Ahead of an Australian tour where the band will perform New Order’s album Get Ready in full to celebrate its 25^th Anniversary, as well as a selection of Joy Division and New Order Greatest Hits, we spoke to Hook about the making of Get Ready, including how the band got back together after the long hiatus in the mid-1990s, why they needed to bring in a producer, and Peter Saville’s album artwork. With the recent news that his ex-bandmates Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert are stepping away from touring with New Order for the foreseeable future, we also posed the question “How many original members of a band does that band need to keep touring under the band’s name?” 

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New Order headlined Reading in 1993 and then the band didn’t do anything for a while…

Imploded. 

…You were working on Monaco in the mid-1990s but did you miss not being in New Order during those years?

I suppose in a weird way, you are sort of addicted to New Order. We all became addicted to the pain, I suppose, and the bitterness and the usual things that groups seem very good at manufacturing.

To be honest with you, when Barney actually did go off to Electronic,  I was really shocked about it. When he told us, I remember we were in a hotel room in Los Angeles and he blurted it out at this crisis Factory [Records] finance meeting that he was going off to work with other people. And the shock was, “Wow, I never thought we’d escape!” [Laughs] And I thought, “Oh, the bastard, he’s escaped!” We were doing a sold out gig at Irvine Meadows in California and it was the most miserable gig that we’d done up to that point, because everybody was sort of watching the first crumble, if you like.

I think we always felt, or I always felt, that when we got New Order going, which was against all the odds after Joy Division, that it would be like a safe place for us. But as it turned out, it wasn’t. I mean, we never had these problems in Joy Division. We were too young and there was nothing like money or publishing credits to get worked up about. Everything was very balanced in Joy Division. It only became unbalanced in New Order. So really, you were all going in the same direction and then when we got to New Order, it literally changed overnight through Ian’s very, very sad demise. So, no, I didn’t miss it.

In a way, I was very nervous about what was going to happen next but very excited by it, because there was, like any relationship, they do tend to be unbalanced. You did find that Barney’s idea of compromise, which now seems hilarious, was that he would just wait for you to compromise. We’d go, “No, go on, compromise,” and he’d go, “No, that’s not what fucking compromise means. Compromise means when you all sacrifice something”, “Oh, well, I’m still waiting for you to compromise,” and he’s like, “All right, well, obviously.” He just doesn’t get that, so that was one of his many charms.

So, yeah, it was nice to be free, to be honest, at that point. Scary, but free. I think you had a confidence in yourself because of what we’d been through with Joy Division or with starting New Order. And then the work we’d done producing. We’d all played, well, me and Barney primarily, had played on other people’s record, and we’d produced other people quite a lot, so we did have a confidence, I suppose, in it. But, yeah, it was a bit of a shock.

I read that the catalyst for New Order getting back together to make Get Ready was Rob Gretton. Given everything that happened with the Hacienda and Factory Records, your manager was still someone you listened to?

It certainly wasn’t as straightforward as that. The catalyst for us getting back together again, insanely, was that Barney had changed his mind. Rob was annoyed because he kept getting these wonderful offers, especially while we were in financial trouble, for New Order to play. So when he got the offer for Reading, which was quite substantial, 200,000 quid or something, he was like, “Oh, if only these bastards would work, we could save the Hacienda and we could save Factory, and, we could save ourselves or whatever,” so it was his insistence that we got together. 

To be honest with you, I thought it was over. But when we had the meeting, he said, and it was the shock of my life up to that point, “Oh, maybe we should do it. Maybe we should get together. Why don’t we do a bit of rehearsing and see if we can still get on?” And I was like, “Fucking hell, this bastard doesn’t half blow hot and cold.” And considering I’d known him since 11 years old, it was a bit of a shock. You know, I thought, “Jesus, this is a change.” So he got us back together again. And it does make me think, now that I look back with hindsight, that he wanted to put us all through the same pain again. The bastard! [Laughs] I think he had a really cruel streak because he did it over and over again. It was typical narcissistic behaviour.

Given how bad things were between the two of you during the making of Republic…

Well, they still are, mate, don’t worry about it.

…Did anything change to make you want to do what became Get Ready?

No, he kidded us into thinking it would be all right and it would be back to normal. And I must admit, we did have a great time, me and him, making Get Ready. When you consider that me and him together wrote our first few songs as Warsaw, and then me and him together, before Steve Morris and Ian Curtis came along, had the ideas for Joy Division. So we were very good at working together in a balanced way with the guitar and the bass. What happened was after going through a phase of literally being sat in a room with three other people in a band where they’d go to you, “Do you have to play on this track?” which was absolutely heartbreaking, seeing as I started the fucking band. To be able to be in that position with Barney, where the two of us could just work together, because Steve and Gillian sort of disappeared on that record and left me and him to it, it was great. 

I think out of all the LPs we’ve played so far, which is 12, I think this is either 12 or 13, this is the most satisfying one to play for myself, because of the relationship between the guitar and the bass on these tracks. It really is balanced, the whole thing is great to play, and I’m enjoying it immensely. And I must admit that out of all the LPs we’ve played, apart from Substances [the two New Order and Joy Division compilations with the same title], this one is getting the most support from promoters in the fact that you can take it round the world and play it. So it must count for something, that this record is different. The trouble was, from a New Order point of view, that once we’d finished the record, Barney went straight back to being how he was before we split up. So we’d put three years’ work in, spent all our money doing it, and then he wouldn’t play, after promising that he would play.

For Republic, while Barney was off doing Electronic, you, Stephen and Gillian wrote a whole instrumental album that Barney then shelved. Did any of that music get used or reworked for Get Ready?

Well, I mean, all that music, much to my eternal annoyance, is sort of captured by Steve Morris on his computers. It’s all there. Presumably all you have to do is find it. And there’s a lot of ideas that sort of disappeared that I loved when we did Waiting for the Siren’s Call. And then, because we split up, I am not allowed access to that. They are never mentioned and they’ve just disappeared, which I think is an absolute crime and a shame to do to anybody.

But they have gone and I’m not allowed access to it because of the relationship at the moment. So, yeah, that stuff is somewhere. In my opinion, the last New Order track we ever wrote was ‘Regret’, because the way that Republic was written and rewritten by Barney, it was not about the group. He was not thinking of the group. He was just thinking of himself. Everything changed on that record. It was a very, very unhappy and very, very frustrating time. And then, of course, after being told that we had to do this record, because we didn’t want to do it, to save Factory and the Hacienda, it saved neither. And the only thing it did was put more nails in New Order’s coffin, which was really sad.

Get Ready is, as you just mentioned, after Factory Records, but you still got Peter Savile to do the album artwork. Was that important to the band to maintain him doing that work for you ?

Yeah, to Rob, it was important. I think Barney and I had discovered that other people could do LP sleeves as well, a damn sight cheaper and a damn sight quicker. But Rob Gretton in particular, and funnily enough, New Odour’s (sic) manager did the same thing when they got back together again. Presumably they wanted to keep the thread going, even though they decided to dump me.

Peter Savile has always been very lucky because we weren’t bothered about the way we looked in any way, shape or form. All we wanted to do was write music and play music. We weren’t interested in the sleeves particularly or any kind of photographs or anything like that, which sort of worked and gave a mystery, you know, for someone who was looking for a mystery. So the thing is, is that Savile was like a pig in shit. You know, he could do whatever he wanted. Could be as wacky as he wanted. He was indulged, probably in the same way that we were indulged. His sleeves cost a bleeding fortune. Rob and Tony [Wilson, co-founder of Factory Records] had a very interesting attitude to things like that, which they expressed in the Hacienda. Money was no object when they had it, so there wasn’t much care taken, shall we say, from a financial point of view.

But, you know, it worked. I’m still here. Most of them are still here, apart from poor old Rob. So the thing is, is that, yeah, we may have been slipshod and loose in the way that we handled ourselves, but we are still here, still smiling, still playing, most of us. And, you know, it worked and it gave you a backstory and a legacy that is very, very interesting, because you didn’t do things normally the way that other groups did them.

New Order self-produced a lot of their albums, but you used Steve Osborne for Get Ready. Was there any reason you felt you needed or wanted to use an outside producer for the album?

Yeah, the reason was Barney said, “I don’t want me and you to argue. So let’s get somebody else in and we won’t do the production.” And I said, “Listen, arguing, we’ve done great productions. Why the hell do you want to change that now?” So ironically, instead of Barney arguing with me about production, because me and Mike Johnson, the engineer, used to do all the producing, he then started arguing with Steve Osborne.

So I was just sat there going, “Oh, fuck,” you know, “this is a blessing on one hand.” But Steve Osborne did a great job and he was very patient and he was very, very good with him in particular. And interestingly, we got him in to work on Waiting for the Sirens Call. Because we were writing tracks that were slightly different from each other; one was rocky, one was heavy, one was, you know, soft rock, one was dance-y, one was dance-y soul-y, he decided to get a producer for each genre, and I was going, “Oh, my God, no, we had enough trouble with one producer. We don’t want nine.” And we ended up with nine producers. Barney sacked all, one by one. In the end, he actually sacked Steve Osborne twice. Sacked him, brought him back, and then sacked him again.

And I said, “Surely, mate, you’re not coming again, are you?” and he went, “No, I’m not coming back again Hooky. Bye.” I went, “Bye, mate,” and I was like, “Oh, my Jesus!” It became absolutely ridiculous.  I think the thing was, that after the very sad demise of Rob Gretton, Barney decided that he could take command. And it’s true, you know, if you can’t do anything, if your lead singer won’t sing. So you can’t do it, and he realised that and he started acting like that.

New Order has been in the news in the last week or so. How many original members of a band does that band need to keep touring under the band’s name?

Well, my mate summed it up very well. He said it’s not a band, it’s a brand.

The actual fight we had legally was that they stole the trademark. In my opinion, they stole the trademark, in their opinion, they took it for better use, which was the three of them. So they transferred the trademark from the four of us to the three of them, and they paid me one pence in the pound, one cent in the dollar. They thought that that was all right for 30 years work, and I didn’t. So I fought to get the brand back and have it redone, but unfortunately, one well-off guy fighting three well-off guys and gals is usually a bit one sided, and they ended up launching two extra high court actions against me. One was for passing myself off as New Order, and the other one was for passing myself off as Joy Division at the same time, and when I had the three high court actions going, I could not afford to do it. My wife threatened to leave me if I didn’t stop, so I had to stop because that was the choice. And so none of us were satisfied. It would have been easier for them to buy me off, but instead, we decided that we’d spend five million just fighting each other’s egos in the courts. 

So it was one of those things. they don’t sound like New Order. They didn’t when Steve and Gillian were there. That music that they play as New Order, doesn’t sound anything like New Order to me. The music that I play, I try and transcribe New Order faithfully because that’s what makes me happy, and that’s what makes me happy with Joy Division. I’ve never pretended to be either group. I’ve always said that it’s me playing our music. Them bastards have never done that, you know, and they’ve been supported by the friends and they’ve earned millions, in my opinion, pretending to be New Order. So he’s just carrying it on, and as long as the fans go and see him, then he’s right, he’s pulling it off.What can you say?

It’s a very strange position to be in, but I am much happier without the politics that came along in New Order. I have to suffer it at arm’s length because I’m still a 25 percent owner of the New Order brand. It’s just that I don’t get to use it because they took it. So I mean, he must have done a deal with Steve and Gillian. I hope they’re getting more than me.

What I’m delighted about is that we still know how to make a fascinating story. Even now, 46 years later, we can still make complete twats of ourselves. New Order’s been very good at that. Very good at that.

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PETER HOOK & THE LIGHT July 2026 Australian Tour Dates

Monday 13^th July – ADELAIDE, Hindley St. Music Hall

Thursday 16^th July – BRISBANE, The Tivoli

Friday 17^th July – MELBOURNE, Palais Theatre

Saturday 18^th July – SYDNEY, The Enmore Theatre

Monday 20^th July – PERTH, Astor Theatre

Tickets: https://metropolistouring.com/peter-hook-and-the-light-2026/

The 2020s have been a particularly productive phase for Turner, making three albums with Brisbane-based musician Helen Franzmann (Mckisko) under the Mess Esque moniker, playing with Adalita Srsen (Magic Dirt), Mick Harvey (The Birthday Party, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, PJ Harvey), and Marty Brown (Art of Fighting) as part of Bleak Squad, and his latest project, Fancy Weapon, which features Joel Silbersher (GOD, Hoss, Tendrils), Claire Birchall (Smoked Salmon, Paper Planes) and Guy Maddison (Mudhoney, Lubricated Goat, Bloodloss).

We talked to Turner about starting Fancy Weapon, the drivers for his recent productivity, how he approaches working on new music projects, maintaining creativity, balancing making music with making art, and Dirty Three currently hitting their peak.

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I read you’re influenced by records your older siblings had in the house. Was there anything in particular that inspired you into wanting to pick the guitar up?  

Yeah, I think probably all of it. A lot of 60s stuff, garage stuff and mainstream. I just always liked music a lot. And then when I was 15, I was kind of getting bored of all my hobbies and collecting cards or stamps and shit, just whatever, playing football, you know, and I just thought I should learn the guitar.  

Did you have particular guitar heroes then?  

There’s people I really like, Neil Young, definitely. I’m a fan of a lot of the guitar you hear on those kind of 60s garage rock records, early Kinks and stuff. I love all that stuff. Like back then, that influenced me a lot, I guess. And then punk rock, you know, and all the new music that came out in the late ‘70s was a big influence and kind of gave people permission to do anything really, you’re allowed to make any sort of music you liked. I guess it kind of allowed music to be more of an art form, I think, in a way that reached out to a lot of people I knew who I ended up meeting. 

Because before music came around, what did you want to, I guess, be growing up? Did you have any plans for what you were going to do?  

I wanted to be a scientist.  

Oh, really? 

Probably. I did at one point. But no, I think I can’t remember not wanting to be a musician, even though I didn’t pick up guitar until I was like 14, 15. I don’t think I thought about it. And then once I had started playing music, there was just no question about following some sort of career, even though I didn’t really see music as being a career. But it was just all I wanted to do.  

You went to university, though? 

I did go to university and I dropped out after two years. I realised I wasn’t interested at all in what I was doing. 

What were you studying?  

It was just like an arts degree. Studying biology, psychology, humanities, sciences. 

I was reading an interview that you did for Mess Esque, where you were talking about your weaknesses and you said, “I have never been technically great, I don’t have a musical ear to accurately discern melody, I can’t sing in tune and I can’t whistle. I can work out a guitar line of someone else’s but it takes me time and I don’t find it easy.” Those would generally be seen as quite key musical attributes, especially when playing with other people, so what kept you going to think you could have a career in music?  

I think it just happened. I just loved playing guitar. I played in a high school band, we used to play covers. I think my first gig was probably when I was 15, but by the time school had ended, a lot of punk rock stuff was coming out, and I started meeting people who were interested in that sort of music, and hanging out with them, and then just joining a band, and then just opportunities came. We would play music and then we’d write songs and then people would say, “Oh, come and play.” And so my career kind of just happened like that. I wasn’t like actively pursuing it as such. 

I just loved playing music and hanging out with them. The Melbourne music scene was a beautiful thing, you know, like it was it was a home for misfits and there are all sorts of people there playing all sorts of different types of genre and anything that wasn’t mainstream, we’d all be in, playing in these small pubs and venues. It was a real community and it felt like there was a lot of respect between people. It was a home for people who didn’t fit in anywhere else. I think music’s really great like that. It gives someone an alternate kind of life from maybe what’s expected of people. 

We’re here to talk about Fancy Weapon, the new band you’re in with Claire Birchall, Joel Silbersher and Guy Maddison. How did the band come about? 

Fancy Weapon came about initially from me and Joel Silbersher. I’ve known Joel for years and we’d always talked about starting a project. We’d actually even written songs for various kind of ideas of bands that that had never got past the drawing board, really. But we had a few songs written for this, what became Fancy Weapon and we’d done demos of them. Guy Maddison, was an old friend of mine. He used to live in Sydney when I met him originally in the ‘80s and he ended up going to America and living in Seattle for a long time and he ended up joining Mudhoney. Then he came back to Australia and moved to Melbourne for the first time. I love his bass playing and I invited him to join me and Joel in this project we were working on. I gave him the demos and then we just needed a drummer. So Joel knew Claire Birchall, and there we were. It worked straight away. 

How do you approach doing something new? Do you approach it with an expectation that it’s going to work from the start or does everyone just keep it very casual initially? And if things don’t work out, everyone just walks away?  

A good thing about Guy, he’s very motivated. He likes to get things working and moving. A problem often with bands is you get together and you really need people to make things happen. So Guy was keen, and in a way, that was part of the reason that I invited him, too, because I knew that he would help get things moving along, because me an d Joel hadn’t managed to. We’d had those demos for like three or four years and nothing had happened.  I wanted us to play gigs and I wanted us to make an album and be a thing, so I did have some expectations, but how well and how quickly that happened was really up to chance and how well it worked. We worked well together.  

Was there a specific point where you knew it would work out? 

I think straight away it felt good. The demos we started were the first songs we tried. And we’re all like seasoned musicians, we kind of know what we’re doing and we know how to get things done, we know how to play with other people. And so it wasn’t that hard. It seemed to just fall in place quite naturally. I think our personalities matched enough that it was easy, actually.  

When you and Joel started writing the songs, were there musical references that you were looking to sound like? You mentioned the 60s garage and psychedelia before and that was the vibe I got from listening to the album. 

Yeah, absolutely, and bringing Guy and Claire in, they’re both fans of the synthesizer and that sort of music a lot and I was really keen to kind of incorporate that into the whole psychedelia, and also song-based. I did want something different to the other things I do. I’ve got quite a few projects on the go and I don’t want projects to be too similar. And then I really like that sort of music. It’s so much fun. 

The last five or six years have been really busy for you in terms of doing new stuff and then also fitting in a Dirty Three album and tour. Was there anything that drove this productivity?  

It might be that my kids are now old enough to look after themselves, almost all of them. I’ve got three kids and the youngest is going to turn 18 at the end of the year, and so he’s just doing his last year at school, and with the others, one’s left home. Parenting is a lot of obligations and it takes up a lot of your energy and time. And it’s great but I think my social life suffered a bit during all that and so I’ve kind of come out the end and I’ve just got a lot of free time and might as well just do what I need to do.  

A lot of these projects, they started quite a few years ago. Like with Fancy Weapon, we did those demos probably like six years ago. With Bleak Squad, that was started just before COVID and during COVID it pretty much froze, so that took like four years. Maybe it’s because of COVID that they’ve all kind of come to the fore right now. 

I was going to ask you about the impact COVID had on you, because Mess Esque also started during that time. Obviously, Melbourne had it pretty bad in terms of lockdowns. Was it a time where there was a lot of talking about doing things because you couldn’t do anything and then afterwards was it like “Oh, we talked about doing all these things, we probably should actually do them”? 

Well, live shows had stopped pretty much completely but I’ve got a little music studio and I was allowed to go there. So it was a very prolific time for me actually, because I was just spending all day recording. For a lot of the time, me and my partner would go halves in taking the day to work while the other would stay with the kids at home. My studio isn’t in my house but I was allowed to go there even with the lockdown rules, so I actually did a lot of work and it was a very prolific time. Maybe that’s another reason why this has all happened, because I had so much material to work with. 

Is that typical for you, do you normally have a lot of ideas? Being involved with so many projects at the moment, do you ever worry you’re going to run out of ideas?  

I recommend to any artist to get their own studio because it does allow for a lot of creativity. It’s great to have a space that is set-up. You set up your workspace and then after you leave, when you come back, it’s all ready to go, so you save a lot of time, like having to pack things down and set them up again and it helps with the creative flow, I think. I’ve always been like this. I’ve always had recording devices and made recordings. There’s so much stuff that never sees the light of day to the public, so I’m constantly working on things. I just love doing it. And most of it comes from just improvising. 

You’ve known most of the people you’ve worked with recently for a while. Do you feel under any pressure when you start a new project with people that you know socially but not necessarily have made music with before?  

Well, something like Bleak Squad, where I’ve known Mick Harvey for a long, long time, he’s guested with Dirty Three at times, but I’ve never really played in a project with him, there’s a mutual respect there. Each person in a project has got their own job, like the bass player’s there to play bass and the drummer’s there to make up the drums, so everyone kind of leaves everyone else and trusts in them to bring their own art to the project. That is the great thing about collaborating with people, the different approaches and the different ideas that come in. All the groups I’m in, there’s a lot of respect between the people. I don’t think a group can last that long if you don’t respect the other players. 

When you start working with new people, does band politics and democracy in decisions ever become a problem?  

Well, some groups have a main member who will probably write most of the songs and direct people. But is there a group like that I’m in? I don’t think there is. Most of my groups aren’t like that. Most of them are democracies, which have their own problems too, which means everything like the cover art has to be passed by everybody, which can slow things down. But I think it’s fine, usually you work it out. Dirty Three’s kind of operated that we each have our own kind of areas of the work that we deal with. Like Warren will deal with – apart from just playing the music – Warren will deal with most of the public relations and doing interviews and I deal mostly with – apart from playing guitar – I deal with the artwork and the production of merchandise and the management of all those sort of things. There’s quite a lot of work involved, apart from just playing the music in a band. 

With Bleak Squad and Fantasy Weapon, you’re, in bands where you’re not the only guitarist. Have you had to adjust to that change?  

No. No, it’s good playing with other players. Me and Adelita play quite differently, and we have different sounds. I think it works well. And same with me and Joel Silbersher, we’re actually getting this almost tag team soloing going and things, which is so much fun. 

Is the soloing of the Fancy Weapon songs you or Joel or both of you?  

We both do it. Like I’ll do a couple of lines and then he’ll do the same. We kind of ham it up a bit sometimes! But Fancy Weapon has a lot of humour about it, and the music’s really good too, I think. 

The projects you’ve done recently have been collaborations and it’s been a while since your last solo album, Don’t Tell The Driver, which came out in 2013. Did you miss the camaraderie of working in a group with other people?  

I’m really glad I did that record. It was a lot of work.  The record has got horn players and strings and stuff, and when I played it live, I did it live with a big band, so I had maybe eight people on stage, playing all sorts of things. But I found that I ended up having to be the music manager, there was so much just coordinating people, I guess almost like conducting or something, so it didn’t leave any room for me actually playing myself. It really affected my whole experience of playing and the music too, I think, a bit. So that didn’t really work.  

But I was going to make another record, and that’s how Mess Esque started, because I was looking for a singer, because I wanted to work with vocals on the next record – I did a bit on Don’t Tell Driver, there’s some vocals – and that’s how I met Helen Franzmann. It became more of a collaboration, so we made it a project. All my solo stuff got put on the side, but I do get asked to do solo things every now and then. 

More recently, last year, I got asked to do the Polly Harvey support of her Australian tour, Even though I’d kind of put my solo stuff to bed, it was too much of a great opportunity to pass up, and so I pretty much wrote all new stuff to play on that tour. So I think I will make another solo record, because I’ve got all this material that I quite like.  

Have the last few years of collaborating with people made you miss being a solo artist and having complete control? 

I don’t miss it a whole lot, because I find loop pedals hard to manage, and often in a show they’ll go awry, you know. You’ll make a bad loop, and it’s hard to back pedal. Whereas when you’re playing live with actual people and you go out a bit, it’s easy to fall back in, and it actually adds to the whole feeling, and the music breathes much more. Loop pedal, you’re really constricted with it, you know, it’s the same loop over and over and over, so it’s got the same tempo and the same feel. Of course, you can change loops, but you don’t. It’s just much better playing with real people, because the music can breathe, I think. I like a lot of music that’s made by people using loops, and it’s just a different thing, I guess. 

You mentioned Mess Esque, is that something you’re planning on returning to? 

It’s still going. We’re working on a record right now, as I speak. 

With everything else you’ve got on at the moment, how do you find the time?  

It’s not easy, but I do, you know. I do find the time. 

You’re touring with Bleak Squad in July and August, and playing some shows up in Queensland. You’re playing some album shows with Fancy Weapons in Melbourne, are there plans to do more shows around the country?  

Yeah. We just played the other night, and we’ve got some more stuff coming up. I’ve got an art show, too, in September at the Abbotsford Convent, which I need to start working on. 

With all the music going on, have you had to put your art on the back burner, or is it something you still find time or make time to work on?  

Yeah, you do, because, I think any of these projects, you need a bit of a clear run. It’s not like I can do three or four things in one day, although I have done that. But especially with painting, I think you really need a clear run, because usually there’s a pattern. I find that you start working on some paintings, you have ideas, and then you start working on the paintings, and the first kind of period, maybe the first five, six paintings, they’re not very good. You’ve got to find that spot, there’s a sweet spot, I think you hit for things that you like yourself, because you’ve got to like it yourself if you want to show it. It takes me a while to get into the groove, especially if I haven’t done it for a while., to get the inspiration and the ideas really, really flowing to a place where you’re enjoying it and you think your work is worthwhile. 

Do you paint your landscapes on location or are they worked on in the studio, from photos or memories or imagination? 

No, most of my landscapes are done plein air, so I’ll go out and paint them. I might work on them in the studio a bit later, not often, but not always. I’ve got a place I go down at Phillip Island, down here. It’s like two hours south of Melbourne, southeast, and it’s a place I go and it’s right on the ocean there, and it’s called Surf Beach, Phillip Island, and I’ve done a whole series of the path from the house to the beach and then the ocean there. I’ve done like 100 paintings or something, but they’re all a bit different. Once I painted it, I did a view looking east along the coast with the beach there, and then I was reading Moby Dick, and I ended up putting a whale in it, but 12 months later, a whale washed up in exactly that spot. How’s that? Weird. It was kind of sad, but it’s an amazing thing seeing a whale washed up. They’re very big. 

The Bleak Squad album cover, it’s just a photo of you, so presumably you weren’t involved in the artwork for that? 

Yeah, no, the Bleak Squad people, they had strong ideas for that record, strong ideas about what they wanted, and we all went with it. 

And is the Fancy Weapon cover something you’ve created? 

No, Claire Birchall did that. I made a film clip, the ‘Squirmin’ Merman’ film clip, which you can see somewhere on YouTube probably and Claire made the ‘Squid’ film clip, and there’s going to be another one coming out that Guy made for ‘27 minutes’.  

Given you’re often heavily involved in the album artwork, was it difficult to have given up the opportunity this time? 

No, I mean, I don’t want every band I play in to have my art on the thing. With the Mess Esque covers, the second record did, but the next record was someone else’s art. Dirty Three always has my art, and my solo stuff does too.  

It was a bit of a surprise when the last Dirty Three album and tour happened. Is it just a case of when the stars align as to whether there’ll be more Dirty Three in the future?  

Yeah, very much. Both Jim and Warren are very busy with other things, they have numerous projects, as you know, I’m sure. I guess a lot of it’s Warren’s availability has opened up recently more, so we did Australia in 2024, and then we did Europe last year, late last year, and then we’ve just done a tour in America. And we’ve got more shows in Europe at the end of this year, in November, a couple of festivals and then a few headlining shows. We’re actually like we’re hitting our peak as far as audience goes. Our audience is like the biggest it’s ever been. It’s crazy. And we’re what, 30 something years into our career. It’s great. It’s nice to play to a lot of people. 

***

Fancy Weapon’s eponymous album is out now.

Fancy Weapon are launching the album with a show on Saturday July 4 at the Tote in Melbourne. Tickets.

***

Hi Lydia. How are you? It looks like you’re at home in New York? How is it, you’ve got a new Mayor? 

Oh, I’m perfectly fine. Yes, I’m in Brooklyn but I’m hardly ever here. It’s just fantastic. I’m touring from, I guess, March until the end of July this year, so I’m hardly ever here. I know when I am, I hardly ever leave my house. 

You moved to New York at 16. Did you ever regret that?  

Hell no. I regret I didn’t leave and move to New York when I was 12. It would have been a little hard to get by, so I went when I should have. 

What was your plan as a 16 year old in New York?  

To just get the hell out of my home and go get the hell to New York and start doing shit. So I did it. That’s it. Just did it.  

New York presumably isn’t the same as 1970s New York. Is there anything you miss about how it was? 

No place is the same as 40 or 50 years ago. No, I don’t miss anything. I’m not nostalgic. It was fucking Beirut on the Hudson. Every other building was bombed out or destroyed. People getting shot in the streets. I don’t miss it, but I don’t miss the past. I live in the present. Not too far in the future because that would be too horrifying. 

You seem busier than ever. As you just mentioned, you’re touring and you’ve just released an album with Marc Hurtado. 

Well, that’s one of the live Suicide shows. I have two unreleased albums, one with a Palestinian musician and François Cambuzat I don’t know why anybody doesn’t step in about this right now, and one with Sylvia Black, which is like jazz noir. I just came from an exhibition in Zurich called The Kaleidoscope of Nothingness, which is like entering into a bookworm’s head. There’s words all over the walls and three floors in all fashion of text, like text on paper, on photographs, on clothing, on cloth, with a Swiss artist, Dion Girard, and an American artist who lives in Paris, Kit Brown. So it’s all different, what I’m doing. It’s interesting to just go with the availability at the moment. 

Do you ever need to take time out to recharge?  

I could be the laziest person you’ve ever seen. Of course I take time out. It’s just certain things have to be done when there’s a possibility to do it. But like I say, when I’m home, forget it.  You’ll find me probably in bed reading a book and watching two different shows at once, a movie and a show. I’m not somebody that has to constantly work, but right now, as a juggler, a professional juggler, it’s just all different things.  It keeps it interesting.  

You’re coming over to Australia again this month… 

 You can’t keep me out. You can’t keep me out! I’m coming back to shake it up! 

… and you’re doing a tour with Andrew Coates from Black Cab of the songs of Suicide and Alan Vega and then you’re doing some spoken word shows with Tex Perkins supporting. Your Wikipedia page mentions that you befriended Alan Vega and Martin Rev soon after you moved to New York.  

I haven’t looked at that in a long time. But yes, they were some of the first friends I met in New York. It was one of the first concerts I went to. There was 10 people and Suicide.  

Were they a band on your radar that you’d hear about and wanted to go and see? 

No, I had no idea who they were. This is like ‘76 or ‘77, before they had released anything. I had just gotten to New York and I just happened to be living around the corner from Max’s Kansas City and just went there. And there it was.  I mean, Suicide and the group Mars, who are on the No Wave New York album, were definitely defining moments, you know, that “OK, I’m in the right place now.” Mars is still one of my favorite bands from the No Wave New York album. 

Alan and Martin’s public persona, at least to me, was that they were slightly terrifying people. The stories of Suicide often focus on how much the audiences hated them and the violence towards the band.  

They’re very nice. That’s because they had a lot of passion and people are frightened of passion. They also had a lot of sensitivity. I mean, they’d go from doo-wop, ‘Cheree’ to ‘Frankie Teardrop’. This was the beauty of Suicide.  

And you found them approachable when you first met them?  

I just went up to them. Why not? Of course. People were afraid of me at that time, too, and I hadn’t even done anything yet. So that was easy.  

I know when the first started out, they were very polarizing. Were they more liked by audiences and the press by the time you were seeing them?  

Oh, no, they were not. There was ten people in the audience. They were not more liked. 

Plus, they went on tours where they were hated even more, like with The Clash or with The Cars. They weren’t afraid of being hated. But then again, neither was I at the time or neither am I still to this day. 

So that was a good lesson in how you just have to go through with what you have to do, especially if nobody else is doing it. The beauty of doing their music or reinvigorating it is there’s so much room for me to also put in whatever I feel like saying at the time. So I can bring politics into it, especially when there’s a song called ‘Vietnam Vet’, where I can bring in more than what their lyrics initially said. It gives me a lot of leeway, and, therefore, it’s never the same twice in a row. So it’s very interesting, while still maintaining the pathos that they had. I mean, I had been doing ‘Frankie Teardrop’ for 10 years before I started doing Suicide with Mark Hurtad, or carrying it on, and I also had done a duet with Alan on one of his albums.  

Are they a difficult band to cover? Their sound is so unique is it hard to balance a respect to them while putting your own stamp on their songs? 

Well, but the thing is this, it’s a lot easier now with technology and all of that. It’s far more aggressive than what Suicide ever was. What I’m bringing now is a more sinister and sexy version with Andrew of Black Cab, but with the same intensity.  

You’re still friends with Martin, has he commented on your take of his songs? 

Yes, and also Alan Vega’s widow. We’re very good friends. She’s played some shows with myself and Mark Hurtado in Europe before. She’s happy that, you know, the energy carries on. A lot of people, of course, never got to see Suicide.  

Someone told me a promoter was trying to bring them out to Australia but Alan wouldn’t do the flight because it was too long without a cigarette. Does that sound like the Alan you knew? 

I have no idea if that’s a true story. It’s a brutal flight, let’s face it. I stop in LA before I hit Wellington and then on to the rest. It’s brutal. You have to be a road dog to do it. You can’t just decide, “Coming to Australia!” you have to be dedicated to the cause. 

When you first saw them, what was it about them that inspired you?  

Just the intense emotion. I mean, and the subject matter, which was unlike most other songs at the time, but also the doo-wop influence, which was very interesting to me.  Like some songs, they just sounded like a dark, greasy, rainy alley in the back of some rat-infested hell hole on the Lower East Side, and then the pathos of ‘Harlem’ or ‘Frankie Teardrop’, or even ‘Ghost Rider’. 

You mentioned ‘Frankie Teardrop’, which you covered it for series of EPs that were released for Alan’s 70th birthday. Was there anything particular about that song that talked to you and made you want to record it? 

Well, it’s just a very American tragedy of domestic violence and just the failure of society to help you provide, and therefore, the only solution seems like murder and suicide. And although I’m sitting here man-spreading and mansplaining, I think doing it from a female point of view, was very interesting to me.  

There’s a lot of bands that Suicide obviously influenced across the ‘80 and beyond. Does it surprise you that they have the legacy they have?  

Well, I mean, a lot of groups were influenced, probably, but where did they take it? Who really took it to the next level? You know what I mean? So what were they influenced by? Using synthesizers and shitty equipment? I mean, I can’t really think that’d be the same way.  I can’t think of who my, you know, progeny is. I can’t really think of who Suicide’s progeny is, even though there might’ve been some inspiration taken from them. 

I read that Alan was quite ambivalent about those bands because of that reason. He had a similar mindset to you about the bands he was inspiring. 

I always say, don’t blame me for other people’s art crimes.  

Does it surprise you that Bruce Springsteen was such a fan?  

Ah, that’s great. I wish Bon Jovi would cover one of my songs. I mean, that probably cemented their retirement fund. I mean, you know, he was such a fan that he did a whole album, Nebraska, that’s almost Alan Vega-ish. 

How Martin and Alan feel about that? Did they felt ripped off?  

Oh no, I’m sure they felt honored to get the fucking money that came through. Plus, I mean, Bruce Springsteen, early Bruce Springsteen, whatever he’s become, which is just whatever he’s become, we’re still talking about the working class, the dilemma, romance, hardworking people, the American dream as a nightmare. So there was some compatibility there. 

As you mentioned before, you’re doing the songs of Suicide and Alan Vega shows in Australia with Andrew from Black Cab. How did that collaboration come about? 

Well, it was Sean Simmons who books me. He suggested it when I was there last time that we do a show, I guess we had a date to fill, and it just worked out very well. I can’t bring Mark Hurtado, it’s too long for him to fly from, from Montpelier, where he lives. He’s got too much physical pain. It would take forever and he just can’t do it, it’s just too much. And again, it’s just bringing another sensibility to the material, which is interesting to me because I’ve been doing it with Hurtado for quite a while now, so it will bring a different sensibility to it, like I said, more sinister, more sexy, more devious. The thing is it’s very freestyle for the lyrics, for my participation. The music remains in the structure it was for the most part, but I’m allowed to go wherever I want because it allows it. There’s a little landscape of the music, which makes it very liberating. 

The first Suicide album is well known, but I don’t think the rest of their albums, or Alan’s or Martin’s solo stuff is as well known. What would you recommend someone should listen to after that first album? 

Well, I mean, right now, especially the last few years, there’s been a lot of Alan’s solo records coming out. So I think you just go to YouTube and you scroll through them. You know, Alan did quite a few different styles of music after Suicide. They’re just not that well known, the records. There’s a lot of them out there right now. We’re doing some songs from some of his solo albums to let people get a taste of that as well. Not just, you know, the obvious, obvious Suicide songs.  

And you’re also doing some shows with Tex Perkins. 

Can’t wait for those. That’s going to be fun. I don’t know what he’s pulling out. I think he might be using a laptop and maybe a guitar. We’re going to sing a song or two together as well. But I’m just doing spoken word.  

And that’s still your true love?  

Well, absolutely. I mean, it’s just mandatory. It’s necessary now more than ever, I think.  

We spoke a couple years ago just before your last Australian tour and you’d just finished up with Retrovirus, but you’re back doing music again?  

Well, I never stopped doing music. I never stopped doing music and I never stopped doing spoken word. And sometimes they’re combined. I have a project, Murderous Again, with Tim Dahl on bass and Matt Nelson on sax, and we’re going to Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City next week and we just came off a 10 day American tour. It’s like symphonies with provocative spoken word. It’s very much more Ornette Coleman than it has anything to do with rock. And now it’s up on Bandcamp, Murderous Again. It’s a very interesting format. 

No plans to bring that to Australia at the moment?  

Well, sure. I mean, but I can only do so much at one time. I’d love to bring it. In the meantime, it’s up on Bandcamp. That’s all I can say. 

You’ve also been working with a new band, Genre Is Death? 

Yes, they’re great. Their new album is just out on In the Red Records and it’s fantastic. And they were on tour with Murderous Again. Two piece out of Georgia, now in New York. They were on my podcast last week, The Lydian Spin. And I definitely say people should investigate because they’ve taken their influences from No Wave to alt, you know, Sonic Youth type stuff, but taken it somewhere else. It’s very interesting. The lyrics are great. The music is fantastic. So I’m highly promoting them. 

There’s another group too, also on Bandcamp, called Bog Creeper. They’re from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Another two piece. And a band called New City Slang, that’s from Tennessee, which is more like New York Dolls, and Stooges rock. But, you know, one of the reasons I have my podcast is to help promote what else is going on there now and what has come before. 

Do you find it easy to find new bands that you love or is it difficult to find something new that excites you? 

You know, I don’t even know how I got all the people. I mean, I think my podcast is at 450 episodes. I didn’t know everybody, people are recommended. Tim brings some, I bring some, some are suggested. With Genre Is Death, I was doing a show with Kevin Shea, drums and vocals, at a club and I saw Taylor, who’s the bass player, singer, and I just walked up to her and said, “Who are you? Come talk to me.” And that’s how I met them.  And so then we became fast friends and then we go on tour together. That’s how it works. Trust the witch. 

You do this mentoring role with new bands and you do empowerment workshops. Did you ever think about going into formal teaching? 

No, I just, I’m continuing to do workshops. I mean, that’s teaching enough. Teaching doesn’t pay enough, plus it’s too heartbreaking. What do you think I do when I’m out on stage? It’s public psychotherapy. It’s like a college education. It’s like a comedy show. That’s why I also have the podcast. It’s like an education and a present-day horror. That’s what we do. That’s what I do, ability and spin. Every introduction on my podcast is a wealth of trivial information. So go get yourself to college, go get yourself an education at the School of Hard Knocks. 

When we talked a couple of years ago, you also said you were really wanting to do a Big Sexy Noise revival.  

We did it in Europe this spring. We did it. It was great. And actually the, we will have copies of Big Sexy Noise live in Australia for sale at their merch stand. Yeah, it was fantastic. One of my favorite bands. 

You mentioned about being on tour in the U.S. Is there any sort of insulation from the current administration when you live in New York?  

I’m a news junkie. I know everything that’s going on, all the numbers, the statistics and the horror never stops. But at night, night rolls around, art is the salve to the universal wound. There’s no isolation from the idiocy that’s happening, but we’ve been here before, hundreds of times. Every news story is absurd. Hence, why I must continue to do what I do. Just in the face of somebody who’s lied 67,000 times, I must tell the truth, or at least according to the way I see it. It’s mandatory.

***

LYDIA LUNCH PERFORMS THE SONGS OF SUICIDE AND ALAN VEGA
featuring Andrew Coates (Black Cab)
Sun 14 June – Meow, Wellington, NZ (as part of Lōemis) – Tickets
Wed 17 June – The Tote, Melbourne (with Black Cab) with guests Belle Phoenix & Jeffrey Wegener – Tickets – SELLING FAST
Thu 18 June – The Tote, Melbourne (with Black Cab) with guests Tongue Dissolver – Tickets – NEW SHOW
Sat 20 June – Brisbane Powerhouse, Brisbane – Tickets
Sun 21 June – Factory Floor, Sydney with guests Rebel Yell – Tickets
Wed 24 June – Ed Castle, Adelaide with guests Messianic Gloss – Tickets
Thurs 25 June – The Milk Bar, Perth with guests Streets of Separation – Tickets

SO REAL IT HURTS – LYDIA LUNCH & TEX PERKINS
Fri June 19th (two shows) – Kew Courthouse, Melbourne – SOLD OUT
Sat June 20th – Brisbane Powerhouse, Brisbane – Tickets
Sat June 27th – Riverside Live at Phive, Sydney – Tickets

Additionally, a special one-off screening of the film LYDIA LUNCH:  The War is Never Over has been announced for Melbourne, with Lydia introducing the film herself:

LYDIA LUNCH: THE WAR IS NEVER OVER (A FILM BY BETH B.)
Tue June 16 – Brunswick Picture House, Melbourne
(Personally introduced by Lydia) – Tickets

The band’s debut album, Rattlesnakes (1984), received critical acclaim for its witty, reference-filled songwriting and jangly guitar sound. Follow-up albums Easy Pieces (1985) and Mainstream (1987) further cemented his reputation before the band disbanded in 1989.

After moving to New York City, Cole launched a solo career with his self-titled album Lloyd Cole (1990). Over the course of the following decades he has continued to release a steady stream of solo work, exploring styles ranging from folk-rock to electronic minimalism. 

Ahead of his 2026 Australian tour, we talked to Lloyd about working with his former Commotions band mates, touring with Robert Forster and Grant McLennan as your opening act, learning that you shouldn’t try to replicate the sound of your recorded songs when you play them live, and loving Bob Dylan’s old man voice.

***

Hi Lloyd, looks like you’re at home today?

Yeah, this is my attic I’m in.

You’ve been in the US for a long time now, 35 years?

What is it? 37 years. I only did music professionally in the UK from ’83 to ’88, and then I moved over here. And there was never the plan to stay, just various forms of inertia.

Yeah, same with me in Brisbane. I only came for five years, and it’s been 20 years, somehow. Living there so long, does the last 12 months make any sense to you?

Oh, the last 12 months in America? Yeah, it makes total sense, because it’s not really just the last 12 months. It was the previous eight years before that, four years of basically the denial of the election.

The denial of the election was really the setup for the next election. We’re very sheltered in Massachusetts from it. It’s quite sane around here. There’s not a lot of people saying things like “Fake News” when you say anything, but nevertheless, we are in America. I admit, the first time that I had to cross the border, being a Green Card holder, I was a bit scared.

I mean, I’m not particularly scared of being sent back to have to be in the UK, but I’m quite scared of being sent to some, basically a prison, is what they’re doing to some people. Yeah, so it’s a mess, and it’s a disgrace, and all of those things. And what’s going to happen? I don’t know.

A long time ago, you went to UCL [University College London] and you studied law, and I was interested why you wanted to study law.

I didn’t. During my final year of what we call high school over here, I’m not even sure what we called it over there, school, there was a form you had to fill out to apply for universities, called the UCCA [Universities Central Council on Admissions] form. I got really sick with something, I can’t remember what it was, but I was off school for about three weeks, and during those three weeks, everything to do with the UCCA form happened. Then I came back, and then maybe another six weeks later, somebody said to me, “So where have you applied to?” And I said, “What are you talking about?” So I had to rush into deciding what it was that I might want to do. I really like the idea of trying to go to Oxford to study a thing called PPL, which is politics, philosophy, maybe law? [Google says it’s Linguistics]. But I would have had to take a year out and sat the exam.

I just was 18. I didn’t want to take a year out, so I allowed my father and my housemaster, and they persuaded me that if I went to study law, they said, “Well, you can do anything with a law degree.” That was the exact words of my housemaster. And so I let them talk me into it.

It only took me about 10 weeks into the course, maybe three months, about halfway through. I went to the dean and said, “I hate this, I want to leave”. And he said, “Well, there’s no point leaving right now because there’s no way you can go halfway through the year. Why don’t you just finish the year? And if you still want to leave, then you can leave.” So very, very luckily, he gave me a nice reference, and I did then take a year out. Then, because of the reference that I got from him, I was able to just walk into Glasgow University and study some liberal arts for two years. And then then I dropped out again.

You were in London originally for your studies but then I think your parents moved to Glasgow. Is that what made you move to Glasgow?

They moved to Glasgow at the same time that I moved down to go to UCL. Then when I dropped out of UCL, I went to live with them in Glasgow for a bit before I got one of those rail cards and bummed around Europe with my pal. Then I came back to Glasgow and I applied to just get what was called an ordinary arts degree. The way that the degrees work in in Scotland, I think still does, is that you can do an ordinary degree, which is three years and you don’t specialise particularly. You’ve just got to get this and this and this to call it an ordinary arts degree, but after two years you decide you might want to do a master’s degree and then you choose what you’re going to focus on. And that’s where I was at when I dropped out. I’d just been accepted to do English and Philosophy. Then it turned out that I had a job, so that was that.

I read that you were making music in London in the time you were there.

Very, very, very, very, very sort of amateurish. I did I did one performance with a borrowed synthesiser from the guy that lived downstairs from me at London School of Economics. Kind of, I guess, almost their equivalent of open mic. No recollection of whether it involved words. I can’t remember. All I can remember is it involved a mannequin.

Was making music a serious direction you were wanting to take at that time?

I didn’t really have an idea. I just had this idea that I wanted to do music, and I was very, very lucky, really, that I was never in a situation to really do music until I actually was a little bit older. And I did eventually have an idea of what I wanted to do. I mean, the first generation of the Commotions from late ‘82 to mid ‘83, early ’83, that’s pretty unfocused shit. I mean, we tried. We were basically trying to sound like Scritti Politti or the Style Council or something, trying to take my Isaac Hayes obsession too far.

We only really hit upon what the Commotions became with just a couple of the songs that we wrote that were not anything, like they just didn’t fit into the idea for the previous incarnation of the band. It just took us a little while to go, “Well, this is better and we can actually do this.” It was as late the autumn of ‘83 before we actually really had an idea of what we were doing.

I spoke to Jim Reed from the Jesus and Mary Chain last year and he forever bemoans being in a band in the 1980s because he hated the music. How do you look back at the ‘80s?  He just hated the ‘80s music, I think he just really wanted to be in a band in the ‘60s.

There are all these great bands, but the ‘60s were shit as well. There’s always shit music. The thing is, if the Mary Chain had been at a different time, they would have been far less shocking, so the ‘80s were absolutely perfect for them because they seemed so unique. Listening back to them, they don’t seem that unique at all, but at the time, that sort of Phil-Spector-reverb-Wall-Of-Sound-guitar thing was quite shocking. I was entirely happy to be making music at the same time as ABC. I thought ABC were great.

It was the usual 20 minute Zoom interview and if I had longer, I think I would have argued with him, because growing up in the ‘80s and looking back at the ‘80s, it was such an exciting time because you could see you could turn on the radio or Top Of The Pops and there would be such a broad array of music. It was brilliant.

The great thing about the UK at that time was that there was no compartmentalisation because there were only certain outlets. There was only radio to play music for old people. There was only Radio One, an independent radio for pop music, and so it had to play everything. So you’d hear the Smiths or Aztec Camera, then you’d hear ABC and Soft Cell and then you’d hear Bucks Fizz or whatever was in the charts. Moving to America, seeing radio stations that only play one kind of music, just still depresses me. I love the idea that the radio stations would play every kind of music. Imagine just wanting to listen to a radio station that only plays music that you like. You never hear anything that surprises you.

The Commotions’ debut album, Rattlesnakes, is an undeniable 80’s classic. Your second album, Easy Pieces, was financially successful, but the band didn’t actually seem to like it.

I don’t know about the rest of the band, but the older I get, the less disappointed in that record I am. It doesn’t hold together as a whole album with a sound like Rattlesnakes, but the good stuff on it’s pretty good. The bad stuff is pretty shitty. But still, I don’t I don’t regret making it. I regret the record company putting such pressure on us to make it so quickly.

Presumably as the main songwriter, you felt most under pressure.

You know, I didn’t really feel that under pressure at the time. The songs on Rattlesnakes, none of the songs on the album were more than a year old when the album came out, so we just thought, “Well, we’ll just do it again. We’ll just write. We’ll write another 12, 13 songs and we’ll be away.” We were very lucky on Rattlesnakes that the only mediocre song that we had, we decided to leave off the album and so we had 10 good songs on the record. Making Easy Pieces, we just didn’t we didn’t get so lucky. There’s a couple of songs on the record that are not so good and the production is less focused. But still, it was very important to us that we didn’t just make another record that sounded like Rattlesnakes. We did want it to sound a bit more electric and a bit more expansive with brass and strings, there’s strings on Rattlesnakes, but we wanted to bring brass in, probably because I was obsessed by the brass on Exile on Main Street.

But, yeah, we didn’t love the record. I think when we made Mainstream, even though Mainstream took an awful lot of effort, it does have more of its own personality. I think we just got worse with every album. I think Mainstream is weaker than Easy Pieces, in retrospect. I think it’s more beautiful, but it’s weaker. And we made one really big mistake of letting the producer co-write a song with me, so it’s not really a Commotion’s song.

For Mainstream, you tried out Stewart Copeland as a producer. Why didn’t that work out?

Because he’s not really a producer. He’s just really just kind of a vibes guy. We needed quite a strong producer at that time, because, we, as a band, we were sort of falling apart, really. We needed somebody to say, “This is the direction,” because, you know, Neil would want to be sounding like the Gang of Four and I’d want to be sounding like the Rolling Stones or whatever. Or Neil would want to sound like Talking Heads and I’d want to sound like something else. So it was it was a difficult time.

If Stewart had been around when we were making a record that we knew exactly what we wanted to do, it could have been wonderful because he’s brilliant. But he’s more of an arranger, a vibe guy, you know. He’d been more the kind of guy that, in retrospect, you could bring in to just work with you on arrangements, he wouldn’t necessarily have needed to be there for the whole record.

The band broke up then, was that an easy decision to make?

It wasn’t that difficult because we didn’t have another record. We didn’t have an idea for another record. We’d pretty much taken all the energy we had to make that last record before we split up. If there’d been a great idea for a fourth record, I’m sure we would have all wanted to make it.

What impact did that have on you? At the time, did you think it was the end of everything?

Kind of. I certainly didn’t take it for granted that I could be a solo artist, because of all the musicians in the band, I was by far the weakest. So when I started making demos for my what became my first solo album, I was really surprised that I’d actually, I think almost like by osmosis, just absorbed a lot of stuff from Neil and Blair and Stephen. I could do stuff that I didn’t know I could do because it was never my job in the band to do that. I could program drums, I could arrange strings, I could play guitar a little better than I thought I could. And so making that first record was really exciting because it was just very much like starting again, like making Rattlesnakes.

You’ve worked with your former Commotions’ band mates Neil Clark and Blair Cowan quite a lot since the Commotions. How has that working relationship changed?

I mean, yeah, it was very different when it was a band because the band was pretty democratic in terms of what it wanted to do. Now, basically, Neil and Blair will occasionally submit song ideas to me, and if I want to do it, I do it, and if I don’t, I don’t. I mean, that was the same way in the band, but what was done with the songs was done by a band and now what is done to the songs is generally done with my supervision. So it’s different, but it’s still a very healthy relationship with both of them, especially with Blair, because Blair comes up with melodic stuff that I like, that I don’t come up with. And Neil, in the same way, maybe not as often, but Neil comes up with ideas that I just wouldn’t. And, you know, why would you want to work with a musician that just agrees with everything you do and comes up with the same things you do? There’s no point. It’s like, I know Prince thought it was great, but the Black Album sounds very much just like Prince and nobody else.

I don’t want to work with people that think the same way I think. I like if people where we can both appreciate certain types of beauty, like we might both listen to a particular Steely Dan song and agree that it’s beautiful, but on the other hand, I know Blair still loves ‘Babylon Sisters’, and I still hate it and yet we still work really well together. So there is definitely something to him bringing stuff to me that is out with my palate.

When you moved to New York, was that a spur of the moment decision?

It wasn’t a long-term plan to stay. I was in London, I split up with the band that I’d been in for all of my musical career, and I split up with the girlfriend that I’d been living with for several years. I was very close to buying a sad person’s apartment and I just got a wake up call. The surveyor came in and said, “This building that you’re thinking about buying the flat in is going to need all this work on the roof. I recommend that you don’t buy it.”

And I just went, “What the fuck am I doing? Why am I staying in London? I’ve got nothing in London. Why don’t I just go somewhere that I always thought was exciting.” And every time I’d ever been to New York, I always woke up really early in the morning and wanted to get out and do things, because I was just so excited to be in New York. So I went to New York. I took a sublet on an apartment for six months and the idea was maybe I’ll stay there long enough to make a record and then see what my plan is after that. I met my wife and we got married and we liked being in New York, so we stayed there.

Those first couple of solo albums, you got together a great band, and you got the legendary Robert Quine [Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Lou Reed, Tom Waits, and many more] in on guitar. What was it like working with him?

When I moved to New York, I had a list of guitar players I wanted to work with that was Robert Quine and Richard Thompson, and I met Robert Quine in like the first month I was in New York because he was close friends with Fred Maher, and we got on. We got along well. Quine could be quite imposing, quite intimidating to other people, but we had a shared sense of humour. We definitely liked black humor. We ended up enjoying eating together a lot.

And I just didn’t take any of this bullshit in the studio. I remember the first time that we were putting together a solo, I just said, “Just do four takes.” I remember Fred saying, “Just make sure you record the first one, because that’s always the best one,” and we did. Quine would never play two solos remotely similar to each other, so I would take these solos and I just listen through them all and treat them like a lead vocal and make a chart and just put ticks on the bits I liked and crosses on the bit I didn’t like. Then I comped them all together, bounced them down to one track, and Quine’s like, “I don’t do that. I just do one takes.” I was like, “Well, listen to it,” and we did it on whatever the song was, and he was just like, “That is better.” And we got on pretty like a house on fire after that. He absolutely trusted me to take whatever he did and not make it worse. If I was going to edit things, I made it better. So we got on great.

And the band was great. Fred was either playing the drums or programming the drums or taking my drum ideas and making them better. Matthew Sweet was around playing bass, a great, great bass player and a great musician to have around because he would literally learn the song before I’d finished writing it.  You heard those stories about those guys that Dylan worked with in Nashville and how he used to love working with them because they were so fast, Matthew was like that.

When you were touring, Don’t Get Weird On Me, you got Robert Forster and Grant MacLennan as your opening act…

Yeah, I take full responsibility for the them reuniting.

What are your memories of that? It’s a pretty imposing opener to then have to follow.

I was pretty confident in those days [laughs]! Yeah, we traveled. We let them travel on the bus with us, so they were around the whole time. Robert was a joy. Grant was sneaking off quite a lot and didn’t seem like he was in a very good place. But the shows that they did were great. It was wonderful.

The press release for the tour you’ll bring to Australia says “And now I find myself approaching the end of my career,” which kind of makes me feel a bit sad.  You’re approaching an actual end date for actual retirement? Do musicians ever retire?

No, but I don’t want to be touring when I’m seventy five. I hope I’m still making records when I’m 75. And you never know. If some turnaround in my career made it possible for me to tour as comfortably as somebody like Dylan tours, then maybe I would want to tour till I’m 85. The way I tour is tiring. I can’t travel first class flying to Australia, it’s just too fucking expensive. It’s tiring, and you feel it. I just got back from Belgium and France, and my son’s here for Thanksgiving, a great big family get together, in fact, and he said to me yesterday, “Oh, I signed us up to play at this benefit concert on Friday,” and I was like, “You fucking what? I’m exhausted, I just played just played two tours.” But I’m going to do it because he’s my son.

I saw Paul McCartney a couple of years ago and at the end of the show he said “Thanks for coming. We’ll see you all again next time,” and it’s like “You’re 81. How can you even be thinking of the next tour,” but I see still touring and he’s been playing in the States the last few months. I know he’s not going to be slumming it, he’s going to be doing all in luxury, but he plays for like three hours a night and if you pay for the fancy expensive tickets you get like three-quarters of an hour of a soundcheck show with more songs.

My friend just went to see him last week and said he didn’t even drink any water. He didn’t even take breaks between songs to drink water. It’s just like straight on to the next one. He’s amazing. So who knows? Who knows? But I don’t want it to be my day job when I’m 75. My goal right now is to is to pay all the debts that I have from before and then make sure that everything is in place. Then if I want to do it, I’ll do it, and if I don’t want to do it, I won’t. I should have had all that in place in about 1995 but that was when I had the financial disaster, so I basically went from a position of great strength to a position of very great weakness in a period of about a year and it took me about 20 years to recover from it.

You came out with the last two albums but the upcoming tour isn’t in support of an album. Are still writing for a new album?

I’m almost always writing for a new album, but the recovery period after finishing an album is different. Sometimes you’re so exhausted working on a project, that you don’t have to think about it, you just don’t write for a while because your brain needs a break from it.

After I got finished with On Pain, I actually did have a really strong idea of what I wanted to do with the next record and I think that might have been the problem. I think my idea might have been too focused and, therefore, not flexible enough for me to be able to write fluently, because I had this very specific idea. So I’m now trying to find a way to take that specific idea and not lose it, and find a way to make it work within something that is not so clearly bound.

In interviews around that time you were talking about Sade’s fourth album and the minimalism in the instrumentation , that was the idea that you were progressing?

No, no, the idea was actually a lyrical idea. But absolutely, the idea of what I was trying to do with On Pain was to go in the direction of minimalism and in the direction of, I guess, maximalism. I was trying to have a pretty large contrast between the spare and the dense. I would still I would like to take the spare a lot further. In fact, I was talking to [producer] Chris Hughes, and we’ve been talking about ways to try and make tracks with just drums and vocals. It sounds very Rip Rig + Panic doesn’t it.

This tour is just you and your electric guitar. Given the more electronic nature of the last couple of albums, is it easy to work all the songs out for you to play like that? Or are there songs you would have liked to play that just don’t translate?

Certain ones, certain ones. I found a way to make three of the On Pain songs work with the acoustic guitar. No, four. I found a way to make four of them work, so half. With the electric guitar, I don’t know. I’m pretty sure ‘The Idiot’ will work, I’m pretty sure ‘On Pain’ will still work. Not sure about ‘Wolves’. In fact, I’m pretty sure ‘Warm By The Fire won’t work on electric. It worked nicely on acoustic because it kind of turned itself into like a skiffle song on acoustic.

That’s the challenge every record is, it’s finding a way to make it work live. I wish in many ways that I’d been forced into this position maybe sometime in the early 90s or late 80s, because then we would never have gone out on tour trying to sound like the record because it’s a fucking waste of time. I don’t know why anybody would want to go and see a live concert that sounds just like the record. Why would anybody want that? You’ve got the record already. You can listen to that. Surely a live concert is in some way different, bringing  a different aspect of the music out, focusing on different things and working with the obviously necessary limitations that you have live that you don’t have in the studio, those things can be fun and sometimes you end up going, ‘Oh, God, I wish I’d recorded it like that.”

I don’t wish I knew a lot of things when I was younger. I certainly have no desire to change the thought process that went into making the early records, but when it came to touring, I wish somebody had just said to me, “No point trying to get those string sounds live, there’s no fucking orchestra on stage. It looks stupid to have something sounding like really good strings on stage when there isn’t an orchestra. It looks wrong. Don’t do it.” My sound engineer for most of my touring in Europe, he won’t work with bands that have backing tracks. He’s just like, “No, not doing it,” and so many bands work with tracks these days.

Yeah, it’s kind of interesting. I kind of feel it’s gotten worse. Just going to see a gig is so expensive now and people expect it to sound exactly as they want, as they’re used to hearing it. I haven’t seen Bob Dylan for a while, probably about a dozen years, but I still love that he makes people so angry.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, one of my best friends was quite the opposite. My friend Dave texted me when he was watching a show recently and just said, “It’s the best show I’ve seen in decades. It was just fantastic.” I love the way that Dylan has made his music work with his old man voice.

I love his old man’s voice!

I love his old man’s voice nearly all the time. Sometimes when he tries to go to Fred Astaire at times, it’s like I can’t quite take that. There’s one song on Rough and Rowdy Ways where he’s crooning just a little bit beyond where I want to hear it. But the first song on that record, ‘I Contain Multitudes’, It’s just brilliant, I could listen to it every day.

Yeah, I really enjoyed it. I’m not a massive fan, or at least not an obsessive, I like some of his albums, but I’ve really liked his later period stuff.

I’m a massive fan and what he’s made me do recently is he’s made me want to go back and listen to all the records that I ignored because I knew they weren’t great records. I want to even go back into the mediocre records to find the little hidden gems in there, because I’m sure there are.

Before we wrap up, I realised there was a follow-up question to something we talked about earlier. When you got talked into initially studying Law, they told you about how you can do anything with a Law degree. Having switched to English and Philosophy, what were you planning on doing afterwards, before music came along?

Honestly, I think by that time, I think I already knew that I wanted to do this, but I also knew that I needed to be smarter, so I needed to expand my lexicon.

If I hadn’t have done that, if this hadn’t have worked out, I’d have found something that worked with enjoying literature and philosophy. I’m sure I’d have found some niche that kept me alive. It’s funny now, because looking back, I used to think if I if I wasn’t a musician, I would have been a teacher, but the only job outside of my job that excites me, that I think would have been a fun job to be, would have been an engineer working on roads and bridges. I do think that seems like a job that you would have massive satisfaction from, and it would be like puzzle solving the whole time. I love doing crosswords and puzzles, so it’d be like math puzzles and making the world better.

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Sunday 15 March 2026 – Metro Theatre, Sydney
Tuesday 17 March 2026 – Melbourne Recital Centre, Melbourne
Thursday 19 March 2026 – Factory Theatre, Sydney – SOLD OUT
Friday 20 March 2026 – Factory Theatre, Sydney – SOLD OUT
Sunday 22 March 2026 – The Tivoli, Brisbane
Tuesday 24 March 2026 – The Gov, Adelaide
Friday 27 March 2026 – Astor Theatre, Perth
Sunday 29 March 2026 – Odeon Theatre, Hobart 

https://www.destroyalllines.com/tours/lloydcole

We caught up with Oldham via Zoom in early April to discuss the making of The Purple Bird, the responsibilities of an artist to their audience, and the rationale for using the Bonnie “Prince” Billy moniker.

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I watched your ‘What’s In My Bag’ video that you did for Amoeba Records a couple of days ago and I was interested that you said you “represented” Bonnie “Prince” Billy and you used the ”We” word, as in “We did this, we did that.” What do you see Bonnie “Prince” Billy as being, if you’re a representative of it?

I think I see other people who have a public life as some sort of expressive artist, whether it’s an actor or a visual artist or a singer, sometimes get tied up in identity to the detriment of not only the work, but maybe even that individual’s mental and emotional health. So it just seemed like there needed to be a certain point where I needed to be able to agree with the audience about if they said “That Bonnie “Prince” Billy show sucked and I hate Bonnie “”Prince” Billy”, I needed to be able to understand what they’re talking about and not feel personally affronted, I guess, on some levels.

And then as well, it just gives me more freedom, when I’m singing a song that employs first person pronouns, to become fully engaged and invested in the song without feeling like I’m necessarily taking leave of my earthly being and the person who is a father and a husband and a son and a friend, et cetera. That person isn’t being thrown to the lions on any given performance stage. 

An individual can be measured in those environments and yet that is not the individual and so I think with having Bonnie “Prince” Billy, there’s a shared understanding that it’s an entity for expression, creative expression through music. That gives me license, to not necessarily phone it in, but sometimes I can go deep and still feel like I can get out, if that makes sense, or I can, just embrace it as a harmony singer, even sometimes.

I read you were embarrassed for a long time to call yourself an artist because you didn’t see it as something that was real. What did you mean by that?

I think part of it is maybe being American because we’ve never had strong institutional support for individual level artists, really. In my household, my mother was an artist, and a fully practicing artist, but she never showed her work or talked about her work outside of the house, but that’s what she did. And so I think that probably infected me somewhat and made me think like, “Well, that’s not what we’re supposed to do. We’re supposed to find a real job,” not understanding, that an artist is a real job. I think part of my drive, for the first 20, 25 years of making music, and still to some extent, was to figure out how I could define for myself the reality of my profession so that I understood it.

There are also a lot of people who embrace the role of artists as a license to sort of fuck up and fuck off. You know, they think like, “Well, this is me and this is my art,” and it’s like that doesn’t mean you don’t have a responsibility to yourself, to society, to other people within the bounds of your work, but it does seem like there are a lot of people who once they, especially once they, get a little recognition and success, that they feel like, “Well, now it’s just about me.” And I take great issue with that. I think it’s definitely it’s an American trend, if it’s not a global trend and I think it’s not a global trend. In Northern India, there are artists communities set up by the government for folkloric artists of a variety of disciplines to live and work. We don’t have anything like that here.

I read the Stereogum interview that you recently did and you were talking about Joanna Newsom and about the appreciation of the audience, so you obviously see that an artist has an obligation to an audience.

I see that, yes.

And that unwritten contract between an artist and their audience isn’t just for the latest record or the latest tour, it extends longer, it’s a bigger commitment?

Yeah, I feel that. For me the ideal situation is that a human being can find their way into something that resembles what we might optimistically label a “Calling” and that they, that person, might then for the rest of their life pursue all aspects of that, thereby sort of being “I want to be useful and I feel like I can be useful by knowing what it is I’m doing and what it is I’m about.” That can come with “Where do I take my breath,” in order to not divide the line at a crucial moment in a song, and it can also come with “How do I comport myself in a promotional interview with a writer, a journalist.

Of course, it’s impossible for all of us to be aware of all of the ways that we are interconnected with other people, so I don’t always know, “Are the people who distribute Bonnie “Prince” Billy records good people?” I don’t know. But if I were to meet them and find out they were bad people, would I say, “Ah, that’s just the breaks”? No, I would probably say, “We need to get the records out of that distributor’s hands and put them into the hands of another distributor.”

I assume that booking agents and promoters are being fair when they’re pricing the tickets on the shows. I’m aware that in the United States especially, these big corporate ticket selling conglomerates like Ticketmaster are not behaving well and so it’s my responsibility to say that my booking agent that I understand that we may enter a city where we have to deal with Ticketmaster every once in a while, but we need to be sure that we’re leaning into shows that are promoted by promoters who do not feel compelled to work with Ticketmaster on their shows. And if I can’t do that, I shouldn’t be doing this as a job.

When you talk about that “Calling”, as an example, if someone produces a body of work and then they decide, “That’s it,” for whatever reason, you think that it needs to be more than that, that’s too transient, that it’s not a true lifetime calling.

It depends because it could be a part of doing the work. My daughter, who’s six, I found a used bookstore in California a month or so ago, a Calvin and Hobbes collection of comic strips, and for the last few weeks, that’s what she wants to hear as a bedtime story, Calvin and Hobbes. It’s reawakening memories of my experiences as a kid, growing up during the heyday of Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin and Hobbes lasted for 10 years and then Bill Watterson, who was the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, ended it. It was over, that’s it.

I take personal offense at people like Steve Martin or Jim Carey, or even Bruce Springsteen or someone like that, who build their body of work on a certain kind of work and a certain approach to work, hit a certain level of popularity, and then they never do any of what you love them for again, never. And they’re like, “Well, now I want to do this,” and they’re only able to do it because they caught everybody’s attention. That upsets me. If Steve Martin wants to be a bad actor in mediocre movies on a small scale because he gets his jollies, it’s just like, “Who the fuck are you and why did I listen to your comedy records religiously? And now it’s so hard for you to even be funny and you built like your career on these?” Or Bruce Springsteen, like making ambitious creative choices and uniquely strange melodramatic evolutions and mutations of what we call rock and roll, and then when it gets to a certain level, it’s just like, “I just need a big keyboard and a lot of reverb and some stupid rhymes.” You know, The Rising, it’s just like, “What the fuck is The Rising? Go home. You need more money?” Did you just all of a sudden think, “I made relatively challenging pop music for a while. I’ve had enough of that. I’m going to just make easy, easy, easy pap for the rest of my life.” That’s kind of annoying.

Jonathan Richman is a is a mason, he builds brick ovens and patios, and things like that. Sometimes with a calling, you can hit a ceiling, you can hit certain boundaries that no matter what you do, you think, “Well, I can’t go any further with this thing, so I need to do something else.”  I have a friend who ran the local fantastic independent video store for years and you can’t make a living at the video store now, so you have to find something else to do.

I kind of get where you’re coming from although I would argue that The Rising is probably Springsteen’s last very good album [Note: at least as far as the E-Street Band-affiliated albums go. I am very partial to Devils & Dust and Western Stars]. I think it had a purpose. But I miss his lyric writing from the early days. I don’t know if you listen to them but I think U2 are one of the worst culprits for your argument, they really lost their way and just infuriate me these days.

Yeah, I mean for me, with U2, I had a begrudging affection for some of the records and then, for me, it was the Achtung Baby record. I was just like, “Okay, now, by your own admission, you’re describing the process of doing it.” It’s just like, “We’re rich and powerful people standing in a room trying to come up with something.” If that’s motivation, please, I don’t want to listen to you. If you’re not going in there, because you have something to say, rather than like, “What are we going to say with our next record?” you should volunteer to step down so nobody else has to listen to you, and leave the airwaves open for people who are desperately trying to communicate things to people who are desperately needing to be communicated to.

We talked about you being embarrassed about calling yourself an artist but for your new album, The Purple Bird, you’re recording in Nashville with A-list session musicians, and you’re the big headline name. How does that feel for you, was it a daunting experience?

I’d had a very, very similar experience in many ways in terms of the things that should be, could be, would be daunting about this twenty years ago. I’d made the record Master and Everyone with Mark Nevers in Nashville, at David Bergman’s recommendation, and in the course of that, I learned what a Nashville session musician was, because Mark would say, “Oh, you want a woman to sing?  My friend is the head of the singer’s union, what kind of voice are you looking for?” And I said, “Somewhere between Dolly Parton and Sandy Denny.” And so he picks up the phone, calls the head of the singer’s union, says, “I need these tones, this kind of phrasing,” gives us a list of names and phone numbers, we call one, she comes over and sings and blows the top of my skull off, and my world is forever changed. And Mark could see that, and he said, “If you like that, we can make a whole record just like that.” So about a year later, he assembled an A-list team of session musicians, and we made Bonnie “Prince” Billy Sings Greatest Palace Music. That team of musicians included Stuart Duncan on fiddle and mandolin, and he’s also on this record, twenty years later.

I’m not sure when I’ve been in the room of people who are that good at what they do. And that went so far. How good they are meant that they lifted me and made me better. I was a better singer in that session with them twenty years ago, and so having witnessed that, I knew that the expectation wasn’t foreign. It’s daunting, but their job is to accommodate, especially singers. Their job is to accommodate singers, and singers can be a complicated bunch, especially when it comes to doing their work. I imagine singers in Nashville are in pop, country music, and I’m sure there are all different kinds of emotional issues and ego issues, and their job is to be sure that the record gets done in the time allotted, with the budget allowed, and make it great.

I almost felt like Kurt Russell in an old Disney movie, who’d been injected with something that made him super smart or super strong.  When I’m in there, I am singing as if I am the singer of my dreams that I always wanted to be, but it’s really me. I’m really here, and I’m not doing overdubs, I’m not doing retakes, I’m right here with these musicians, and I’m singing like this. I know a lot of it is because I’ve worked so long and hard on what I do, but most of it is specific to that environment, that record, and that these musicians, part of this skill set that makes them who they are, is to be able to draw that out and inspire confidence and creativity in the singers that they work with.

The first song on the album is ‘Turn to Dust’ and I’m sure you’re getting a lot of questions about it. I saw a recent interview where you talked about people of different ages and experiences sitting there making music and having a good time, but given the last couple of months, is that becoming more difficult?

There’s certain voices that I would like to hear more of right now, and one big group that I would like to hear more of right now are people who may have actively participated in voting in the current administration. I feel as if there’s a certain amount of conning that was done and manipulation through how information is disseminated that made people vote the way that people voted. But whatever, people voted the way they voted.

When we were making it, when we wrote the song, me and Ferg and Ronnie Bowman wrote the song, there was no discussion of politics, but I felt all of the sudden like I was doing something agitprop and practical and functional by being a part of a song that identified archetypes and the tension between archetypes, specifically in ways that we’re dealing with again in American society and culture, and it made me feel like I’m finally graduating. And then I thought, “Well, when will the song come out? Before the election, after the election,” and we finally decided after the election. But I’m still thinking like, “Well, this is still a song for everybody,” and being a song for everybody, it has the potential ability to create these little bridges from which one stance might be able to cross over and communicate with somebody who has another stance.

Of course, right now, shit is just hitting the fan left and right and I want to know what people are thinking and feeling, no matter how they voted, especially if they voted for the current administration. I feel like people are being so needing to retreat and be so self-protective that I’m not sure what the power of the song is right now. I was very enthusiastic and optimistic and excited about the potential power of ‘Turn To Dust’ and I feel like the shreds of society we’re being served are so confusing that I’m not sure if there’s a way for somebody to even experience the song with a clear head.

I’ve had ‘Guns are for Cowards’ stuck in my head as an earworm ever since I first listened to the album. Where did the premise of the song come from? It’s so interesting and I can’t work out if I sort of have those same thoughts about “Who would you shoot in the face, who would you shoot in the brain” because it’s something that’s happened as I’ve gotten older or just that there’s more evil and injustice in the world. Is that where the song came from? Was it something you were discussing with people?

With the first verse, the idea is to get people’s guard dropped, to make people feel like, “Oh,  we’re all friends here. We can talk about these kinds of things.” And then with the second verse and the third verse say, “That’s not something to be thought,” because in the United States, and in Louisville, Kentucky, gun violence is such a real and terrible constant.

I don’t know if it’s being underreported, but potentially one of the greatest advantages of the chaos that American society is in right now is that it doesn’t seem like any idiotic gun happy people are out shooting in the way they were, say, this time last year. Maybe there’s just not room in the newspapers to report on it. Here in Louisville, I think at the time of working on the song, fortunately, it hasn’t gotten closer, but at that time, over the course of a couple of weeks, there were three different times I was supposed to meet with three different people, and each of those meetings, those interactions, was postponed due to separate incidents of gun violence, and I’m just thinking, “This is batshit,” and two of those were involving minors being killed.

I’m not a self-righteous person, I don’t think, but I’m somebody who’s a little bit baffled that if someone has some spare time on their hand, they wouldn’t maybe just attempt to do some minor activity related to gun control or diminishing gun violence or dealing with gun violence, as opposed to, say, binge watching some bullshit streaming show on a streaming service,. The default is like, “Which show haven’t I binge watched yet?” What 18 hours of my life haven’t I given over to somebody who could care less about anything I will ever do in my entire life? Or do something for twenty minutes that would potentially alter or impact the life of one of your fellow human beings? That just blows my mind. It blows my mind. It just seems like when your life flashes before your eyes, do you want most of that to have been sitting on a couch, eating popcorn or and drinking Diet Coke? I don’t know.

My favourite song on the album is London May. You know, I love the harmonies and the uplifting chorus, and looking at the lyrics the first word of each line spells out, “London May”. How did that song come about?

Do you know who London May is?

No.

Oh, so London May, I first met him in like 1985, I think. He was the drummer at the time for Glenn Danzig’s band Samhain, which was the band between the Misfits and Danzig.

Oh, Misfits and Danzig are some of those bands I know of but have never knowingly listened to.

My friends were in a band called Maurice, here in town, and they were, we were all big, huge Samhain and Misfits fans. One of them reached out to Glenn and created a correspondence through the mail and then when they were doing a Samhain tour, Glenn asked Maurice to open a week of shows throughout the Midwest, and I got invited along by my friends to take pictures, basically, because that’s what I was doing at the time, taking pictures of musicians. They were a bunch of rowdy New Jersey guys, the Samhain group, including Glenn, but London was a sweet guy from Baltimore and we became friends and we’ve stayed friends since then.

He then became a career nurse and he’s a nurse at a children’s hospital in Los Angeles, while still playing music sometimes. His fantasy was to make movies, produce movies, make movies, be in, act in movies, and he made a low budget, kind of classic B-horror movie called Night of the Bastard, in which there’s a scene where his character is about to be besieged by a cult of Satan worshippers out in the desert, and so he’s sort of battening down the hatches and making his house secure to resist the attack. At the beginning of that montage sequence, the character puts a needle on a record, and London called and was like, “Could I use one of your songs?” and I was like, “How about if I make up a new song for this movie?” and he said, “Okay.”

So I made up the song for Night of the Bastard and it’s in there, a version of it. This record was all set up and we had seven or eight songs and I wanted to revisit that song because I didn’t feel like we’d done it justice. So we brought it in there.

There’s so many cool things. We just performed with London May in Los Angeles a few weeks ago and he played drums on ‘London May’, which is pretty cool. But I forgot, I completely forgot that after he worked for Glenn Danzig, he got a job for John Prine, working for John Prine’s Oh Boy record label and  the only time I ever saw Johnny Cash live was the first time I saw John Prine live, Prine opening for Cash in New York City at London’s Invitation in 1989. And then it’s funny that my first Prine listening was all cassettes that London sent me from the catalog. Ferg, who produced this record and co-wrote all the songs, when I first met Ferg, he co-owned a studio called The Butcher Shop with Prine, and I met Prine numerous times through Ferg, as well as Prine’s son, Tommy Prine, co-wrote one of the songs on the record, and of course, Ferg’s, was Johnny Cash’s right-hand man for a number of years as well. So it was funny that London was this bizarre thread through line. Then, of course, Danzig wrote a song for the first American recordings record for Johnny Cash to sing, ‘Thirteen’.

That song,  I’m sure a lot of the magic comes from Mike Rojas’s insane keys and Fred Eltringham’s insane drums and Brit Taylor’s incredible vocal harmonies and all this stuff, but I love it, and when people love it, I can’t help but think it’s because it has this history. It’s what a song should be, which is not an entity unto itself, but an entity that is also a representation of relationships and history, musical and non-musical, and that’s what it is. I’m pretending that that’s what comes through and gives the song its strength. Whether or not that’s the truth, I don’t know.

***

 The Purple Bird is out now on No Quarter Records – https://bonnieprincebilly.bandcamp.com/album/the-purple-bird

I’m old enough to have seen the Sex Pistols before, but unfortunately it was in 1996 on the band’s first reformation for the Filthy Lucre tour. I saw them at Phoenix Festival, which is still probably the greatest festival lineup that I’ve ever experienced. If you were to put that same bill on today, it would still be the best festival lineup of 2025, not that there are any music festivals anymore, and that’s without David Bowie and a Keith Flint version of the Prodigy. My only memories of seeing Lydon/Matlock/Jones/Cook headline the final night of a music festival at a disused airfield in 1996 was seeing a few songs and then going to see the Cowboy Junkies instead.

But I’ve always had a complicated relationship with punk rock. Ultimately I don’t think I was ever angry or disaffected enough growing up for it to ever truly resonate. I chose the other pathway, the one that involved loving Pink Floyd. Never Mind the Bollocks? It’s an ok album, some good songs but it’s over-produced and all a bit one dimensional. The Clash? The Clash will forever be my goto response to “Who is the most overrated band?” But I loved the Damned, they are easily the best of that first wave of UK punk bands.

I’ve spent far more time reading about the Sex Pistols, and watching films and documentaries about them than I have listening to their debut album. The story of punk rock, the story of the Sex Pistols, the mythology of the Sex Pistols is something far bigger than the band’s fairly limited musical output. The idea of punk rock is everything. The impact that they had on music. Coupled with my complicated relationship with punk rock is that I’ve always much preferred what happened afterwards from all the bands that were inspired by the Sex Pistols and their peers. On the one hand, its a shame that the Sex Pistols, never got to show the world what they could do, on the other hand you just couldn’t see them ever doing anything like Public Image. For all John Lydon’s faults, he has been in two bands that changed the musical landscape, and continue to inspire, and there aren’t many people that can say that.

As it usually does, curiosity has got me here tonight. My only experience of the band was a major festival headline show and I don’t think punk works at that scale. The smaller the show the better, it needs to be close-up and in your face to be effective. I’m also curious to see how it works replacing the lead singer, arguably the face and focal point of the band. I’ve yet to see Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes but Gallows were a great band and on paper he looks like a good fit. To be fair, Gallows were also a great band after Carter left and was replaced by Wade MacNeil from Alexisonfire, showing that a seemingly integral part of a band can be successfully replaced.

What’s fascinating about watching Carter perform tonight is just how well he’s integrated himself into the band. While the three Sex Pistols appear to be happy to largely confine themselves to the back half of the stage, it’s Carter that provides the focal point and, who ultimately, makes the performance. It’s clear from what he puts into his performance just how much this band, how much playing with the three other musicians and how much being asked to sing these songs means to him. For Carter, it’s looks like it’s the role of a lifetime, the role he’s dreamed of playing for his entire life, and he revels in every single moment living that dream.

Its interesting to compare and contrast this show to last year’s Saints 73-78 shows. The Saints 73-78 show was hugely enjoyable, I don’t think I’ve heard the band sound as good live and it was a joy to watch Ed Kuepper throw himself into his guitar playing without having to multi-task that with singing. The only criticism that I had was that as a performance, it felt more like an exclusive, one-off special that you’d see at an arts festival, whereas the Sex Pistols tonight feels like a real band. Lydon might have unfairly called it karaoke, but it feels like the real thing, probably because the focus is on the frontman and he looks like he’s always occupied this position on stage in this band. As good as The Saints 73-78 were, there was am awkwardness about it,, Mark Arm stood at his microphone stand for the whole show, looking like he was an invited guest, rather than having full ownership of his position on stage. You can’t fake band chemistry and this version of the Sex Pistols, or whatever you want to call them, have a band chemistry that belies that they’ve only played a handful of shows prior to this tour.

Carter’s voice has the right amount of sneer to do justice to these songs. It’s his own voice and at no point do you ever think he’s trying to mimic Lydon’s voice. At no point does it ever feel awkward delivering someone else’s words. It belongs, it sounds like it’s the voice that’s aways delivered these words. Given how distinct Lydon’s voice is, its a real testament to what Carter has brought to the band. Carter brings enthusiasm and boundless energy that Lydon was never going to bring, even if he’d been asked. ‘Bodies’ and ‘Silly Thing’ has Carter exchanging the stage for the midst of the crowd, imploring them to form the biggest circle pit the room has. “If I’m looking at you get the fuck out of my way.,” he warns the mosh pit while in their midst. Most importantly, Carter has the attitude to pull off replacing one of punk’s greatest icons so flawlessly, giving no quarter to the crowd and band alike, but never with any malice behind his barbs. “This one’s dedicated to fucking me,” introduces ‘Satellite’, while the crowd is taunted with “Are you getting tired, are you getting fucking tired?” before the band launches into ‘No Feelings’.

As we saw last year when the Damned toured Australia, punk is all about the drumming and Paul Cook excels tonight. Steve Jones’s playing on these songs is obviously reasonably rudimentary but together with Cook and bassist Glen Matlock bring the songs to life for Carter to embellish.

For what many would consider the definitive punk rock band, there are moments that are anything but punk rock, from Matlock getting the crowd to clap along to the mini drum and bass solos in the cover of the Stooges ‘No Fun’ when Carter introduces the band for the first time (at least Steve Jones kept the Spirit of ‘76 alive by choosing not to play a guitar solo when he was introduced). From Carter imploring everyone to get their mobile phone torches shining for the cover of ‘My Way’ to the crowd sing-a-long to Anarchy in the UK’, the final song of the night, with only a drum backing while Carter records it on his mobile phone and tells us we can do better than that. 1976 punk attitude reborn as pure show business in 2025. Punk nostalgia’s not what it used to be.

Fifteen songs, all eleven from the original UK album, a couple of covers, and a couple of what I’d guess you call deep cuts. It’s all over in less than 75 minutes, but it always was going to be, wasn’t it?

Earlier in the evening, Carter had remarked, “The thing about the Pistols these days is that everybody comes and everybody leaves with a smile on their face. It’s a beautiful sight.” While I’ve long deplored any live review that ends with a “…and everyone left happy and smiling” conclusion, in this case, he’s not wrong. At the end of the night, no one left feeling that they’d been cheated.

Lambrini Girls’ debut album, Who Let the Dogs Out is out now on City Slang Records. https://lambrinigirlsband.bandcamp.com/

The post In Photos: The Saints ’73-’78 + Chimers @ Princess Theatre, Brisbane, 24.11.2024 first appeared on COLLAPSE BOARD.]]> http://collapseboard.com/in-photos-the-saints-73-78-chimers-princess-theatre-brisbane-24-11-2024/feed/ 1 99872 http://collapseboard.com/in-photos-the-the-fortitude-music-hall-brisbane-23-11-2024/ http://collapseboard.com/in-photos-the-the-fortitude-music-hall-brisbane-23-11-2024/#respond Mon, 25 Nov 2024 21:00:00 +0000 https://collapseboard.com/?p=99784 The The’s Ensouled World Tour comes to Brisbane, with the the first of two shows at the Fortitude Music Hall in Brisbane.

The The’s Ensouled World Tour comes to Brisbane, with the the first of two shows at the Fortitude Music Hall in Brisbane.

The post In Photos: The The @ Fortitude Music Hall, Brisbane, 23-11-2024 first appeared on COLLAPSE BOARD.]]>