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.

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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/

Bad news: They’ve lost a couple of the band since we last saw them and are back to the core/original duo of Carlotta Cosials and Ana García Perrote

Good news: They’ve got a new album out, Viva Hinds.

Bad news: It came out in September but I didn’t know anything about it

Good news: I found out about it via The Algorithm

Bad news: I found out about it via The Algorithm

Good news: Ten new songs, 31 minutes and 21 seconds of Hinds goodness!!!

Bad news: It’s only ten new songs, 31 minutes and 21 seconds

Good news: It’s really good!!! One of those albums where anything/everything could be a single.

Bad news: Um…

Good news: There’s loads of tour dates pencilled in for 2025!!!

Bad news: There’s no Australian tour dates pencilled in for 2025

Good news: The current tour dates end with a couple of shows in Japan in April 2025

Good news: There’s a very attractive-looking gap between the end of the tour in April and their Primavera show in June that could easily be filled with some Australian shows.

Good news: The poster advertises “MORE +++ DATES VERY SOON!!”

Bad news: April? That’s forever away

Good news: It’s impossible to narrow it down to a single song for Song of the Day, so you lucky people get a couple. Enjoy!!!

***

When we spoke to Ed Kuepper in July 2023, it was to talk about the reissues of his Electrical Storm and Honey Steel’s Gold albums, the start of a broader reissue of his solo albums. When we talked to Ed Kuepper a year later in July 2024, it’s to discuss the deluxe 4-LP box set of (I’m) Stranded, which includes a remastered version of debut album, a previously unreleased 1976 demo mix, live recordings from 1977 Australian and UK shows, single B-sides, plus a photo essay book of the band covering their origins from 1973 through the end of of 1977.

We also discussed the new band Kuepper has assembled, The Saints ’73-‘78, for an Australian tour in support of the boxed set, as well as playing songs from the Eternally Yours and Prehistoric Sounds albums that followed the debut. And what a band it is. Alongside Kuepper are original Saints drummer and founding member Ivor Hay plus honorary Saints Mark Arm (Mudhoney), Peter Oxley (Sunnyboys) and Mick Harvey (The Birthday Party / Bad Seeds).

***

It’s been a year since we talked last. I think the first question is always, how’s the autobiography coming along?

Pretty good, thanks [laughs].

You always seem to find new ways to keep yourself busy.

Yeah, I guess I do [laughs].

Let’s start with the new deluxe boxed edition of (I’m) Stranded coming out. What involvement did you have?

Oh, pretty significant involvement. A lot of the stuff in the book that comes with the boxed set comes from my archives. I put it together with Tim Pittman and our graphic designer, Cameron Moss from Ultra Vivid Design. It’s been a fairly arduous process getting it done and I’ve been involved fairly strongly.

Was anyone else from the band involved in it?

To a lesser extent, everyone was involved in it up to a point, but I’m the only one that’s got all the archival material. Everyone was aware of what was going on and gave their approval when they could.

You mentioned your archives, is it like a well-organized archive?

No, it’s an awfully organised archive [laughs]! It’s hardwood boxes of stuff that I’ve collected over the years. There’s no real organisation. If you’re lucky you’ll come across a box that might have something, a whole pack of things all pertaining to a band or a project or something like that. It’s quite good when you come across something that is organised, but overall it’s not, I’ve never really had the time or the inclination to do it. It’s one of those funny things that when you start going through them, it’s quite easy to get distracted by something and start reading articles, and I just really try to avoid that if possible. So, it’s messed up purely by necessity, but it was good to get through it.

The boxed set says it’s has got all recordings studio and live from 1976 and 1977, including a previously unreleased mix of the album?

Yeah, that’s right. The only thing where we broke the chronology a little bit was that Eternally Yours, the second album, was recorded in 1977, but we cut just before that, just because that’s a different project. But apart from that, yes, it’s the live recordings and studio recordings that we have. There are probably some live recordings that aren’t included, just because I don’t have access to the tapes.

You mentioned Eternally Yours there. Are Eternally Yours and Prehistoric Sounds going to get the same deluxe box set treatment in the future?

I’m hoping to. Part of the long process has been getting the rights to do it. We don’t own these tapes. It’s a matter of negotiating with different record companies these days, because the stuff that we did in the UK for Harvest isn’t part of EMI anymore, or Universal anymore, so it’s a different label. Also involved in the process is trying to actually get decent royalty rates on the stuff. I think the process started about, oh God, I can’t actually remember when, but it was largely me going through the stuff with my manager, and he was just basically saying, “We really should try and tidy it up.” And so we started the process and everyone in the band was on board for a change. It was a good thing that everyone was on board, but it was kind of annoying that it took so long to get it happening.

Because I think the last couple of times we spoke has been about, I think maybe the first time was about The Aints, and then last year was about the re-release of your solo albums, and the Mr. MiraKle lost album. Is it hard to escape the lure of the Saints? Is it something you embrace?  

I don’t try to escape it. I mean, I’ve always stood by the material that we did. I think in some ways I was probably, for a long time, the only advocate for the early stuff. So it’s not that I’m trying to escape it, it’s part of what I’ve done and it takes, I suppose, particular significance because it was the first stuff that I did. But it’s as important to me as the [Laughing] Clowns and the solo stuff.

I was never sure whether it gets in the way of what you’re doing, or what you’re wanting to do next.

No, it doesn’t really stop me doing anything else.  Well, I mean, that’s not completely true. I mean, if I’m doing this, I can’t be doing something else, but I choose to be doing this.

So you’ve got some dates coming up. You’ve put together a pretty special band to do it. So starting with Ivor then, is this the first time since Pig City you’ve played together?

I think we did some shows after Pig City. We did ATP [All Tomorrow’s Parties] and ‘Don’t Look Back’. I think that was more 2009, 2010, sometime around there.

Ah, yes, I’d forgotten about those shows despite actually having a potential question for later on about them. When you played ATP in Brisbane with Nick Cave, it was advertised as the Saints playing (I’m) Stranded in full, and it didn’t happen. Was there any reason why it didn’t happen?

Oh, there certainly was [laughs].

It was a very difficult series of shows to do, and I was just really, really pleased that I was also doing the Laughing Clowns at the same time. The funny thing was that the Clowns were a much more difficult band when we were going, in terms of everybody was just always really tense, and especially towards the end, it wasn’t a particularly pleasant environment. But when we got back together, it was almost joyous. Everyone was happy to see each other and play together, so that was really great.

But with the Saints, it was much more complex. There were just endless little dramas. One of the things with ‘Don’t Look Back’, doing the Stranded album, was that for the other shows on that tour, I think we might have played the album once.

We did a couple of shows in Melbourne, and one was sort of like a broader performance of material from across the first three albums, and then there was one where we did (I’m) Stranded plus some encore. The Brisbane show, we were supposed to do this, and the day before the show, Chris said to me, “Well, if we’re only playing the album, we don’t need the horn section.” And I said, “Yeah, but what if we probably do some encores, so we should take them.” And he said, “No, let’s just save some money.” It was kind of difficult, so I said, “Okay, all right.”

Then the next morning at the Melbourne Airport, I think it was, could have been Sydney, I can’t remember where we were, but we were on our way to Brisbane and I was sitting having a coffee, and Chris’s manager cum representative, came over to my table and said, “Oh, Chris doesn’t want to do the album.” And it was just like, “Oh, fuck.” So we don’t have a horn section and we’re not doing the album that doesn’t have horns on it.

And we got there, no soundcheck. I think that Brisbane show was the only time that I could remember feeling embarrassed about what I’ve just done. Like I’ve done shitty shows, everyone does that, and you think, “Oh, that was a load of shit,” but this was actually just an embarrassment. It was like, “Fuck, this was awful.” And so that’s the story behind that. It was basically just a little power play, or something like that, and it made it a really difficult thing to be associated with, for me anyway.

Going back to Ivor, he stayed with the band for a bit after you left, and then also played with Chris during the 1980s. There weren’t any ‘taking sides’ issues that had to be resolved at some point or other?

Well, it wasn’t quite like that, because the band split up, and it came together again after. I’m not quite sure when this was, it must have been around either late ‘79 or 1980, sometime around there. The Laughing Clowns were already going, and then Chris came back to Australia and said he wanted to reform the band. He already had a band together but he asked me if I wanted to be involved, and I said no. I also indicated I didn’t think it was a great idea to go out as the Saints. But anyway, that happened. I’m not a litigious sort of person, and I expressed my disapproval, but I didn’t do anything more about it.

The fact that Ivor and Chris still did some stuff, I mean, Ivor plays on that version of the band’s biggest hits, I think, no, I didn’t feel any resentment towards Ivor or anything, it wasn’t a matter of taking sides. Ivor was involved from the outset, it was sort of, “Oh yeah.”

Peter Oxley is on bass and you’ve been playing with him for a while in your solo band. In the early days of the Saints you went through a number of bassists. Kim Bradshaw played on the album and before Algy Ward came in. Algy sadly passed away last year but Kim was never in the running to be part of what you’re doing now?

No, not really. The process of putting the band together had commenced some time ago but until we had the box set kind of completed and ready to go into production, and had a label that was going to actually put the work into it, the tour wasn’t the first thing, it was getting the box set done first. I think the way Kim played on that first album was actually really good, probably better than I thought it was at the time, but no, it wasn’t sort of a real consideration. There just wasn’t quite the connection there for me.

Presumably Mick Harvey‘s coming in as a guitarist?

And a little bit of keyboard, there is a bit of keyboard on the Saints, those three records. Mick plays both guitar and keyboard, he plays everything I think, except for maybe the brass stuff. So yeah, primarily he was considered as a rhythm guitar player, a second guitar player, and I think he’s a really strong rhythm guitar player.

I don’t know if you’ve ever played with a second guitarist in your own band, did you feel you needed a second guitarist for these shows?

I did, because on the records, I double track stuff. Especially from the second album onwards, there’s often an acoustic rhythm put into the mix, and I really like that texture of having an acoustic with an electric rhythm. I wanted to hear that again, just add something good to the mix.

I’m sure everyone’s asking you about how Mark Arm came to get involved in this project.

Yeah, they all do. I asked him, or we asked him [laughs].

Did you know him beforehand?

Not personally, no. But it was a mutual friend of ours, when we were discussing doing this, and I indicated that I wanted a stand-alone singer rather than me doing the vocals and guitar parts.

I wanted someone that had a vocal approach, I guess. And our mutual friend said, “Well, what about Mark?” and I just thought, “Fuck, yeah, what about him?” It just seemed obvious, in the same way that Mick kind of came up in the conversation and it was suggested by someone else actually and it just seemed obvious once the suggestion had been made.

Did you have an initial shortlist of other singers, or did Mark come around quickly?

We had a couple of people in mind, but once Mark was suggested, I just thought, “Yeah, I think he’ll do this really well,” and he was really keen, which makes a nice change [laughs]. So it was almost a very sort of mellow approach to the whole thing, you know, just put something out, see what comes back.

I can’t remember how many shows there are, but you’ve added some more to the initial dates that were announced, but is this a one-off, or are you planning to do any festivals or take this out of Australia?

We’ve had a number of inquiries from overseas, which is really great. There’s been real enthusiasm about the project. Whether it’s feasible to actually tour the band is another matter, but everyone in the band has indicated that they’re keen to do it if it’s possible. It’s a big band, it’s like an eight piece with a horn section, so with the logistics, it’s hard to know what the demand would be outside of Australia. We’re looking at it, but that’s kind of all I can say. I don’t want to make it sound like it’s out of the question or anything like that. There is a lot of enthusiasm, whether that enthusiasm is great enough to actually make it financially feasible is the issue.

***

THE SAINTS ’73-’78 NOVEMBER 2024

Wed 13th: Adelaide Hindley St. Music Hall
special guests The Double Agents

Friday 15th: Castlemaine Theatre Royal (SOLD OUT)
special guests Parsnip

Saturday 16th:  Melbourne Northcote Theatre (SOLD OUT)
special guests The Double Agents

Sunday 17th: Melbourne Northcote Theatre 
special guests Alien Nosejob

Wednesday 20th: Fremantle Freo Social (SOLD OUT)
special guests Chimers

Friday 22nd: Sydney, Enmore Theatre (SOLD OUT)
special guests Kim Salmon & The Surrealists

Saturday 23rd: Brisbane, Princess Theatre (SOLD OUT)
special guests Chimers 

Sunday 24th: Brisbane, Princess Theatre (SOLD OUT)
special guests Chimers 

Monday 25th: Brisbane, Princess Theatre 
special guests Chimers

Wednesday 27th: Hobert, Odeon Theatre
special guests Liquid Nails

Friday 29th: Thirroul, Anitas Theatre

Saturday 30th: Byron Bay, The Green Room

Tickets for all shows available via feelpresents.com

THE SAINTS (I’M) STRANDED BOXSET is released November 15 on In The Red via Universal Music Australia and is available for pre-order here

It’s been forever perplexing just how much the mainstream music media has ignored Iron Maiden. Like most metal, they’ve been long regarded by the music press somewhere between disdain and scorn. Critics like Elvis Costello because critics look like Elvis Costello, right? Waiting outside before the show, my curiosity finds me Wikipedia’s list of biggest selling British music artists and there Iron Maiden are, listed alphabetically between George Michael and Paul McCartney, with an estimated 100 million album sales. The same number as claimed by Coldplay and Fleetwood Mac. And yet they don’t come anywhere near getting the same amount of column inches as any of those. The Venn diagram of Iron Maiden and mainstream music media is just two circles. They’ve long been one of the UK’s biggest bands, massive all over Europe, massive all over South America, festival headliners at the biggest and best festivals all over, and playing sold out arena shows in Australia, before heading off to do the same in New Zealand, and then Japan but you won’t hear much about them in the papers or outside of he heavier side of the music press.

In some ways, The Future Past World Tour that Iron Maiden has brought to Australia is an oddity for what the band plays and what it doesn’t play.  The setlist, which hasn’t changed since the 2023 leg, focuses on the band’s 2022 album, Senjutsu, and 1986’s Somewhere In Time.

Senjutsu is a good album, a good Iron Maiden, as 2016’s Book of Souls was before it but whatever Iron Maiden release in their late-period career, and as unfair as it might seem, it’s more than likely to get ranked in the bottom half of the their albums. I’m old enough to remember the slight side eye that Somewhere In Time was given. This was the mid-1980s, of course, and the thought of any rock band introducing synthesized sounds, especially a band like Iron Maiden introducing guitar synths, was considered tantamount to an act of heresy. But, to be fair, anything that came after Powerslave was always going to be accompanied with a sense of disappointment. And by 1988’s excellent Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, everyone had more or less reached the opinion that Iron Maiden with keyboards was acceptable.

What’s fascinating about the setlist is that it’s as close to a ‘Deep Cuts’ tour I can remember the band playing for a long while.  You could write any number of setlists that includes the songs you’d expect the band to play and if you’ve come for “The Hits”, you’re going to be disappointed.  In a way, this is a massive statement.  At this point in their career, and especially so given that the band have a limited number of tours left in them, they could just play it safe and play a crowd pleasing set night-after-night. Instead they want to highlight their most recent set of songs and show how well they work within the context of their older songs and some better known songs. There’s no sign that the band are slowly winding down by making life easy for themselves.

Some people will argue that a trio is the purest and perfect size for a band, but there’s something so imperious about five across the front, and a front five where everyone brings something to the performance. When people describe a musical performance as “theatrical”, it normally just means big show production values, and sure there’s backdrops that change for every single song and dry ice and explosions and an elaborate stage design and a couple of appearances by the 8ft Eddie but that’s just window dressing. I’ve never seen Iron Maiden from this angle before, I’ve always either been on the floor or right at the very back in the cheap seats but what I’m watching and what I’m totally mesmerized by and virtually the only thing I can focus on is the interaction between the band and each other and the band and the stage. 

Each of the band has their allocated personal space on the stage. Guitarist Dave Murray on the left hand side, guitarist Adrian Smith back towards the drum kit, singer Bruce in the middle, bassist Steve Harris mid-right and guitarist Janick Gers in his own little world on the right hand side of the stage.  Everyone has their own performance. Murray, forever looking like the most content man in the room, his unmistakable guitar tone, makes it all look effortless. Smith, forever the no nonsense rock star with the cool moves. Dickinson, covering each inch of the stage, the consummate front man, the endless energy levels, all while belting out the vocals. Harris, foot on monitor, bass guitar handled like weapon, the leader, the look on his face shows you what this band means to him. Gers, in his mandatory Iron Maiden t-shirt (after all, this is one of the very few bands where you’re expected to wear a t-shirt of the band playing) pulling out all the rock star moves, managing to play guitar wherever his guitar is in relation to his body at any given time, his antics leaving him bloody after only a couple of songs, treating those sat over on his side of the stage their very own performance.  Drummer Nicko McBrain is of course there at the back, playing behind his immense drum kit that obliterates any view of him. The only glimpses you get of him are on the giant video screens at both side of the stage.

When the band interact with each other, it’s pure Gestalt in practice.  The way it looks so effortlessly coordinated, as if it’s been properly choreographed and practiced endlessly. It’s theatrical because it’s theatre. The onstage flow is hypnotic. How everyone knows where they need to be on the stage at any given time. Blink and you miss the transition. It just happens as if out of nowhere. I’d love to see this show with everyone GPS-tracked, it would be a work of art.

The song order has definitely been well considered. It’s a strong start with “Caught Somewhere in Time” and “Stranger in a Strange Land” before new songs are introduced and rather than intersperse them amongst the older songs throughout the set, they’re introduced in a three song block. The way the crowd greets Senjutsu‘s lead single, “Writing On The Wall”, you’d think it was a lost classic that has been brought back into the set and the momentum is kept through “Days of Future Past” and “The Time Machine”. “Death of the Celts” has the unenvious positioning of being sandwiched between “The Prisoner” and “Can I Play With Madness” but never feels like a lesser song when compared to two stone cold classics from the band’s back catalogue. Indeed, “Can I Play With Madness” is one of the night’s highlights and hopefully there’s a future where the Seventh Son songs get to be showcased again. More than an hour in, there’s no sign of any drop in the bands energy levels, with “Heaven Can Wait” finding Harris galloping around the stage while Dickinson prowls the walkway that wraps itself around the back of McBrain’s drums, the song culminating in a first entrance proper for Eddie for a ridiculously over the top gunfight with Dickinson.

There’s a welcome return for Somewhere In Time‘s epic “Alexander the Great”. No one quite does a big historical number quite like Iron Maiden, with the weave of intricate guitar harmonies, galloping bassline, sing-a-long sections, all culminating with Dickinson hovering behind McBrain pounding away at the drum kit’s gong, as they pull out all the stops for a final big number. The crowd laps up “Fear of the Dark”, as they always do, and which means it always gets played, even if it’s far from the band’s best. While you could spend considerable time musing over the songs they could have included, ultimately there’s only one song that has to be played, one song that’s never going to be skipped, the first song on the setlist: “Iron Maiden”. That introduction still sounds incredible. For everything that the band became during 1980s, there’s not an ounce of fat on the songs from that first album, they’re lean but muscular, and, although the band have always disputed any assertions, it’s as punk as fuck and has a real spirit of ’76 running through it.

The three song encore finds newbie “Hell On Earth” being worthy of it’s positioning and worthy of the big production pyrotechnics.  Other than “Iron Maiden”, “The Trooper” is possibly the only other song that Iron Maiden aren’t allowed to not play and it remains a perfect encapsulation of everything that’s so great about this band.  The evening ends with “Wasted Years”, which in recent times has been the band’s go-to song to finish with. The band stay on the stage to make their farewells as everything heads off into the night to face the horror that is Rail Bus Replacement and a wish that Brisbane would get its act together and locate the city’s arena-sized venue at least somewhere vaguely near the city.

It does feel slightly sacrilegious that there’s nothing from Powerslave. I’m sure I read somewhere that “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” had been rehearsed for adding to the songs for this tour but it sadly wasn’t to be. You want to say “Next time!” for all the songs that didn’t make into the setlist for this tour but we’re fast approaching a time when there aren’t going to be many more “next times”.

If we’re lucky, we might get one more chance to experience a live Iron Maiden show. By the time that comes around, you’d expect most of the band to be in their early to mid 70s. Two more tours might be pushing it a bit; by then it would probably take drummer Nicko McBrain into his eighties and I’d be surprised if they’ll still be on the road in the 2030s. Almost 50 years in, and more than 35 years since I first saw them, they’re still one of the great live bands. And to think, people paid stupid money this month for tickets to see Oasis.