Say Hello 2 Heaven - Children of GraffitiNirvana’s debut ‘Bleach’ and a thousand times as...

ISSUE 2 - AUTUMN 2000FREE

If you love ROCK MUSIC you know what it’s like to live in an ALTERNATIVE dimension. When you listen to the records you LOVE, TIME becomes something you can fly back and forth through. The artists featured in CHILDREN OF GRAFFITI offer you a feeling of OMNIPRESENCE, a sense that something about the way we communicate is NOT TRANSITORY. This music is NOT DISPOSABLE. And neither is this magazine. Collect all 12 issues and use them as your doorway to an era when bands broke out of the backrooms and into your hearts.

Say Hello 2 Heaven

PLUS... PLACEBO . QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE . LINKIN PARKMARILYN MANSON . THE CROCKETTS . IDLEWILD . THE JUNKET

Contents

4. SAWYER SAYSEditorial. Rant. Diatribe. Discussion. Deep. Pointless. Call it what you want.

5. ALL TIME ALBUM TWOReflecting on Nirvana’s frightening finale, ‘In Utero’.

5. OOH... THIS IS NEW!Placebo, Queens Of The Stone Age, Linkin Park, Marilyn Manson album reports.

8. TIME OF OUR LIFEThe Crocketts, Idlewild, The Junket live reviews.

9. WHERE WE AREProfile of the best club night in the world: Fazer.

10. it means everythingDevastating David writing devastatingly about Nirvana and how they make him feel funny.

11. SHAMELESS SELF- PROMOTIONDavid talks hard about our song

‘Nights Like Wolves’.

12. TOP 10Songs that rocked our year 2000.

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ISSUE 2 - AUTUMN 2000 ISSUE 2 - AUTUMN 2000

“Welcome to the jungle.” “It’s a big, bad world.” “You’ll get eaten alive...” Blah blah blah. There’s no need to get all metaphory. Just give it to me straight. And ‘it’ isn’t some kind of euphemism. Honestly. I’m starting to think you don’t know me at all. And, really, all this terrifying wordplay seems to be the most fright-ening thing about the city. I haven’t come across anything else to be scared of. Apart from all the moaning. Have you ever been surrounded by so many frowny faces in one place? Every music venue is packed at the edges with the most depressed people in the world EVER. And I mean literally at the edges. The kids in the middle trying to get close to the stage are fine. It’s the A&R scouts, the sound engineers, the promoters, the managers, the journalists and the producers – all those people who linger on the fringes of every small gig. “Bloody bands!” they complain at every opportunity.

Maybe it’s fair enough. I went to Leeds Festival recently and having ‘acci-dentally’ bumped into At The Drive-In’s guitarist Omar Rodriguez, he told me about their recent tour. “We came really close to death, almost sliding off the road. It was pretty scary,” he said. I put on my best little-fright-ened-girl look and gasped. His drummer friend Tony Hajjar expanded: “Whatever feelings we have come out in the music.” Which might explain why the Texans sound like a car crash, but it’s tricky to quite get past the band’s mid-show instructions

that the crowd stop leaping around like wild animals. At The Drive-In think jumping up and down is too dangerous. Which means they’re allowed to get their emotions out, but everyone else just has to stand there. Bloody bands.

So, yeah, artists want it all their own way. But don’t we all? I know I do. Riches. Why not? Who wouldn’t want a diamond tiara to wear around Camden Market? But then there’s all the hard work that goes into earning enough rubies

to brighten up my grungey wardrobe. Do I really want that? Hmmm. Not so much. Contradictions. Hypocrisies. Paradoxes. We’re all full of them. Whatever. EVERY-BODY CHILL OUT. Be like Roddy Woomble. “I’ve been looking for a nice pair of brogues,” the Scottish terrier confided in me, mid-power cut, at the Barfly Sessions. Life’s easier when you keep things in perspec-tive. A few months later, the point was emphasised when I found Conor Oberst, otherwise known as Bright Eyes, sitting in the back of his little touring vehicle outside The Monarch. It was the middle of the afternoon and he was drinking steadily from a bottle of red wine. “Writing is something I have to do to justify my existence as a person,” he insisted. “Even if it’s not of worth to anyone other than myself.” I wanted to give him a cuddle. But it

was already weird that I’d just hopped into his van.

Maybe, then, it’s people like me who give the city a bad name. I’m the stranger that will stick my head through your window simply because it’s open. And I’m the girl who will tap you on the shoulder because she thinks you might be Dave Grohl. But really you’re just someone who tries to look like him and I should have known better because surely Dave Grohl would never wear a Kurt Cobain

T-shirt. Which means if the city is a jungle at all, then it’s the cartoon kind, where the animals are nowhere near as scary when you get up

close to them. Take Liam Gallagher. I went to see some weird Cajun-influenced band called Menlo Park at Shoreditch Town Hall and the Oasis frontman happened to be standing next to me. From a distance, then, he’s the tough guy of British indie music. In reality, he’s smaller than you’d think. I reckon even I’d have a good chance with him in a wrestle. And, yes, maybe it’s a big, bad world. But isn’t that true anywhere? And isn’t it better when you’ve got approximately a million live music venues on your doorstep.

As for getting eaten alive, well, the city’s so expen-sive that you can hardly afford a bagel which means you end up way too skinny to end up looking anything like a decent meal. And if you wouldn’t even fill little Liam Gallagher up then you’ll probably be okay.

SAWYER SAYS

EVERYBODY CHILL OUT. Be like Roddy Woomble.

NIRVANA, IN UTERO (GEFFEN)

Whilst ‘Nevermind’ was the album that broke Nirvana all over the world, it seems that ‘In Utero’ was the one that finally broke Kurt Cobain. And listening to this masterpiece now, it’s bloody obvious that it’s as much a suicide note as an album. From the masterful, knowing opening line that finds Cobain

announcing that, “Teenage angst has paid off well” to those questions peppering closing shot ‘All Apolo-gies’: “What else could I be? What else should I say?” You can’t listen to those lyrics without seeing the doomed rhetoric flip-flopping on the floor like a fish out of water.

‘Dumb’ and ‘Pennyroyal Tea’ are perhaps the tracks that set this album apart from its prede-cessor, proof, as they are, that Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged set was far from a fluke. Cobain may not write overtly sophis-ticated music, but the best artists are able to streamline their complex ideas in ways that people can understand. With ‘Nevermind’ and to his own distress, Cobain proved

himself better at that than any other musician around. And on ‘In Utero’ he does it again – on ‘Rape Me’ he re-uses the ubiquitous ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ riff in a way that could only appear unimaginative to the densest of listeners.

‘In Utero’ is scarier than Nirvana’s debut ‘Bleach’ and a thousand times as bitter as ‘Nevermind’. Like existence itself, it is at once confus-ing and obvious, angry but resigned. It is a few hundred comedowns too many. But it proved one thing for sure. Kurt Cobain was indeed a voice for a generation. And ‘In Utero’ was his final, shocking truth.

ALL TIME ALBUM TWO

PLACEBO, BLACK MARKET MUSIC (ELEVATOR LADY)

Listening to a Placebo record is like going to a party in an electric storm. And if the first self-ti-tled album was the yell of revellers going full-throt-tle and second release ‘Without You I’m Nothing’ was the soundtrack of the aftermath, ‘Black Market Music’ is the noise of the same party a year later. It’s dislocating and it will devour you.

Single ‘Taste Of Men’ makes for a powerful opening, its impact multiplied when set

in context. It may kick off like The Chemical Brothers but it’s not an attempt to jump a train – instead it represents the futility of trying to start a dance when no one wants to dance anymore. ‘Change your taste in men’ becomes ‘change the record’ becomes ‘change your life’ and the response is always ‘I can’t’ or ‘I won’t’. The lead-off track, then, is typical of a record that might look like one thing but is actually something else.

It’s the sound of a body and mind as separate entities. ‘Won’t you join

me now,’ Molko sings on ‘Days Before You Came’ and if you absorb ‘Black Market Music’ then you’ll have no choice. ‘Slave To The Wage’ is its hook, its crack cocaine, but preced-ing it are the hypnotic ‘Passive Aggressive’, the frank ‘Black-Eyed’ and the desperate ‘Blue American’. Placebo have lined these tracks up like a trail of gunpowder. Light a match and watch the world burn.

OOH... THIS IS NEW!



“I’m paranoid,” “I’m about to break,” “I’m left in the wake of the mistake” – so go the first three songs on this debut from California’s Linkin Park. No one can accuse this upset sextet of forgetting what their point is. Indeed, they tap whole-heartedly into the unhappy psyche of a generation neatly warmed up by Korn. This is teen angst at boiling point.

And yet, despite its content, ‘Hybrid Theory’ is just as colourful as a high street window display. It’s nu-metal for a Top Shop generation. Yes, the band have problems that keep them in floods of tears but there’s no denying the sense of satisfaction that comes from being totally and utterly miserable. It almost makes you feel good.

So it’s in that paradoxical frame of mind that the melodramatic Chester Bennington sings, “My life is broken”, “I’m stuck on the outside” etc. All this emotion is suitably over-egged by guitars like bull-dozers, not one but two panicky vocalists (the other is ‘rapper’ Mike Shinoda) plus a DJ – Linkin Park certainly aren’t ones for leaving space in their songs.

Which is fine; the result of this American outfit’s kitchen sink packing is an album filled to bursting with melodic inten-sity. ‘In The End’ is a soaring anthem, ‘With You’ is magnificently affecting and ‘Crawling’ is insanely infectious. The list could go on. Despite being filled to the brim, this album has no filler. Resist it if you can.

LINKIN PARK, HYBRID THEORY (WARNER)

OOH... THIS IS NEW! OOH... THIS IS NEW!QOTSA, RATED R (INTERSCOPE)

It’s an odd one this. Suddenly worshipped all over the place – in the pages of your indie-pindy weeklies and at the counters of your local heavy metal shop – Queens Of The Stone Age are getting everyone’s adrenalin pumping. And in a market so heavily dominated by image, appealing to such a broad cross-section of music listeners is something of an achievement in itself.

But that’s not the only accomplishment for which ‘Rated R’ stands out. Its quality is what makes the second album from QOTSA far more than a fashion statement – and it’s refreshing to find that the public have been crying out for something so original. Because, yeah, it’s a rock record, but it’s definitely not like any other rock record you have heard. As stoned as a hamster in an opium den, it’s alive. And it’s also huge fun.

How could it not be when the band’s lynchpins, former Kyuss guitarist Josh Homme and weirdo

friend Nick Oliveri, are clearly having the best time ever? It’s their full-throttle approach to life that fuels this record and from the moment it propels off into the unknown, via a chemist’s, with ‘Feel Good Hit Of The Summer’, ‘Rated R’ feels like a road trip in your own front room.

No wonder people are digging this record – who wouldn’t pay the price of a CD for the kind of expe-rience you normally have to travel to the highways of desert America for? ‘Rated R’ is a trip in more ways than one.

MARILYN MANSON, HOLY WOOD [IN THE SHADOW OF THE VALLEY OF DEATH] (NOTHING/INTERSCOPE)

Marilyn Manson’s fifth album, ‘Holy Wood’, is a commentary on the battle between religion and entertainment, a report on the ongoing wrestling match between God and Television, a statement about commercialism. Some will understand it as a call to arms, others will hear a tantrum and shut the door on it.But whatever you think of

this record, or Manson in general, you shouldn’t ignore the fact that he’s good fun. ‘Godeatgod’ addresses the big man himself and works perfectly as a build-up to the misleadingly titled ‘The Love Song’. America-baiting and anti-religion, it’s as big and catchy as a rock ‘n’ roll musical and, in fact, the whole album would work perfectly as just that. Yes, you feel like you’re being shouted at but equally you’re encouraged to yell back or sing along. Leave your self-conscious-ness at the door.

And while you’re at it, leave your preconcep-tions behind too because as panto-ish as Marilyn and his output may be, there’s a mantra here worth gripping onto. “I’m not a slave to a god that doesn’t exist, I’m not a slave to a world that doesn’t give a shit,” he sings and frankly his attitude bears scrutiny. “We’re disposable teens,” he hollers next and of course he’s not a teen at all but we take his point. And actually if you can’t connect to Manson’s perspective then you’re missing a sense of spirit that should, in an ideal world, survive into your twenties and beyond.

It may be obvious and it may be in a right old mood but ‘Holy Wood’ is Marilyn Manson’s most listenable album.



THE CROCKETTS, HIGHBURY GARAGE, LONDON

Mr. Davey Crockett – recent hero of The Sun’s Dear Dedire column – shakes like he’s caught some kind of unknown disease and claws at the low ceiling of the Garage like a resurrecting corpse. He’s in the middle of singing/howling the-biggest-pop-hit-that-will-never-be-a-pop-hit EVER. Why won’t it crack the mainstream? Maybe because it’s too intense and definitely because of the swearing. Still, though, there’s no ignoring the fact that ‘Will You Still Care?’ isn’t just a song, it’s a mainline artery and it tells everybody’s story. ‘James Dean-esque’ is further evidence of this band’s high standards.

The Crocketts’ new material, too, is both unsettling and upbeat. Maybe the sense of maniacal, knife-wielding ecstasy that drives the earlier material is hidden deeper beneath the surface of songs such as ‘Mrs Playing Dead’ but these tracks remain familiarly lop-sided.

In the year 2000, then, The Crocketts do certainly still think with their heart rather than their head and they remain drunk more often than they are sober, but the London-based alcoholics continue to deliver performances that are utterly trustworthy and insightful. Their songs are like needles, their perspective is masochistic and they’re likely to turn you as deranged as they already are. But as you’re half-laughing, half-crying your way to hell, at least you will understand something about your life.

IDLEWILD, MONARCH, LONDON

It’s not often you find Idlewild playing Monarch-sized venues in London these days, but back in Camden for the Barfly Sessions, Roddy Woomble and co. look at home as ever.

Not that anyone can promise us the band will actually be playing after all. A power failure has brought proceedings to a halt. The television cameras don’t work. Neither do the amps. Even for a band as chaotic as Idlewild, this is out of the ordinary.

Eventually, though, the Scottish outfit do make it on stage. Someone in the crowd shouts: ‘You ugly bastard,’ and Roddy acknowledges the heckle with a quick, ‘Thank you very much’. There are still technical issues and an amplifier appears to explode, but Idlewild bump onwards.

The band had said they wouldn’t be playing older material but having tested the patient crowd with delays and hitches, they do treat the crowd to ‘I’m A Message’ and ‘A Film For The Future’. Perfectly unpredictable.

THE JUNKET, THE VENUE, NORTHAMPTON

The Junket are looking out at the crowd. Staring back at them is a roomful of Damned fans. The ancient punks headline tonight and The Junket are out of place. They’re still dazzling, though. Rik Flynn’s guitar parts twist and turn, cartwheeling through each song like gangs of kids running with sparklers, whilst the three-way harmonies he shares with bassist Stevie Rees and drummer Reuben Humphries emphasise the effect.

Tracks from debut long-player ‘Lux Safari’ and preceding mini-album ‘Stamina’ make up the majority of tonight’s set. ‘Night In Red’ and ‘Adolessence’ are highlights. Like Cure songs written in a futuristic city, they take us miles away from Northampton. New track, ‘The Blue On You’, brings us back to reality. Alcoholic and unpredictable, it’s rockier than the older material but no less dynamic. And it’s definite evidence that The Junket are making the sound of something new. Something important. Maybe that much could be said of The Damned once.

Time of Our liFE

FAZER

Half-black hole, half-maze, Fazer is hidden right out in the open. In the heart of the city, lobbing distance from Tottenham Court Road, paper plane throwing distance from Centre Point, no one ever sees it. It’s underground in every different way that you want to understand the word. Boys and girls you see playing in The Camden Falcon when the sun goes down fall south through the city and are here when the sun comes up again. The blonde-haired singer from Malluka stands in a doorway, looking at the silhouettes being macheted by strobes. Leo Ross, brother of Bomb The Bass programmer Atticus, is at the bar with his nuts-brilliant band Nojahoda. The glittery, gaudy Rachel Stamp are falling around the corridors.

It’s the music that everyone notices first. It massages you into shapes you’d never thought of making before. Basslines like undercurrents. Guitars like heart monitors. Drums like army majors on acid. Vocals like the voices in your head. Is it the singer of a band speaking? Is it you speaking? By one in the morning, it will be impossible to tell. Kids inter-twine with each other on the dancefloor, coming together and parting again like atoms. In here, everybody is a molecule coated in mineral oil. Each song is a new chemical bond. The lights flicker, flicker, flicker, like old film, creating the sense

that everybody here is being thrown, from second to second, between the past and the future. One moment it’s 2014, the next it’s pre-the-beginning-of-time. Look one way and the world’s a black canvas, look again and it’s paint-spattered and graffitied.

Is the club as big as it seems or does each corner seem further away from the last one just because it’s so hard to see where you’re going or who you’re passing? Faces loom out of the darkness when the lights flare up. It’s like living life inside a bipolar camera flash. The floor becomes sticky with drinks. At the bar, they pour purple concoctions, clear, viscous liquids and anything else you want to ask for. If you’re not eighteen yet, well, chances are no one can see you anyway so if you made it past the front door, then you’re safe here until tomorrow.

It’s the music that defines Fazer. Named after a song by New York band Quick-sand, the club’s name gives you a clue to the DJ’s playlist. ‘Fazer’ itself gets played every club night (every other Tuesday) and it’s one of the more pogo-friendly tracks. Not that people jump up and down here. The dancing is linear and symmetric. First time around, you won’t be able to do it. Or even if you can, you won’t be doing it the way everyone else does. It’s breath-taking, watching the shadows form and dissolve, the silhouettes as sharp as fins cutting through those bassy subsur-face currents. Existing at Fazer is to find you can live on a submarine. Or in a box. As long as there’s a soundsystem playing Tool, Sunny Day Real Estate, Girls Against Boys, The Junket and whoever else reveals your own interior as a place a million miles deep and wide. And still expanding.

Stand atop the broken amplifiers scattered around the place and watch the people dance. Throw yourselves amongst them and become part of the cobweb. Or just close your eyes and listen. There’s no place like Fazer.

WHERE WE ARE


ISSUE 2 - AUTUMN 2000 ISSUE 2 - AUTUMN 2000IT MEANS EVERYTHING

DAVID ON ‘NIGHTS LIKE WOLVES’

This was the song that made me look at JD and Chambers differently. It’s as dark as a hole, man. Before then, I hadn’t really considered the dudes too much. I mean, I had better things to do, man. But if I’d thought about them at all, I guess I had them down as kids who had split from the country and arrived in the city to play at being grown-ups. But when I heard ‘Nights Like Wolves’, it was a bit like when I first listened to ‘Jeremy’ by Pearl Jam. I mean, man, obviously it’s a way different song, but inherent in it is still that idea of this quiet kid who had all these crazy demons. I dug that.

I don’t know exactly what moti-vated the lyrics – JD doesn’t say much about that kind of thing once something’s written, which maybe he should because when he does actually open his talker he rarely says much that sounds half as interesting as what he says in ‘Nights Like Wolves’. Still, I do know that it’s one of three tracks from ‘It’s All Make Believe, Isn’t It?’ that isn’t about looking at the world through those rose-tinted spectacles JD likes to carry about. Clearly he wrote ‘Nights Like Wolves’, ‘Voices’ and ‘When Boys Are Boys’ without them. Man, I wouldn’t like to be him when he loses those damn glasses for good.

Personally, dude, I can’t wait to turn this song into something bigger. The recordings so far have all been done so quickly and have been too tightly based around the limited set-up JD and Chambers had when writing the tracks in the first place. So this song ended up being tracked all inside out – acoustic guitar and vocals first, drums later. When it came to laying my parts down, it was like giving me a steak and telling me I had to eat it without chewing. Sometimes I wonder whether these kids are screwing with me on purpose.

NIRVANA BY DAVID

As a kid, Nirvana seemed like they were from outer space or something. They were the gateway to everything else in my life. The Friday morning after their Top Of The Pops perfor-mance, all the older kids who dug their music were yabbering about it. At that point, I can’t have consciously thought about the fact that the band, by singing out of key and falling out of time with the synched instruments, were spitting in the face of expectation and that corporate whoredom those T-shirts of theirs stood against. But maybe it fried my brain even more because I couldn’t figure what these cats were doing. I mean, I thought they were fried themselves. But really it was just the sight and sound of someone going against the norm that made them look so nuts and that goes to show how rarely you see someone really defy the norm. Who has done it since?

Those older dudes all went to Reading Festival when Nirvana headlined but they didn’t invite me. I was allowed to knock around with them at school but I knew not to push my luck. Still, I did get a ticket for Brixton Academy a couple of years later. I was going demented at the thought of Kurt Cobain starting up the ‘Teen Spirit’ riff. It was all I thought about for weeks – that moment when Brixton Academy would go berserk.

And then Cobain decided he was going to cut. Which was shocking but again it was one of those Nirvana moments when the significance only hit me later. At the time, it was kind of cele-brated that another rock icon had died at the age of twenty seven. But all the others on that list actually died from excess and maybe they weren’t having a good time (probably because of too much excess) but they weren’t so dramati-cally or particularly distressed by the concept of being famous and adored. Their deaths didn’t really signify too much other than the fact that rock stars have lots of money and lots of time to get wasted.

The Nirvana frontman, though, was a much more powerful example for kids who understand beliefs and principles as more valuable than money and fame. Beyond signing to a major record deal, Cobain never acted in a way that any sensible cat trying to be successful would. He was an outsider and a maverick.

SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION

SAWYER

1. IDLEWILD: ACTUALLY IT’S DARKNESS2. THE CROCKETTS: CHICKEN VS. MACHO3. HIM: JOIN ME IN DEATH4. GLASSJAW: PIANO5. PEARL JAM: BREAKERFALL6. TURN: BERETTA7. RACHEL STAMP: MONSTERS OF THE NEW WAVE8. DEFTONES: STREET CARP9. LINKIN PARK: IN THE END10. MARILYN MANSON: DISPOSABLE TEENS

CHAMBERS

1. INCUBUS: DRIVE2. DEFTONES: CHANGE (IN THE HOUSE OF FLIES)3. EELS: MR E’S BEAUTIFUL BLUES4. DOVES: THE MAN WHO TOLD EVERYTHING5. IDLEWILD: LET ME SLEEP 6. THE JUNKET: CAGEBIRDS7. EMINEM: THE REAL SLIM SHADY8. COLDPLAY: SHIVER9. BRIGHT EYES: SOMETHING VAGUE10. ELLIOTT: CALM AMERICANS

CHILDREN OF GRAFFITI HAS BEEN ADORINGLY ASSEMBLED BY SAWYER WITH THE HELP OF ROCK ‘N’ ROLL REVIEWER JD, CHILLED OUT, CLOSET OBSESSIVE CHAMBERS AND DROP-DEAD DEGENERATE DAVID.

ALL FOUR OF THESE PEOPLE ARE ALSO IN A BAND CALLED CHILDREN OF GRAFFITI.

DAVID

1. PEARL JAM: LIGHT YEARS2. DEFTONES: FEITICEIRA3. GLASSJAW: PRETTY LUSH4. HIM: POISON GIRL5. AT THE DRIVE-IN : ONE ARMED SCISSOR6. QOTSA: THE LOST ART OF KEEPING A SECRET7. CAY: NEURONS LIKE BRANDY8. A PERFECT CIRCLE: JUDITH9. THE JUNKET: THE KING OF THE LETTUCE LINE10. PLACEBO: DAYS BEFORE YOU CAME

JD

1. THE JUNKET: ADOLESSENCE2. HUNDRED REASONS: CEREBRA3. DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE: PHOTOBOOTH4. PLACEBO: BLACK-EYED5. HIM: RIGHT HERE IN MY ARMS6. KING ADORA: BIG ISN’T BEAUTIFUL7. IDLEWILD: LITTLE DISCOURAGE8. MY VITRIOL: CEMENTED SHOES9. DEFTONES: KNIFE PRTY10. TWIST: GLISTENING

TOP 10 - SONGS THAT ROCKED OUR YEAR 2000

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