off on you…

I’ve been digging Banksy from 10 or 12 years. He’s international, with graffiti lovers, and in the hip-hop world, that’s how I came to know him, through friends in Northern California. I pulled a couple of lines from one of his books. He said this thing, “Suicide bombers just need a hug,” which I think is witty and cute — and true! But the song’s about how I never want to see his face. I want him to remain a delightful mystery. I don’t care to reveal him, I love his whole gig.

Earlier this year, you stood in for Guy on his BBC radio show. Did what you played illuminate in any way what you try and do with your own music?

It maybe gave a sense of the standards that I’m after. And that I don’t listen to many female singer-songwriters. And that most of what I own is quite old, and there’s not much new in there, but there’s a really broad range of stuff — humor, irreverence, provocative music, beautiful stuff. There was Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, this Bulgarian women’s choir — I do draw some influence from their style of singing, although really I just dabble. There was the song “The Seed” by The Roots — funky and cool. I got to play some Elbow on there because Guy has chosen not to treat his listeners to his music [on his show]. I played Ennio Morricone’s The Good The Bad & The Ugly, and Sergio Mendez, some more hip-hop, and some straight-up rock — PJ Harvey, Peter Gabriel.

Any songs on your album you’d like to flag up?

“Deeper Devastation” is my personal favorite — a slower number, a deeper cut — and “When I’m Asleep.” Both have these vocal bursts which just take you over for a minute. And also the discovery process of those tunes was really enjoyable. With “Deeper Devastation,” the producer said, “Yell out these parts.” He tipped me into doing something quite tribal, which I’d never anticipated doing.

So anyone thinking of making some avant-pop should be prepared to be challenged, to depart from their musical comfort zone?

Yeah. For me personally, I want to be, like, jerked, by the song. I want it to take me by the jacket and shake me. I would say every tune has been like that. Some of them are really gentle, so they don’t all shake you, but they’ll, like, dig their way through you. Then, “DNR,” certainly, was like an ice pick in the chest. For every one of the songs, it was a very emotional experience. In the studio, it was kind of solemn at times. I call it a sacred space.

There are few icons in rock history who’ve been as systematically misunderstood as John Lydon. Ever since his blood-curdling cry of “Des-trooooy!” at the climax of “Anarchy In The UK” by The Sex Pistols, he has been pigeonholed as the orange-haired lunatic who arrived to terminate rock ‘n’ roll, the man once known as Rotten whose musical energy is emphatically negative.

Really, not so. Few realize that he’s actually one of rock’s great enthusiasts, both a listener of staggeringly diverse knowledge and tastes, and a music-maker of fierce creativity and commitment. Indeed, after the Pistols’ first, explosive, game-changing tenure in 1976-78, Lydon reinvented himself in Public Image Ltd., which initially went to a different extreme, of macabre bass-booming improvisation, incorporating reggae, disco and Krautrock.

After 1979′s monolithic Metal Box album, PiL shifted through umpteen incarnations, each different in mood and influence from the last, reflecting not only Lydon’s restlessness as an artist, but also his love of a variety of genres and styles. Some were outraged when 1986′s Album offered up his own twist on FM-rock — was this befitting of punk’s prime mover? His answer, essentially, was: Yes, the whole point of punk was to make up your own rules, and anyway, who wants to make the same record twice?

Over the years, he would also forge one of electro’s formative classics alongside Afrika Bambaataa, and turn his hand to techno/house with Leftfield, but, after ending up in a legal stalemate with his U.K. and U.S. major labels, he drifted away from recording, in favor of step-parenting and a controversial TV career. He remained a peerlessly magnetic live performer, though, both with the Pistols and a new line-up of PiL, convened in 2009.

With the latter, he has finally concocted his first new album in 15 years. Called simply This Is PiL, it’s another departure, spurning the hi-tech sound of late-’80s PiL for a more organic, intuitive and, again, diverse sound. Already it’s being hailed as Lydon’s latest masterpiece. He’s in extra-positive (if ever potentially caustic) mood, as he gives the lowdown on post-millennial PiL, then hand-picks some of his favorite tunes from theeMusic catalog.

Is it good to be back?

Yeah! It’s been a few years there, and people have been assuming that my voice is this, that or the other, but I think I’m multi-textural, multi-purposeful, and I could shape-shift the vocal into anything I wanted to now, without much of an effort — and with no vocal training! Because I’m being really seriously truthful to myself, those are the tones and sounds and attitudes that lend exactly to the emotion I’m trying to express. There’s no pop-star in it. It’s something far better. But [sniggering] I’m still expecting young girls in the front row.

Explain your selection process for this incarnation of PiL…

I’d known Bruce [Smith, drums] from the Pop Group, and Lu [Edmonds, guitar] from the Damned, but that isn’t how we got together. We’ve sat down and tried to remember it all, but it’s impossible — there’s so many juxtapositions of events from back in those days (i.e. post-punk), that we almost accidentally fell into each other’s company. But I’m very loyal to them, and them to me. We’re proper with each other.

They’re two enormously diverse characters, and then you add Scotty [bassist Scott Firth] — he fit into this band from day one, right from his picture on the internet with a terrible hooligan skinhead haircut! Hahaha, it just made me laugh. His resumé was really extensive, and it showed a great sense of fun, that he could go from Stevie Winwood to the Spice Girls’ touring band in a heartbeat. That’s exactly the kind of open mind that we can work with. You’re not bringing judgmental musical snobbery to the table. Because a snob would have a hard time in PiL, they wouldn’t be understanding us at all.

So this is the happiest I’ve ever been, in the alleged career of music. I don’t want to stop this. It’s clearly set on a good foundation — a really honest one, and a very open one — very deep friendships. And it’s going really good places.”

This Is PiL is 64 minutes long, and has a real sense of journey about it, with lots of twists and turns and mood swings. How did you write it all?

PiL now seems to be a live-orientated band, and we all feel that that’s the best way. A lot of these songs were what you would call improvised, spontaneous. I mean, they’re thought about, but we never actually sat down with acoustic guitars and figured any of it out. Obviously, I’m loaded with thoughts running through my head, I never stop writing, but a load of stuff I’d had stockpiled for this got torched in a kitchen fire at my flat inLondon.

So, there we were in the middle of a tour, and we plonked ourselves straight into a barn in the Cotswolds [idyllic rural area in Southwest England] for recording, with nothing prepared — I mean, doomed to go wrong! And then we invited all manner of press down, not knowing if we were gonna get two bangs, a bash and a screech together. It’s kind of frightening to put yourself into that environment, but it just seemed to help, it became almost like a live gig. If any of this was easy, it wouldn’t be worth doing.

What did you end up writing about? There seem to be a lot of thoughts about Britain, which obviously isn’t your main home anymore [Ed. Note: John mostly lives in Los Angeles], but it is where you recorded…

They’ve always been in there. Home is where the heart is. Wherever I am geographically, this is always gonna be the way. But yes, it is aboutBritain, it’s about my life, my childhood here, it’s about our lives — a good look back to the past, to realize where we are at the present, and that will set us up nicely with the future.

I’m still standing up for this place. Maybe that’s what Britain needs to do about itself — do what I’ve done — just go away for a long holiday and come back and look at itself properly. And realize that the fine art of moaning without a constructive conclusion is a rather pointless exercise, as propagated by the Tory government.

Some songs seem very urban, with a world-y, multicultural feel, others are more based in the natural world, with a fluid, ethereal vibe. Most obviously, “Deeper Water” is about seascaping, right?

That’s something I like doing. Me and [my wife] Nora go out to sea in our boat when I really can’t bear the pressures of situations around me. It totally clears my mind. You have to step back or away or aside every now and then. Then the picture becomes much more clear, and you can describe it more accurately. You can get lost in the confusion of it all, and you begin to accept the nonsense that’s being force-fed to you on a daily basis. I’m not very good at accepting.

That song was one-take. It started out as something totally different. I thought, “I’m not very happy with that,” then we went back in and rewrote it on the spot, and what landed on the tape stayed on the tape — there was no need to fiddle with it at all. You don’t want to start trying to contain nature! Nature, being what it is, is always trying to escape from you.

“Lollipop Opera,” on the other hand, sounds much more town-y…

To me, that’s the soundtrack to my youth, the sound of Finsbury Park. It’s that juxtaposition of noise from my part of London, which I think accurately portrays the way I grew up — all those influences, the sounds, the chaos of it all, yet the fun in it. It was multicultural and ultimately good-natured. We don’t always have to be angry. When the powers-that-be leave us alone, and up to our own devices, we have a very peaceful existence amongst each other. I think it’s rules and regulations that destroy all that.

In “Human,” you say, “I think England’s died.” How exactly do you mean?

It’s generally the social aspect. They’ve turned all the pubs into swine bars. Swine bars can be quite nice too, but there’s too much of it, and it’s all so cold and indifferent, and the modern architecture — they’re de-structuring buildings with all that tubing and glass. It’s really ugly to me. I don’t feel that that’s offering me any spirit of generosity. I think it’s been put up in such a cold, indifferent fuck-you way, it makes people feel they’re not part of something in this country any longer. All I’m getting is a reflection of myself in a front door that won’t open for me. You’re looking in mirrored glass, and there you are, out on the street, and that’s where you’re gonna stay. Well, no, no, no, let me in!

In “One Drop,” you sing, “We come from chaos, you cannot change us” — a clear nod to your punk beginnings. But does it get frustrating being judged forever on the basis of The Sex Pistols, which, reunions aside, only lasted for a couple of years when you were barely out of your teens? What do you feel about that band now?

It got me everything. It got me out of the doldrums of self-pity, of growing up working-class and poor. It set me up beautifully to be an independent thinker, and to think outside of the box, as indeed I probably always did. I’m justified for the way I think, and I don’t think badly or wrongly or stupidly — these are not glib throwaway lines I put out there, there’s a lot of thought that goes into it. I want to get it right in life, I want to be accurate about it, and I want life to improve, not only for myself, but for everyone.

That’s what those Pistols songs were about, whatever people may think. They were from the point of view of the disenfranchised. No matter what benefits I’ve collected along the way, it doesn’t alter the perspective — you don’t forget what went wrong in your childhood. You don’t forget the rules and regulations that wrote you off as a misfit, or erroneously judged you.

The aftermath of the Pistols was pretty grim, with heroin overdoses, court cases and much animosity. Do you manage to think about it these days for the great stuff that came out of it?

Well, it obviously did because I’m here. So it hasn’t been negative in any way at all. The fact is, I’m alive. Thank you, world! I’ve got through so far, and I’m planning on a happy 50 from here on in again. Life is worth living.

A collection from the thick of pioneering, early-'80s indie-pop

The post-punk era has been excavated extensively these past few years, mostly for its arty, experimentalist leading edge. Yet, if you tuned into John Peel’s all-influencing show on BBC radio back in the day, you were just as likely to hear quirky, laugh-out-loud early-indie bubblegum-pop from combos like Girls At Our Best! or the Chefs, as some abstractly mesmerizing punk-funk-disco groove.

The Chefs, a three-boys/one-girl group from Brighton, may have faded from explicit influence pretty much as soon as they split up circa 1981-82. Yet, as can be deduced from this collection of pretty much everything they ever recorded (three indie-label singles; three radio sessions), they were in the very thick of that pioneering indie-pop sound at the turn of the ’80s, which would soon coalesce in the Smiths, and later evolve through markedly Chefs-y mutations such as C86 (bands like the Flatmates and the Shop Assistants even aped their amusingly mundane style of band name) and Saint Etienne.

The Chefs were out to extrapolate entertaining things from punk’s poppier pantheon: Their template was a rickety collision of the Ramones and Slits, with strong echoes of ’60s bubblegum and DIY three-chord simplicity. In singers Helen McCookerybook and Carl Evans, they had a pair of humorists not afraid to take the Buzzcocks’ romantic bathos a step further: Evans’s “Sweetie” is hilariously, intentionally twee, an irresistible antidote to the macho, brawly violence of latter-day punkers like Sham 69 and Cockney Rejects — and check the tingling Afro-highlife guitar line on the BBC session version.

McCookerybook’s “24 Hours,” set to a jangly railroad rhythm, is a stone classic, its sweetly-harmonized tale of amorous obsession subtly morphing into a realization that the anticipation of love is more exciting than the thing itself. Elsewhere, Evans fantasizes about losing his virginity to a girl who works on a supermarket check-out (“Someone I Know”), while McCookerybook again deflates the glory of sexual conquest, as thereafter she winds up jilted, with an unpleasant dose of STD (“Thrush”).

After disbanding, the members variously went on to form Yip Yip Coyote, John Hegley’s The Popticians and Helen & The Horns. The Chefs’ lively mixture of fun and social acuity might easily leave them forever chained to their age, were it not for the sheer quality of their tunes. The heights to which they aspired in that department are best intimated via their final single, a gorgeous cover of the Velvet Underground’s immortal “Femme Fatale,” which duly chimes with their own air of romantic defeat. Like the Smiths and countless ensuing indie-pop heroes, however, The Chefs turned forlorn emotions and humdrum surroundings into triumphant music.

Given that the band played many of their key gigs at late-’70s anti-racism/anti-nuclear marches, their music was astonishingly experimental, and Stewart himself cut a visionary dash, not serving up numbskull politico chants, but tossing out esoteric yet penetrating images of state control, paranoia and cultural fragmentation, in his trademark, bone-chilling wail.

When the Pop Group scattered, he hooked up with Adrian Sherwood — another reggae-influenced iconoclastic nutcase — with whom he further pushed the envelope across an occasional series of brain-busting collaborations in the ensuing three decades. Backing musicians in the early days included the erstwhile Sugarhill Gang, aka Tackhead, who’d played on numerous proto-rap and electro tunes. Hip-hop, disco and industrial/EBM all found a place in his sound.

For his latest opus, Stewart has ventured beyond that relationship’s relative comfort zone. Called The Politics of Envy, his seventh solo album was made all over Europe andNorth America, as the ever-influential singer flitted between art happenings and romantic liaisons, calling in numerous associates and disciples to contribute. The cast list is astonishing: from Lee “Scratch” Perry, Primal Scream, Massive Attack’s Daddy G and Public Image Ltd’s legendary guitarist, Keith Levene, through to hip young electronicists like Factory Floor.

With strong flavors of contemporary R&B and dubstep duly infused into his unmistakable sound, this 50-something hero sounds more furiously relevant than ever.eMusictracked him down to a flat by Clapham Common, just a five-minute bus ride from where theLondonriots erupted in September 2011. His conversation, just like his music, is free-associative, often surreal, even hysterical, but always profoundly thought-provoking…

How did the recent Pop Group shows come about?

I did a gig at the SE1 Club [in 2005], and Barry [Hogan] from ATP came up to pay me, and he said, “Matt Groening, the bloke from The Simpsons, wants me to ask the Pop Group and the Stooges to reform.” I said, “Where?” He said, “Minehead!” It’s like, that’s our local seaside resort, like Barry Island or something. I grew up there; my cousins had caravans there. I just said, “Oh my god! What?”

Then maybe a couple of years later, I was doing one of these weird collaborations, some mad film about a serial killer, something weird in a café in Vienna and it was kicking off. Then this thing popped up again. And I thought, “Why am I negating these people, just because I’ve worked with them before? Why can’t I just think, “Ah, I can make something new with these people? We’re all completely different people now. Why am I negating that as a channel?”

So we phoned around, and I said, “I’m only interested in doing it if we do an experiment and do something new.” It hadn’t particularly crossed our minds. It was just like a commission, like Miles Davis and Gil Evans or something — like a Medici commission to make a new piece.

But then me and [guitarist] Gareth [Sager] got together, and, suddenly, instead of sitting in a room writing with somebody I’d never met before, like if I’m off producing a band in the Czech Republic or whatever, suddenly we’re in this room, and these French ballads are coming out of nowhere! I’ve never done anything like it before. I’m like, “This is all right! What the fuck is it?!” But I’m just letting it happen, not trying to think about it…

We’ve got all our back catalogue back, right, like the Pistols, who just did a deal with Universal. So I was just thinking, say Y came out, and at the same time something new, on a cool label, it would just give it something extra. Let the new stuff run, and don’t stop it. Don’t try to contain it.

The funny thing with those [old Pop Group] songs though, was that we’d made them up in the studio, and we never played them. Suddenly, we were listening to a record which had never been reproduced live, because in those days, we started writing something after school, and you’d have a bassline — rip off a funk bassline or something, so we’d go and do a gig with ATV or Gang Of Four or Joy Division, and I’d just be shouting something, like “blind faith!” over a bassline. Then a few weeks later someone would be playing a bit of guitar over it, maybe a solo. But after a few months, somebody said, “Oh, you’ve got to go to a studio,” and we’d record the things that had got that far. But we never played the recorded versions. I’ve got recordings of The Pop Group, and the songs don’t sound anything like the records. The songs are completely amoebic, it’s like mad jams, like Albert Ayler, it sounds like donkeys! But the things in the studio were sculpted in the studio. Now I’m having to learn the records!

Listening to the records you’ve made with Adrian Sherwood, one can almost imagine the two of you high as kites in Sherwood’s front-room home studio, setting up beats, concocting weird noises and laughing maniacally.

Yeah, it was just like that! “That Hooversounds good — come in with the Hoover!” It’s like Joe Meek up in Holloway Road; he was throwing stuff down the toilet pipe on his records. I’ve been doing that sort of stuff since I was a kid. I had this reel-to-reel tape machine, and you remember those little tin waste-paper bins? I worked out if I unscrewed the little speaker from the reel-to-reel and put it in the little bin, it would vibrate — kkkkkkkcccch! — against the tin, or you could put something backwards.

The good thing about Adrianis, he had everything there. Before, you’d go to a studio, and honestly, it was like those old films of George Martin. There’d be people in grey coats [posh English accent], “Oh, you can’t do that!” Or there’d be some engineer sitting there reading Motorcycle Weekly, just setting the normal settings…I remember, we tried to do something backwards with Dennis Bovell [circa '80]. “You can’t run it backwards!” I was like, “There’s people in New York cutting it backwards and forwards, all the disco people. And actually, what do you mean I can’t do it, it’s my tape!”

Adrian’s nonchalance was the thing — he’s just a West Ham fan who likes messing around with mad noises, like Joe Meek. He doesn’t wanna be in a band, he didn’t wanna be David Bowie. He’s a scientist. His place is like a strange secret laboratory. The possibilities that gives you! When we’d do gigs, the PA guy would be like, “You can’t turn the bass up like that, you’ll blow the speakers!” “No, we won’t!’”

For The Politics of Envy, you’ve recorded stuff all over the place, including a fair amount with Sherwood, but it’s Youth who’s helped you streamline all the tracks into a coherent whole, right?

He pulled it all together. Youth has got a real big dub heritage. Me and Youth were both influenced with a lot of the hip-hop things, back in the day in New York. He had exactly the same Kiss FM tapes that I brought back and gave to all the Massive people, which kicked off the Bristol scene. That open-mindedness, and letting someone be creative is crucial. My mum’s a child-minder; she looks after Asperger’s kids, and you’ve just got to let somebody do something. I remember when I produced Tricky’s first thing, he hadn’t really done anything at that point, I just let him do something, and I tried to catch it. Like, put it in a box, and give it to somebody else. I didn’t want to put my own ideas on top. It’s about standing back. It’s psychotherapy, really.

Anyway, I’ve been collecting all this stuff on my travels. That’s the thing about hard drives and computers. I can be inBerlinin somebody’s studio and catch them of the moment, or I can be inViennarecording and just catch things the next day if I like something.

I don’t understand why people hold what I do in such high regard, and why people will drop things, or do things morning noon and night to help me keep something in order. I don’t understand. It’s certainly not for monetary reasons, so I don’t know why they’re doing it. I think I owe a lot of these people favors.

But obviously these days it’s easier to be connected: Flights are cheaper, and communication is free and instant!

Yeah, and people really want to do something cool. Any of these people could have said, “Talk to my manager,” even if you’re friends. But they just said, “Yeah.” So, it’s a patchwork from that particular activity. And it wasn’t particularly expensive to make. We’re doing it on trades, and nobody asked for vast amounts of money. I’m paying people in songwriting or splits or whatever.

I like that interconnectivity — suddenly I’m playlisted on Radio Lebanon! I had this song, “Radio Freedom,” and it’s fucking on there apparently! Then, I was down working with Massive Attack, and I’d just seen this documentary about Beirut, and there were these kids in these bombed out bits of the city listening to Massive Attack. This mate of mine from Portugal, when I was living in Berlin, he formed his whole mind-view on us, something that happened in Bristol when he was a kid. We are having an effect!

Your stuff is always very politically aware, if not explicitly “about” specific events or politicians. Something you said in an article I read the other day really struck me: “I can’t see how the word political should be separated from reality.” But until very recently, Anglo-American rock had been almost completely politicized since the early ’80s.

Yes, it’s been the zombification of society. One of the songs I’ve been working on for ages was “Citizen Zombie” — “Don’t point your plastic finger at me, Citizen Zombie.” It’s like, why are people talking to me about politics? A friend of mine fighting for this indigenous resistance thing in South America, or up in the hills in Burma — old Pop Group fans — are they any different somebody on a production line in Coventry, if there still was one? Why are they asking me about it? Why isn’t anybody else talking about what’s happening in the world?

But isn’t art of all kinds there to provoke that kind of discourse?

But I don’t even separate art from it either. There’s this thing inBali, where they say, “We have no art, we do everything well.” I don’t see why cutting your nails is any different to painting a picture. I don’t see these definitions. It doesn’t make any sense to me. It seems to me that the illusion that’s been surviving since the end of the crusades, when the Templars came back and the Renaissance began — this illusion that somebody will look after you, a local government or a nation state. It’s suddenly being torn away, and there’s this big slathering fuckin’ wolf at the door. For me, it’s like the Fall Of Rome: can nobody else see what I’m seeing? Can nobody else see what’s going on?

Funny you should mention that. Listening to your music, I’ve often been reminded of Cassandra screaming her prophesies of the Fall of Troy, but nobody’ll listen.

Yeah, I’m screaming away, and everybody’s walking past! I get it in my day-to-day life, though. I feel a bit locked out. Other artists and musicians get it. I don’t understand what’s going on. Who says you have to sing about cars and girls and whatever? Who says? Where did this orthodoxy arrive from? It’s bizarre.

“Baby Bourgeois,” on the new record, has lyrics about brand whores and corporate cocksuckers. It makes me think about the riots down the road, which was all about people looting for plasma-screen TVs and trainers, rather than any urgent social motivation.

No, mate, that’s about hanging around with the Habsburgs in Vienna. The problem is, people take these songs as political neo-slogans, but they’re actually very personal things that have actually happened to me. The Politics of Envy could be about people around you, about how envy drives personal politics.

I question what we value — why, when we were kids, everybody wanted to talk to this blonde girl, for instance, and not the brunette. It’s conditioning. And when you ask about branding — the corporate cocksucker — maybe that’s me!

Your music is all about juxtaposition — in the Pop Group, it was putting some funk into punky-reggae, and so on…

Yeah, deliberate, and some of it in order to question my own construct. I’m arguing with myself, in a process of learning. I’m arguing with myself about things, and then suddenly in the process of making an album, my whole view of world history and economics is completely destroyed, because some new evidence emerges.

It’s a bit like a kid’s toy, a plastic thing where you have a round brick and a square brick

and a triangular brick, and I’m still trying to put the wrong brick in the wrong hole — for hours, until you get a spark. And when that spark finally happens, some other people run off and say, “You’ve created this! You’ve created that!” But I do it for my own pleasure, really.

So, on “Stereotype,” you’ll pit Keith Levene, Factory Floor and The Raincoats’ Gina Birch against each other just to see what happens?

Yeah. It’s like having a wedding party and deliberately inviting antagonists because you know somebody is gonna wind somebody else up. I was just constantly taking the piss. People don’t realize, but for me punk was about taking the piss.

I know it’s good to be serious, and to present a wholesome thing you can get your teeth into. But I’m a very jovial, “up” pisstaker really. The pleasure is in the friendships and the juxtapositions — like with Grant from Massive Attack, we’re virtually brothers. We’ve known each other since we were 13. I’m probably wearing his shirt right now — we swap clothes because we’re both so tall. We’d always stand around with each other by the bass bins, because we couldn’t go dancing with girls. There’s a lot of friendship and a lot of love in it.

Ever since the Pop Group, you’ve never exactly had a fixed band behind you, but why did you collaborate so widely this time?

Somehow, the wind blew me to some of these people. I’ve been living a lot of different places the last five or six years. In a castle in Poland, I met this Portuguese art collective called MechanoSphere; they’re kind of weird prankster semioticians. I really get on with them, we sparked. I said to this guy, “What do you do?” And he said, “I’m doing an opera based on radar.” Like, “Oh great, let’s have a pint!”

Out of that, we ended up organizing a three-week symposium inPortodedicated to [late-'60s underground movie legend] Kenneth Anger, on magic and art. We had all the top theoretical magical historians all coming in, giving lectures, and all these galleries in the old quarter of Lisbon exhibited sympathetic artists.

I was talking to Kenneth, and found out that he does a live performance thing where he projects his films and does live Theremin. So me, MechanoSphere and Kenneth did these live performances in these derelict ballrooms in Lisbon and that was the seed of this album.

I’ve read that the track you did with Primal Scream, “Autonomia,” was inspired by Carlo Giuliani, the protester who died outside the G8 summit in Genoa in 2001…

I was just talking to his sister, today. It started from this guy, Hakim Bey, who has a piece of conceptual art about setting up temporary autonomous zones. And my ex-girlfriend was running this free-TV temporary autonomous zone, like one of those weird drag things in New York in the 1980s. I remember having quite heated discussions with Geoff Travis about some of this, because I sort of shared a house with him when he was starting Rough Trade, and Mayo Thompson, when he was doing his Art & Language stuff. Some of these concepts really stuck with me.

But I think you have to really adapt to be able to flow in the veins of the beast. And if you can take a shield and go into the heart of it — the Pop Group had this idea of the explosion in the heart of the commodity, which came from Michel Prigent, one of the original Situationists, who somehow I became friends with when I was 19. I decided with this thing to engage with the machine. And it seems like now, all these doors are being opened around the world. I think probably it’s because cool people are in quite good positions, like high up in Sony films or whatever, or Matt Groening. They’re opening the door, like, [furtively] “Mark, Mark, come in here…” There’s like sleeping agent punks, way up the ladder!

Do you think that that sense of community is sorely lacking in the post-millennial music?

That is the solace I got when I was young from music, of being in a community. Now, with the internet, you’re talking to people inArgentinaor wherever, and they have this tribal sense by being into stuff. You’re using it as a badge of honor. It is a feeling of community, and that was the point for us, during punk. We were gonna play at the Roxy, but in the audience — we’re just the same people. It was an anti-star thing.

The last time I’d really hung out with Keith Levene was outside the Marquee [legendary London rock club] the day Elvis died. I was young and came up to see my mates The Cortinas play there, and there was this bloke outside and we ended up talking about UFOs. I didn’t even know he was in a band, so me and Keith were like that [crosses fingers], then Adrian [Sherwood] and Keith became friends, then somehow some of these people get written out of history. For me, Keith is British punk. His character — he was like the Beavis, and Lydon was just like [chuckles evilly like Butthead]. It was Levene, really. We went to the pub after one of the sessions, and he had custard with his chips! It was like — yes! And he doesn’t give a fuck. He didn’t play guitar for years and years and years.

Keith comes to the studio, he walks in, and I just take the piss out of Keith. Everybody holds him in such high regard.Londonpunk means nothing to me really; who gives a fuck? I just remember him because he was all right outside the Marquee once, you know? I nicked a fag off him, and everyone else was posing around him — but Keith was alright! So Keith comes in, and I start taking the piss out of his trainers.

And then he looks over at Youth and says, “Aren’t you that kid that used to look through the letter box?” You see, Youth used to dress up like Sid Vicious when he was at school, with a white coat on. He would go round to Lydon’s house in Gunter Grove — I went round there a couple of times with Linton Kwesi Johnson. But he used to knock off school, and look through the letterbox at Levene and Wobble and John Lydon’s brother, and try and get in! So, all these years later, Keith goes, “Aren’t you that kid who looked through the letterbox while I was trying to read the paper? Fuck off! I’m not fucking working with him!”

What were your first experiences of punk?

I’m from Bristol. 1960, I was born, so to me the first punk band was the Feelgoods, then Eddie & The Hot Rods. Hanging out with Douglas [Hart] and Bobby [Gillespie] from The Jesus & Mary Chain, right, I didn’t really know them that well. And then I remember talking to Ian Curtis a bit, and other people from our generation, about how, in isolation, when we were 12 or 13, we just kind of found “Metallic KO” by Iggy, or some [New York] Dolls stuff, or some early garage thing. I really liked “The Ox” by The Who, I just found it in a junk shop. We all started finding this stuff, and some weird literature, and there’d be one or two people in these different cities — in Glasgow, kids from the Mary Chain, the Primals; in Manchester, the Joy Division lot, Devoto, Linder and all that lot — even Morrissey.

But we were all picking this stuff up on our own. It was a weird synchronicity, and then when you suddenly saw a picture of the Pistols…I was coming up and shopping in King’s Road, and buying mohair jumpers, pink drainpipes and those kind of clothes, and wore them to funk clubs in Bristol on a Saturday night.

But when I saw a picture of the Pistols in there, and they were wearing the same mohair jumpers, and the same plastic sandals that we wore, I just thought, “There’s somebody in a band that isn’t like a grebo! They’re wearing the same clothes as us,” and then they started talking about the same reference points as us: They’d seen the Dolls on [BBC TV's] Whistle Test, and were into Jobriath or whatever. I don’t know how we picked up these tropes at the same time. It’s quite strange how something happened out of it.

So how did your band, The Pop Group, form out of it?

Gareth was in a different school, and my friend, the singer in the Cortinas, he was my neighbor — we were just into Roxy [Music], but he [Sager] was trying to learn saxophone to be like Andy Mackay when we were 12 or 13. Then suddenly we didn’t know anybody else inBristolthat was interested in similar things to what we were interested in, in that kind of art music stuff. Then somebody said, “Oh, Gareth has got a Terry Riley record.” I was like, “Who’s Gareth?” It was like, “Oh, he plays a bit of guitar,” and I’m immediately thinking, “Ooooh, I could get a band.”

It’s weird how I could sit down with Mike Watt from the Minutemen, who’s in the Stooges now, or somebody in Berlin, and talk about this stuff, and we’ve got so much more in common than I have with my own brother. This is a community, a culture. And making this new record for me was a bit like being a fan-boy. I’m still that 13-, 14-year-old kid that’s going around junk shops on the way home from school, and I’d pick up Hollywood Babylon, or Vampire by Lee Perry, and hear about him doing Keith Haring drawings on the Black Ark or something. I’m thinking about all his psychobabble and Sun Ra-isms, and suddenly I’m standing next to him in the studio!

The Pop Group was reputedly a fragile and rather heated union. Afterwards, you all split off to do other things — Rip Rig & Panic, Maximum Joy, Pigbag and, of course, Mark Stewart + The Maffia. Did the sense of community in the band not endure?

The funny thing is, people thought there was some big falling out, but because we’re all from the same posse, we were all just doing our own things anyway. We’ll all go to the same places in Bristol, when we’re in Bristol. Massive Attack still live two doors down from where my grandfather lived. There’s a hub there. It’s not really like who’s in a band with who. There were a hundred of us, our little gang, and nobody’s really any more important than anyone else. There’s people I ask after more. There’s this dread mate of mine, who was carrying this cross around in St Pauls [Bristol 'hood] — he was some gang fella — I ask after him all the time.

When Adrian lost his Jamaican buddy Prince Far-I— who was shot dead in JA — he was so disgusted with reggae’s violence, he reacted by making ear-splitting industrial music. He was into some proper heavy sounds…

And still is! [Long pause] I was still at school, right, and John Cale came down for a meeting, because [the Pop Group] all liked John Cale’s production of The Stooges. I was talking to Iggy about it recently. For me, The Stooges are really dance underneath — with Steve Mackay’s sax and everything, it’s really funky! He was going, “We thought we were Motown!” I met Mitch Ryder as well in Berlin. Everyone makes Iggy out to be a punk, but it’s like Northern Soul, his stuff, they were trying to play dance music! It’s like the English R&B bands were trying to play black covers, but they were playing them slightly different.

I originally said I wanted to get King Tubby to produce us, but then he died in Jamaica. It wasn’t that I wanted to make reggae; it was that I was really interested in the deconstruction, and the way they’d suddenly have a doorbell ringing, like on Joe Gibbs’s record. It reminded me of [legendary British radio comedy] The Goons.

We thought punk was all about tearing up the rulebook, and questioning everything. By the time punk had happened, we didn’t want to play pub rock, or four-bar blues, or whatever. We were like, Why can’t we mash funk, with punk, with reggae, with dub and — later on, with the Maffia — with hip-hop, and now with dubstep and coldwave or whatever the fuck it is. Why can’t we do it, right?

At the time, the Pop Group seemed like the most extreme music ever. Was that the idea? To be the leading edge, post-punk?

The bleeding edge! If you think they’re extreme, at the time, I was listening to this thing called “Spark of the Desired Magneto,” which was English experimental stuff. I could play you extreme! I thought it was pop music.

Party-minded indie rock from the top drawer

“Take me in your arms tonight,” croons Young Liars’ Jordan Raine on the curtain-raising “Echoists,” from thisVancouverquintet’s debut EP. The sense of open invitation is matched in the surrounding music: It’s full of warmth and affectionate detail, from the crisply irresistible dancefloor rhythms conjured by drummer Ty Badali and bassist Andrew Beck, through to the way Angelo Ismirnioglou’s mesmerizing Afro-guitar picking and Wesley Nickel’s hyper-melodic techno-pop synth lines weave seductively in and out of each other. As an entrée into these early 20-something Canadians’ world, it could hardly be more enticing.

Indie rock combos who arrive this confident and fully formed are rare, indeed. In latter years, it’s been the likes of Local Natives and Vampire Weekend, and there’s a similar air of self-belief, too, about Young Liars, who first convened, according to legend, in an Algerian basement bar inParis, while taking refuge from rioting outside. Their sound is breathtakingly contemporary, pumping out all the physical, rug-cutting rhythms of a Friendly Fires or Metronomy, while also packing the swoonsome, romantic tunecraft ofSt. Vincentor M83. But these boys are proper stadium-indie contenders, with echoes of the Killers and, thanks toJordan’s Morrissey-esque, heart-on-sleeve voicing, the Smiths.

Each of the six proper songs here (“Great Green Light” dreams up a minute-long synthesized future-church-organ coda) is both insanely catchy, and an expertly arranged journey-in-sound. “Colours” glides off on an undulating synth figure reminiscent of the Who’s “Baba O’Reilly,” but sets up its own stutteringly funky beat, which soon kicks in for a euphoric chorus about train rides and colour-blindness. It’s a compulsively listenable five minutes, full of left turns, and Homesick Future boasts nearly an album’s worth of such stellar material. This is party-minded indie rock from the top drawer.

File under: Keyboard-generated cinematic weirdness with a sprinkling of pop on top

For fans of: Bjork, Aphex Twin, Anjali, Willy Mason

From: Originally Iran, now North London

Personae: Leila Arab (keyboards, programming, etc), Mt Sims (vocals on six tracks)

Leila registered a blip on the electronic-music radar in the late ’90s, after associations with musical heroes Björk and Aphex Twin saw her debut record on Aphex’s Rephlex label, Like Weather, earn a warm reception for its lush, slo-mo textures. A second album, 2000′s Courtesy of Choice, spread her name a little wider. Some critics said she was trip-hop; Ms Arab vehemently disagreed. But even without a cosy niche, her future looked rosy.

All that was thrown into turmoil, however, when her mother passed away after a long illness, followed within 12 months by her father – a dynamic figure, who’d moved their family to England from Iran in 1978-9, in the wake of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution. Fittingly, Leila retreated from the spotlight to take care of her family affairs.

Grieving process over, Leila resurfaced from her North London bedroom with 2008′s Blood Looms and Blooms, her debut for pioneering techno stable, Warp Records. There, she was joined by a handful of singers, some well-known (Terry Hall, Martina Topley-Bird), others not so much (Luca Santucci, her sister Roya).

For Leila, music-making has always been a small and private playground, but for her fourth outing, she sought to expand her sound and fully overcome the dark feelings that had festered since her parents’ passing. To that end, she entered into an intense collaboration with Matthew Simms, aka Mt. Sims, the Berlin-based polymath, whose track record in left-turning from funky synth-pop (2002′s Ultrasex) into macabre post-punk (2005′s Wild Light) obviously tickled her ever-lively contrariness gland. The resultant U&I album, featuring Simms’s voice on six tracks, is experimental, occasionally hard-hitting, sometimes exquisitely beautiful, but throughout fabulously uplifting.

Andrew Perry contacted Leila at her bunker, as she was figuring out the technical and human-resource requirements for taking ‘U&I’ on the road. Simms, who’s been somewhat elusive these past three or four years, will be joining her roadshow, she promises…

On joining the pantheon of illustrious electronicists:

I don’t make electronic music. I adore synthesis, and I adore noise, but the reason I use electronics is because, with them, I can make any kind of music I want. I do it all in my bedroom at home because I can’t be arsed. I’m lazy. I get up, walk across the room, do some work, then come back and watch a bit of [U.K. TV quiz show] Countdown, or ['80s darts/quiz show] Bullseye re-runs.

The truth is, if a track like “Welcome to Your Life” [from U&I] came on, and you didn’t know who it was by, you’d probably have to say it’s a rock record. I think “Colony Collapse Disorder” sounds like Joy Division. But because they’re from me, it’s like, “That’s that bird who releases records on labels like Warp and Rephlex.” I’m about making machines sound alive, not controlled. I want them to sound mental. The way I mix, it’s all about wall of sound, not working in some laboratory. Most electronic music sounds like it’s been made in some sterilized no-go zone. Mine is a mess!

U&I definitely has a certain nihilism to it. It was all about making something that was full-blooded and grounded, because I live in my head, and for me to have dealt with what I’d dealt with in recent history, I had to kind of come to earth to deal with it.

On her freaky, telepathic, career-kickstarting link-up with Björk:

I had a month left to graduate from my degree, and my options were to either stay in Stoke, sign on and do a little bit of DJing here and there, or come back to London and try to get a job. But then suddenly the third option was to go on a world tour. It was like, OK!

When Björk first called, she’d left her number. I didn’t even have a phone. She called my best friend’s house, and I bumped into the guy my friend lived with, and he was like, “There’s a message for you on our phone from some German- or Swedish-sounding woman.” So I called her, and she was like, “Hi, I’m looking for a band to do this tour.” I said, “Look, I’ve spent three years watching Czech cinema and falling asleep in classes, I really think whoever told you I can do this is taking the piss. I don’t know how to read music…”

I met them at their rehearsal rooms, talked a bit with her and had a quick go on the keyboards, then I remember leaving, and looking at her and going, “Have I got a job?” And she was like, “Yeah – they asked you for your passport, right?”

Had I met her before? I was living in this rancid terraced house in Stoke! But it was weird – I’d seen her on some telly show, and I’d thought, “What is going on with that voice? I know this person.” Proper fucked up. Then two days later, she calls.

On her career of happy accidents:

On that tour, I started doing the live mixing thing. Then I did my first record with fuck-all equipment, but just with a lot of love for music. I started working on the second record, and I was friends with Richard [James, aka Aphex Twin], because I’d met him on one of the Björk tours when he was doing the support DJ slot. I just got on with him, because we liked smoking weed and playing Mario on the back of the bus. I was just happy there was someone to play Mario with, that’s why we got on. So, later on, he’d come round and hear what I was up to, and he was like, “Look, I’ll put it out for you.” It was literally that casual. Then I did that record, and everybody was like, “Oh, it’s a lost Prince record!” Every time, it’s an accident. I’m incredibly thrilled and humbled that I get to make noise and people bother to put it out.

On how defeat loomed from the jaws of victory:

After those two albums, I lost my mum in 2003, and my dad in 2004. My mum was hardcore ill for a year, and we looked after her, but my dad, he went really quickly. So I’ve done both versions, and I can tell you – they both suck. At the end, I was a mess.

I started to question the errors of physiology, like the fact that breathing and eating should not be connected. What a bad bit of design! So I would only eat liquid food, like porridge and noodles, because I’d reduced myself to such a point that I didn’t even trust myself to remember how to eat. It was all a manifestation of the grief, the helplessness.

Imagine the lack of control you feel. Being a creative person, you have a realm where you’re in charge. There was a side of me where I was literally offended, almost like by a bad remix – what have they fucking done to my track! Obviously, I know I’m not God, or a doctor, or a healer. Intellectually, I understood that I couldn’t have altered this, but emotionally it took years.

Music has always been so profound for me, in terms of my reaction to it, but, when that shit happens, it was suddenly like, this is worthless. And every time I did some music, it was like, “That’s all good and well, but you couldn’t make that thing stop. If you were that clever…” After a few years of that, I was like, “No, enough! I’ll make myself go mental with all that pent-up creative energy,” because you can’t turn energy off, even in science.

So, doing U&I, after seeing life reduced to that binary shit – life-death, one-zero – I wanted to make a record that was bloody and alive and earthed. Some people have said it’s aggressive but I see it as aliveness. You know, life’s a bloody business.

On finding another dream wrecking partner in Mt. Sims:

I’d met him at this fancy dress party where he came as a Computer Processing Unit made out of a cardboard box. I’d always liked Matt’s music. He really is a kindred spirit, in the sense that he’s fucked his career, too. He did the Ultrasex album, and everybody was like, “Wow, great.” Then he goes and does a goth record, and everybody was like, “Why the fuck would you do that?”

So I emailed him, “Look, I’ve started this new work, would you be up for it?,” and he just came over from Berlin. The album is formed from two one-week sittings where he stayed at my house and we just messed about. Some tracks we wrote together, and it was all pretty much done by the end of 2010, but I knew it was still not completely done. For me, it’s always about, “is there enough emotional variety on the record?”

So then he sent me “Anyway,” a really arty-sounding ambient wibbly-wobbly track in 6/8 time – but the minute I heard the vocal, I was like, “Fuck, this is a pop record, this isn’t art.” So we edited the vocals to make it 4/4, and that happened really quickly. “U&I” [the track] was actually two separate a capellas, but the moment I heard them, I was like, “These could be one.” He was surprised, because we’d done two years’ worth of him coming over on and off, and me not finishing. He was like, “Now you finish two tracks in an hour!” I was like, “Welcome to me.” I’m not a very structured person.

Now there’s an air miles advert on TV using a track off my first album, “Underwaters.” Which all adheres to what I always say – it takes at least 10 years for my music to make sense.

Balancing their experiments with pop immediacy

Thirty-five years on from 1977′s post-punk benchmark, Pink Flag, Wire have hit another indisputable purple patch. 2003′s gnarly Send album ended a decade-long silence in a squall of gleefully streamlined feedback, but the subsequent departure of guitarist Bruce Gilbert from the original quartet resulted in a brief wobble (to wit: ’08′s patchy Object 47). Luckily, the ship was steadied and re-fuelled for last year’s Red Barked Tree, an all-cylinders-firing triumph to rank easily alongside those late-’70s masterpieces.

In its wake, Wire toured throughout 2011 in an extra-confident mood, with Gilbert replaced by Matt Simms. By the time they rolled into Radio France’s theatre for one of Bernard Lenoir’s legendary Black Sessions, they were audibly, as this resultant live document proves, in peak fitness. With typical contrariness, they kick off, not with a high-speed crowd-pleaser, but with Colin Newman’s minor-chord meditation, “Adapt.” Thereafter, however, they’re soon rocketing off with a warp-speed “Comet,” and a smoldering, rage-themed “Smash.”

This ping-ponging setlist is testament to Wire’s genius in balancing their experiments with pop immediacy. Graham Lewis’s “Please Take” mixes lyrics of bitter, back-stabbing hatred with the sweetest and most uplifting of melodies, while Newman’s ’80s-era gem, “Kidney Bingos,” makes shimmering sublimity out of his word-association gibberish. The ever-influential band’s ornery sensibility is such that they’d never stoop to churning out what, for them, constitute “the hits,” so you won’t find many here. Instead, The Black Session finds them leavening a supercharged selection from Red Barked Tree with a few choice cuts from yesteryear, including the exhilarating 1979 single “Map Ref 41⁰N 93⁰W,” and a squalling, angsty “Two People In A Room.” In the encore, “Pink Flag” (the song), the needles finally dip into the red for keeps, amid the kind of axe-bludgeoning mayhem which would send many bands 30 years their junior running for cover.