NZ Listener's Songs of the Week: Foo Fighters' 30th anniversary anthem, plus Theia, Geneva AM and more
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NZ Herald
2 days ago
- NZ Herald
NZ Listener's Songs of the Week: Foo Fighters' 30th anniversary anthem, plus Theia, Geneva AM and more
Dave Grohl's band, which started out as a post-Nirvana solo project, is celebrating 30 years of existence, with Foo apparently still undefeated. The stadium rock stalwarts continue despite the damage that Grohl's nice guy reputation has taken in recent
Otago Daily Times
28-06-2025
- Otago Daily Times
Booze, brawls and break-ups
Oasis are back. But what was it like in the band's self-aggrandising, boozy heyday? Thomas Beller revisits the '90s. In 1993, by an accident of fate, I received a promotional tape from a record company publicist, Jim Merlis, who worked with Nirvana. He had made friends with a mad Scotsman named Alan McGee and sent a cassette with a bunch of Creation acts, calling out one in particular: Cigarettes & Alcohol . "Everyone is going crazy about this band," he said. "What's the big deal?" I thought when I heard it. "T Rex with different lyrics." At that time, in the fall of 1993, I was a staff writer at the New Yorker . By the spring of 1994 I was a fired staff writer. Embarrassed at losing such a job, I fled to London. Oasis sounded different in England. I heard them on the radio, in record stores, everywhere. A lot of the excitement had to do with the singles. This aspect of Oasis feels lost now in the platform age; their early work has been repackaged on albums with titles like Stop the Clocks and Time Flies . In some ways it was the B-sides that made the biggest impact: Fade Away and Listen Up ; an early version of Columbia ; and, especially, Acquiesce . To encounter Acquiesce on a B-side added an aura of limitless possibilities to the band. And it was this limitless horizon that the songs kept emphasising. "You and I are gonna live forever" is the most obvious example, but those early lyrics are overflowing with exhortations to live, an aspiration repeated so often it almost seemed in defiance of someone having once told Oasis to drop dead. I saw Oasis live in London in 1994, and again, at Earl's Court, in 1995. I remember an acquaintance walking beside me amid the throng of fans as we entered the arena in 1994. A seemingly mild-mannered guy, he turned to me with wild eyes and said the word that encapsulated the mood: "Butterflies!". Twenty-two years later I would watch Supersonic , the documentary about their early ascent, in a half-empty theatre in New Orleans, and exit the theatre pondering where it had left us: arriving at Knebworth by helicopter. A massive crowd. A homecoming. The primal thump of the bass drum. And then ... Credits. The end. Or the end of the beginning. I met the band just on the other side of this divide between moving upwards towards the sun and the other option, falling to Earth. It was the summer of 1997. I was on assignment for the music magazine Spin . The interviews were done at the Sony sound stage on 10th Avenue, New York, a big anonymous box of a building in Hell's Kitchen. I was put in a big room and my subjects were brought to me in batches. First came Alan White, Paul "Guigsy" McGuigan (or "Guigs", as the band called him), and Paul "Bonehead" Arthurs. Then came Noel Gallagher. And finally his brother, Liam, who was accompanied by a bodyguard, named Danny, in a tracksuit. I assumed Danny was there to protect Liam. But then I misspoke and said, "I quite liked your record", and Liam was on his feet. "You liked it quite a bit? What do you mean you liked it quite a bit? See ya later, man." He marched over to the door before Danny could get off the couch. Then Liam turned back towards me, and Danny's other purpose was revealed: protecting people from Liam. "You've got big f****** hands, man," Liam said. "But I'll knee you in the balls, man! Whaddya mean you liked it quite a bit? It's tops, man. Tops!" In the end, we worked it out. By the end of our chat he invited me to join them that evening at a bar he called "the Irish pub". "There are a million bars in this city with the word Irish," I said. "I need a name." That night I arrived at the street corner with my girlfriend and was confronted with a large sign that read "The Irish Pub". It was my first clue that Liam is not as incoherent as he sometimes seems. What transpired at the bar that night still seems incredible to me. ("I can't tell you the way I feel / because the way I feel is, oh, so new to me," as the lyric to Columbia goes. The refrain is: "This is confusion, am I amusing you?".) The most basic fact of the night is now a banal commonplace regarding the early years: the epic amounts of alcohol consumed by everyone, most notably Liam. Then there was the band's choice of music on the jukebox. The band the members of Oasis, or really Liam, played over and over was called, "Oasis". Liam took great pleasure in singing along to the lyrics of his favourite band, sometimes slapping his open hand very hard into the chest of Danny in the tracksuit, while insisting he sing along. A good friend with an interest in rock music, the writer Robert Bingham, had been bothering me all that day to bring him along to this rendezvous. His choice of companion at The Irish Pub was the most conservative, Waspy person he knew, a lovely guy named Willie who sat with Rob and me at a small round table while me and my girlfriend Jennifer chatted with McGuigan over pints of beer. McGuigan was a source of curiosity for me because of the way that both Noel and Liam, independent of one another, had mentioned Guigs as having had "a crispy". I had never got a clear answer on the meaning of "a crispy". As far as I could tell it meant some sort of Gallagher-/tour-induced nervous breakdown. Guigs was already exploring other interests and, along with Bonehead, would soon bow out of the band. He seemed to be the most calm and non-violent of the group, even more than Alan the drummer, who was brought in late and seemed to want to make zero waves. And yet when Willie answered Guigs' innocent question, "What do you do?" with the reply, "I'm a lawyer", the glass of beer came down on to the table at the same time that Guigs got to his feet. An electric current shot through the room. Guigs had sent up a flare. By that point in the night, Guigs had told me, in a calm, slightly solemn way, about various brawls the band had been in, including a situation in Tokyo where they scrapped with American Navy ensigns. "There were about 35 of us," Guigs explained. "We were in a bar. One of them f***** with one us, but they didn't know how many we were. And then we all stood up at once." And what happened? "We kicked the shit out of 'em," he said. Once again, there was a "we all stood up at once" energy in the room. Somehow, Willie murmured a sufficiently placating response. Everyone sat back down. Willie, in his pinstripe suit and impeccably knotted tie, remained, to his credit, unmoved by the whole thing. Meanwhile, I could see Liam chatting up Jennifer. She was very pretty, with a soft voice, round face and expensive hair. I went over. Liam turned to me with the poker face for which he is famous. At Earl's Court, he had done nothing more than hold this blank expression for 60 seconds as the giant monitor above the stage slowly zoomed in on him, his pretty blankness reverberating to the increasing roar in the arena, the facial expression equivalent of a guitar held near an amplifier and generating louder and louder feedback. Now he gazed at me with that same impassive expression. "Marry her," he said. "Before someone else does." Jennifer was as psyched to be hanging out with Oasis as anyone else would be, and Liam liked her. Let it be said! That such an agent of chaos should also have such a conservative streak — "marry her!" — is one of the paradoxes that fuels the story of Oasis, which is also a story of two talents that hover in the tension of killing one another and complementing one another. Cain and Abel never had a band, after all, and never had to do press. After the New York interviews, I followed them out to California that summer of 1997, where they set up shop in a stadium in Oakland opening for U2. Be Here Now was chugging its way to record stores across the land. This was the moment in the cartoons when someone runs off a cliff and for a while they are suspended in the air, legs churning, but not dropping, yet. After their set, there was a memorable scene with Noel in a sky box — literally a glass box way up in the sky. We had a nice chat fuelled by my offer of a powder. (I am still annoyed that Spin magazine did not reimburse me for this, as I had quite reasonably listed it among my expenses alongside meals and transportation, which, come to think of it, are both words one could use to describe the substance.) "Don't mind if I do," Noel said, and when he lowered his head to imbibe I saw, in the next glass box over, Liam Gallagher himself, both arms thrown out around the empty seats on either side of him, one leg crossed on the other knee, sitting resplendent in kingly solitude in dark shades, watching the "fookin egg" which was U2's stage set on that tour. It was like a movie, or an allegory: Noel's face fills the screen, then, when he moves out of the frame, Liam. It was a perfect moment of regeneration. One brother morphing into the other, different but the same. Later that night I trailed Liam into a backstage party where I was not meant to be, and from which I was ejected by an angry San Francisco security guard. But not before I absorbed the sight of Liam singing his own songs into Bono's face. Singing at the top of his lungs while slapping the U2 singer's chest with his open hand and insisting he sing along. Bono was recently quoted, in advance of this summer's Oasis shows, as saying: "I love them; I just love them. And what I really love is, the preciousness that had got [into] indie music, they just blew it out. There was just the swagger, and the sound of getting out of the ghetto, not glamorising it ... they were rawer than anybody." My encounter with the band was about a year after Knebworth, prior to the release of Be Here Now . It was the beginning of the long second act. And then the break-up years involving the brothers hiding in plain sight. It's not like they stopped making records and touring. If there is a chart for the most mentions in the NME over the past 30 years, Oasis and the Gallagher brothers combined must surely be at number one. But the sense during this period was never of finality, but rather of dormancy. A volcano, not a death. And now these two wizened faces peering out at us from a poster, skirting perilously close to Spinal Tap territory and yet not, because the excitement is real. Once again: "Butterflies". — The Observer
Scoop
13-05-2025
- Scoop
Folk Bitch Trio Announce Debut Album, Now Would Be A Good Time, Out July 25th Via Jagjaguwar
Folk Bitch Trio — the Melbourne/Naarm-based band of Gracie Sinclair (she/her), Jeanie Pilkington (she/her) and Heide Peverelle (they/them) — announce their debut album, Now Would Be A Good Time, out July 25th via Jagjaguwar, and release the single/video, ' Cathode Ray.' Now Would Be A Good Time tells vivid, visceral stories. Their music sounds familiar, built on a foundation of the music they've loved throughout their lives–gnarled Americana, classic rock, piquant, and clear-eyed balladry. Yet the songs are modern and youthful, with the trio singing acutely through dissociative daydreams, galling breakups, sexual fantasies and media overload— all the petty resentments and minor humiliations of being in your early twenties in the 2020s. Listening to Folk Bitch Trio, it's clear this is a band of three distinct points of view. Pilkington grew up with two musician parents and brings formative memories of watching them perform, of listening to Gillian Welch and Lucinda Williams, and of her own imagined path as a career musician. Peverelle spends their spare time making art and furniture; those hobbies, as well as their love of pop music old and new, articulate a love for the tactile, the home-grown and the hand-made. Sinclair is the self-proclaimed jester of the group, but her taste skews dark, gothic, baroque and dramatic, expressed as a love of opera and ballet as well as musicians as wide-ranging as Patti Smith, Nirvana and Tchaikovsky. They've known each other since high school, and as soon as they started singing together five years ago, 'the chemistry of being inspired by each other was evident from the get-go,' says Sinclair. Following the 'acidic and gorgeous' (Beats Per Minute) lead single The Actor, dubbed a 'Song You Need to Know' by Rolling Stone, today's single, Cathode Ray, opens with caution, its first harmonies arriving in big, looping sighs. It's vulnerable but a little menacing, with a wide open chorus and a spacious, airy beat anchoring everything. Lyrically, the song is about bodily, deeply human anxieties. 'It expresses a feeling of being trapped in myself, and wanting to break out of that so violently that I'm literally talking about opening up a body viscerally,' Sinclair explains. 'It's about frustration, and knowing there's no cheap thrill that's going to fix that.' The songs on Now Would Be A Good Time were workshopped on tour and written specifically with their shared connection in mind. Recording in Auckland with Tom Healy (Tiny Ruins, Marlon Williams) during winter 2024, the band built out these songs with minimalist, idiosyncratic arrangements, and, with voices and guitar taking center stage, recorded to tape as the final missing thread in bringing the album to life. The strongest link between the trio, aside from friendship, is music. 'We all talked about loving music when we were growing up, and knowing we wanted music to be a big part of our lives,' says Pilkington. 'But for me at least, when I looked into the future, it was this relatively mysterious thing.' Joining forces as a group demystified that future. That feeling—of music as an innate calling, as opposed to hobby or folly—was justified. Folk Bitch Trio have already toured across Australia, Europe and the US, supporting bands as disparate as King Gizzard, Alex G and Julia Jacklin. They've signed with Jagjaguwar, a home for singular icons and iconoclasts, and found their first fans with their dazzling harmonies and acerbic lyricism that transcend genre expectations and audience lines. Folk Bitch Trio announce their debut album release tour of New Zealand, playing headline shows in Auckland, Wellington & Christchurch. Tickets available from Moshtix from Friday, May 16.
