Garth Cartwright

Gypsy Kings
Garth Cartwright and His Journeys with Gypsy Musicians.

"Our empire is surrounded by enemies. Our history is written in blood, not wine. Wine is what we drink to toast our victories." (Anthony Quinn in Attila the Hun)

The above quote is not wholly relevant to the Roma people of the Balkans. But I use it as Hunter S Thompson used it in his new journalism landmark Hells Angels - to describe an endemic outlaw mentality. But also because expat Aucklander Garth Cartwright, who spent many months with the Roma, compares his book Princes Amongst Men: Journeys With Gypsy Musicians to Thompson's first book.

"I chose that because if you don't know anything about gypsies, you're going to think they're wild outsiders who make music and dance and fight and pull knives all the time. And Hell's Angels, if you don't read his book, the only idea you have is of these wild outsiders who ride motorbikes and pull knives. That book of his is a great piece of journalism, and it shows them not as angels in any sense, but it shows them as real human beings, and that's what I want to show, that the Roma are real human beings. They have an incredible culture, and communities, and language that essentially is overlooked."

Cartwright, who grew up in the cultural vacuum of Mount Roskill, wandered through Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Macedonia over many months during 2003, tracking down and hanging out with the gypsy musicians. In the marginalised Roma communities, musicians are more than just entertainers; they reflect a culture that is many centuries old. Moreover, they are a celebration of it. It is often the downtrodden that have the best tunes - just look at how jazz and blues, and more recently hip-hop, grew out of African American oppression. Some of the Roma musicians are stars, some are legends, while the majority make their living playing at weddings and festivals.

The Balkans - a war plagued, almost forgotten corner of Europe - is a strange place for a kiwi boy to end up, covering something as seemingly arcane as gypsy music. "When I got to Europe in the early ‘90s I started hearing European gypsy music," explains the London dwelling Cartwright. "It just knocked me over straight away. It's a music that knows no rules, and is sung by people who are really possessed, they don't want to do it politely, or just for the top 40, but just communicating really deeply, there's something beyond just music or entertainment or the trivial background soundtrack that so much music is today. So for someone that just loves music it just grabbed me man, and took over straight away."

It was a convoluted path that led Cartwright to the Balkans. He says he was always interested in reading news about such exotic places as a kid in suburban Auckland. The stifling boredom and lack of cultural stimulation in Mount Roskill - "It was what you'd call a dead zone" - triggered some kind of wanderlust, and he hasn't stopped yet. After immersing himself in music, literature, skateboarding, even boxing to stave off the ennui, Cartwright took to Kerouac-style aimless hitching as soon as he was old enough. He dabbled in punk, and started writing.

Soon enough he was writing controversially about New Zealand art. Hell raiser artists such as Philip Clairmont, Tony Fomison, and Allen Maddox were around, and no one was writing anything engaging about their work. Cartwright lived with Fomison for a spell, before winning some journalism awards that afforded him the opportunity to travel overseas.

"I jumped on a plane and went straight to America, 'cos I wanted to go and hear as much blues and soul and honky-tonk country music as I could. I really wanted to do an On The Road trip. I met an old friend in LA, and we bought a $600 Buick, a rusty old car, and jumped in it and drove down to New Orleans. And continued driving for the next 6 months. Then I went to Mexico and Guatemala and Belize and Cuba, and I did my Latin American wanderings. Then I came back and lived in San Francisco, and essentially I had a real romantic engagement with American and Latin American culture. But to get into the States I had to have a ticket out, so I had a ticket to London. And living in there when Bush Senior was in power and the first Gulf War was on made me think, well, America's not quite as romantic as I thought it was."

On the other side of the Atlantic Cartwright did what he needed to pay the rent, including a stint in market research - "it's a nightmare job you know". It was at this job that he found out he had won a Guardian music writing competition, that he had entered and then promptly forgotten about. "I got a phone call one day, it was this really posh English guy who goes 'I'm ringing up to tell you you've won the competition’. And I'd just had a smoke at lunch time and was like 'Yeah? What's this man?' I didn't really know what was going on, and it took some time to sink in."

Making the most of this opportunity gave Cartwright a rare entry into the closed world of British print. Since then he's written for many daily newspapers and music magazines. And it was through the freelancing that he found the seed of Princes Amongst Men, writing an article on Romanian Taraf de Haïdouks for the Telegraph. But it's not easy making a living out of freelancing, particularly when your preference is to cover a music that loses its cultural context away from its own shores.

"All the media is very parasitic, it feeds on its own media. I think the band of the moment is Interpol, so they all do features on Interpol. They're very much lemmings in that sense. So if you come in and go, 'Look, I've got this story about a woman gypsy queen in the Balkans, and she's been twice nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, and she's a great humanitarian, and she was friends with Tito, and Indira Ghandi", you'll generally get a blank look. Because even though it's a great story, they want what they've been told is fashionable. I have little respect for parts of the British press. The arts coverage is generally pretty poor. It's an extension of the fashion pages."

Having said that, it seems Princes Amongst Men has been generally well received. The book is part hung-over travelogue, part musicological adventure, and part amateur sociology in the classic New Journalism vein. It tells the hidden story of the Roma, how they live their lives on the fringes as they have done for eons, damaged but not destroyed by the horrors that have gone on around them. But as you would hope, it is the music that shines through like a triumphant beacon. This is equally to do with Cartwright's outsider passion for it, and the fact that it is in the Roma blood, a connection to their past, and a promise for their future.

"They've always been a marginalised community, so music would have always been seen as a way of getting some respect and making some money for your family. It's a community conveying through music and dance their absolute belief in themselves. It's really a deeper, older, more ancient thing. And that's something you realise about the Balkans, it's where Asia and Europe are blending. In Western society we've cut off our roots and built these big urban societies where there's just manufactured entertainment for us."

It wasn't an easy thing to do either, traveling through these shattered remains of Communism's lost ideals. Public transport is average, hotels don't exist, the food is different, and breakfast is generally alcohol and cigarettes. It takes its toll.

"It absolutely destroyed me. The Balkans is the extreme opposite of New Zealand, not in landscape or climate, but in lifestyle. People smoke really heavily, drink hugely - often first thing in the morning someone will pass you a glass of rakia (brandy), it's just their way of starting the day. And fried meats and stuff, there's none of this idea of being health conscious. And when you're living amongst gypsies, you do as them, it's no use standing off and trying to live this healthy lifestyle. If you're along for the ride, you have to go for the ride. That was really hard, and it gets really hot in the Balkans, it's incredibly hot and humid and dusty. Then in the winter it's freezing. It beat me up essentially. By the time I got back to London at the end of September 2003 I was physically shattered. I was lucky I had everything by then to start writing the book, because I couldn't have kept traveling any longer."

Since the completion of the book, Cartwright has been researching his next project about his first love, American blues and soul. If it's anything like as good as Princes Amongst Men it'll be a coruscating read.

Garth Cartwright
Princes Amongst Men: Journeys with Gypsy Musicians
(Serpent's Tail)


Gavin Bertram.

Simon Reynolds on Postpunk

THE UNFINISHED REVOLUTION

"Our own correspondent is sorry to tell, of an uneasy time that all is not well" ('Reuters', Wire 1977)

While punk's initial amphetamine flash was a beguiling antidote to what had come before, it dissipated as rapidly as it arrived. But the ground illuminated by its fleeting glow yielded enough energy to create a greater fireball, one that has flamed since, spitting out sparks to reignite the spirit. What came in punk’s wake fed on its fundamental promise, but took its revolutionary stance far further.

Postpunk didn't so much describe the stylistic signature of the music, as situate it in a particular time and place, bestowing it with the political weight of the era. Punk rallied against the cultural climate of the time, but its direct progeny found a far greater rallying call responding to the political climate. It was a bleak time, the late 1970s and early 80s, and postpunk was a rare pocket of dissent to the new right doctrine sweeping the West.

While its musical traits have been mined over the last few years by acts such as Franz Ferdinand, Interpol, Maximo Park and Art Brut, there's something missing. The body moves but it has no soul. For those familiar with the initial postpunk vanguard - Joy Division, Wire, Gang of Four, PiL et al - this Noughties wave feels like a shallow facsimile, an exercise in exploitation. Nothing personal, they just don't have the oppressive weight of a troubled epoch on their collective shoulders.

"In some senses I think postpunk was one of the last places left to go," muses British music journalist Simon Reynolds. Author of Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984, Reynolds has constructed a compelling journey through postpunk and its many aspects - including industrial, New Pop, and Goth. At last a definitive telling of what's described on the cover as 'the most exhilarating moment in Britain's pop/rock history'. Reynolds, who previously penned the history of the nineties rave phenomenon Energy Flash, has covered postpunk in exhaustive and fascinating detail.

"I don't know if people are inspired by the politics and cultural context," he continues. "I get the impression that people don't know that much about it, and there's a certain aspect that is unrecoverable. Someone that grew up after the collapse of the Iron Curtain and communism can't imagine what it was like when it really did seem like the world could get blown up. I think some of the fear of that time is something you can't communicate to people who are young now."

It’s also impossible to ignore the artistic advances made in this six-year period. Reynolds asserts in Rip It Up and Start Again that after punk's digressions into back to basics rock'n'roll, the postpunk pioneers were intent on creating a sound that had no historical precedent. This they largely achieved, bringing adjectives like angular, desolate and abrasive to the forefront of the rock lexicon. Although he's in two minds about the real gains made by the bands covered in the book, Reynolds upholds Leeds legends Gang of Four as an example.

"In some ways Gang of Four were like a pub rock band. They liked to drink a lot and they were playing this white, aggressive, amped up kind of black music. But at the same time they were able to create something that did seem precedentless at the time. By the way they used technology and by exaggerating the spikiness of Wilco Johnson's playing in Dr Feelgood and bringing in dub, and by the way they approached things in this incredible premeditated cold-blooded way. The only things it reminded me of at the time were certain disco records, and it was such an abstraction of those disco records, so stripped of what disco was about, it just seemed so new."

Gang of Four were a highly politicised band, coming from the radical student left. The aggressiveness of their manifesto was an integral part of their music and lyrics. Amongst their postpunk contemporaries there were more strident units (Scritti Politti), and those whose message was delivered in a subtler, and perhaps more subversive package. John Lydon's post-Sex Pistols organisation PiL, and Manchester's revered Joy Division are two that come to mind. By issuing challenging, compelling albums that entered the broader public consciousness, they left glowing embers that would ignite again and again throughout the preceding years.

"Obviously Joy Division weren't as big a band as the Doors, say, or Jimi Hendrix," says Reynolds. "But I think in terms of pushing the boundaries of rock music it is equivalent work. And they created waves within an audience that existed then that was looking for figures to show the way forward - in the same way that in the Sixties people were looking to musicians to lead the way forward."

Joy Division's Ian Curtis was certainly one his generation's answers to the pop culture prophets of the 1960s. His tragic death by his own hand in May 1980 guaranteed his place in the pantheon of rock's departed deities. Late Joy Division producer Martin Hannett told Jon Savage (author of punk history England’s Dreaming) that Curtis "was one of those channels for the Gestalt: the only one I bumped into in that period. A lightning conductor."

While Curtis and Hannett are two who were obviously unavailable to recall their memories of the period, Reynolds has interviewed an outrageous amount of participants - over 120. Certain individuals - John Lydon for instance - didn't respond, but of those who did there was a lot of enthusiasm for the project - although some needed the theme explained.

"A lot of them, when I mentioned postpunk, they didn't quite understand what I meant," recounts Reynolds, still mystified. "Which is odd, because I did all this research in the music papers, and that was what people called it, even then. It's always been known as the postpunk era, it's not something I've invented! So they didn't necessarily have a grip on it, but when I started explaining what I wanted to do about halfway through the interview they'd suddenly get very animated. Like they'd forgotten what a great time it was, and what a great time they'd had. Even though there was a lot of fear at the time, and political fear and anxiety and stuff going on, they would get really animated as they remembered it. Nearly all the people I spoke to were very accommodating."

Just as British punk was inspired by Stateside frontiersmen such as the Ramones, MC5 and Stooges, its own sparks leapt across the Atlantic, in some kind of cultural handshake. Post Modernist-savvy acts like Talking Heads, Devo, Pere Ubu and the Residents all contributed to a movement that was at odds to the prevailing cultural paradigm of North America. All around the world enclaves inspired by punk, and motivated by its offspring, began to emerge. In New Zealand Children's Hour, Danse Macabre, The Gordons, and some of the early 1980s Dunedin music can be attributed to this. Postpunk must have tapped into some preternatural instinct in this country, as both Joy Division and The Fall found early chart success here.

Reynolds says that of all those he interviewed, there was no one overriding common experience. There are mixed feelings, but the majority are immensely proud to have been a part of something so potent.

"Nobody I spoke to disowned what they'd done, or thought it was ridiculous. There was this sense that it was an urgent thing that they were doing. And that's one of the things that is hardest to recreate. Sometimes when I've done interviews, especially with younger people, they get a certain look in their eye, like 'Oh really? Did you really think this was subversive or was going to change the world?' They can't even imagine that it would be possible to believe that. And that's what I was trying to get across, that rightly or wrongly, whether it was a delusion or not, people really thought that what they were doing mattered. It all came from punk I suppose - the punk part of postpunk is very important. There's this tremendous reinvigorated and revived sense of the power of music."

As the more aggressive edges of postpunk were blunted by time, and critical acclaim, a new movement grew out of it. A music concerned with hijacking the charts, using the machinery of the music industry to achieve its subversive ends. New Pop included such chart luminaries as Frankie Goes to Hollywood, ABC, Human League and Heaven 17. The post bit remained intact, but the punk bit was perhaps no longer so relevant. At least on the surface…

"Martin Fry from ABC said 'I am a punk, I always have been and always will be,'" says Reynolds. "They saw themselves as living out punk, just by trying to excel and make the most spectacular record they could. To make a record that sounded like a classic disco record but with these sort of biting lyrics, they felt that was part of punk. As much as they rejected the standard rock'n'roll format that punk rock was rooted in on the whole, the punk part of it, that sort of missionary zeal was something they tried to live out."

Simon Reynolds
Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984
(Faber and Faber)

See the full transcript of the interview with Simon Reynolds on the Author's website: www.simonreynolds.net

10 Essential Postpunk Albums:
Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures
Wire - Chairs Missing
Gang of Four - Entertainment!
Devo - Freedom of Choice
Killing Joke - Killing Joke
Cabaret Voltaire - The Voice of America
Talking Heads - Fear of Music
PiL - Second Edition
The Fall - Grotesque (After the Gramme)
The Human League - Dare

Throwdown

Bonded By Blood

Considering how much they have common, it's kinda strange that metal and hardcore haven't fostered closer relationships. It's only the opposing doctrines of punk and heavy metal that have kept the two seemingly natural bedfellows apart. Sure, there have been nods towards a crossover, in the mid-1980s when acts like DRI, Cro-Mags, Circle Jerks and Suicidal Tendencies began turning up in metal 'zines. Even the notorious Stormtroopers of Death made gestures in both directions.

Later, in the mid 1990s, numerous acts on the American Roadrunner label played a form of metal that severely trimmed the fat off the genre. Such mundane trappings as interminable soloing, falsetto screaming, and homoerotic imagery were dispensed with in favour of a bludgeoning heaviness by the likes of Biohazard and Sepultura, whose 1996 Roots album profoundly moved metal forward.

In the last few years the line between metal and hardcore has blurred, introducing a host of aggressive acts that have breathed new life into forward thinking head banging communities. Hatebreed, Lamb of God, Killswitch Engage, Shadows Fall, and Throwdown are just a few of this emerging legion. The latter hail from that recent soap kingdom, California's Orange County, a privileged area you wouldn't think capable of breeding such antagonism.

But the Throwdown boys are actually pretty well adjusted, young, straight (edge) living, and intensely committed to their music. This has seen the five piece move forward from the bitter lyrics of 2003's Haymaker, to a more positive outlook on the recent Vendetta. That doesn't mean they've mellowed any, as the title track suggests - "This is war. This is pure hostility. This is vengeance. This is all that's driving me. This is a Vendetta." But these lyrics seem more of a nod towards their heroes in Sepultura, Hatebreed and Pantera than the harbouring of any real disaffection with society.

As bassist Dom Macaluso explains, vocalist Dave Peters outlook has altered since Haymaker. "All his lyrics are based on first hand experiences from life. Although there's a bit of animosity and anger on that record, I think he's been able to vent a lot of that, and in the course of this new record been able to mature and branch out, and sing about things with more substance. We're all really happy about the musical and lyrical progression."

Part of this progression came about because of line up changes, along with experiences like touring internationally, and as part of major packages such as OzzFest. "Before we were more of a hobby band and we would do tours in between work and in between college," elaborates Macaluso. "We just wanted to establish that for our private lives, and once we'd done that we went out and did the band fulltime. It's been a real rewarding time over the last year doing this."

Vendetta was started in January this year, only a week or so after Throwdown had returned from a tour of the UK. They wrote at home in Huntington Beach (also the home of such luminaries as Pennywise) throughout that month before heading East to Hadleigh, Massachusetts. Here they hooked up with producer Zeuss, a man that Macaluso only has good things to say about. "In the past we had a handful of bad experiences as far as recording engineers being flaky, and wanting to record on their time and their schedule. Zeuss was exactly the opposite, he was very business minded and worked day in day out to help us create a really great record. And he had a lot of creativity, he knows the kind of music we're going for, especially (having worked) with Shadows Fall and Hatebreed and bands like that, he had a good idea of what we were trying to do."

Having inked a deal with Roadrunner Records since Haymaker, Throwdown are now enjoying an increased audience, something they first noticed while on that UK tour late last year. A benefit of their expanded profile is the ability to tour in such exotic locations as Japan, and of course New Zealand. The band has now made two trips down here, and it seems they'd be keen for more. "Oh yeah, by all means," enthuses Macaluso. "It's kind of ridiculous that we can go to a place as beautiful as New Zealand, and essentially have the trip paid for. And it's a great feeling also to be on the other side of the world, be it Europe or Japan, and seeing kids that actually know our lyrics, and we're bonding with them on that level."


Gavin Bertram.

Success, Lies and Videotape

Outlaw Filmmakers Rewrite the Rules During the ‘90s.


"... a man stood up and asked, 'So how do you justify all the violence in this movie?' The director replied, "I don't know about you, but I love violent movies."

This was the scene when Quentin Tarantino's artistically plagiaristic tour de force Reservoir Dogs showed at the conservative Sundance Festival in 1992. The director, a blunt, driven operator, was not the deferential emotion merchant the hand wringing audiences at Robert Redford's showcase of independent films were used to. Here was the brazen new face of the indie universe, and they didn't like it. In fact, Redford himself commented that year that he'd seen some of the violent films in the festival and "I could barely eat for twenty-four hours because they were so loaded with violence."

Yet it wasn't the violence itself that was so shocking about this new frontier of low budget film. In many ways it was that they had been made at all - that was enough of an affront to the complacent, elitist knobs that patronised ‘art house’ cinema during the 1980s. To make a trite comparison, 1980s indie film was flatulent prog rock, and the 1990s zeitgeist was punk rock, come to wash away crimes of interminable boredom with youthful enthusiasm and rampant creativity.

Two recent books offer in-depth exposés of the phenomenon of 1990s independent film, a loose movement that offered a spicy flipside to the white bread contributions coming from Hollywood. Peter Biskind's Down and Dirty Pictures and Sharon Waxman's Rebels On The Backlot uncover the filth and the fury, the intrigues and punch-ups, the backstory that made the '90s such a fascinating era in cinema.

Just as Biskind's 1999 tome Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex 'n' Drugs 'n' Rock'n'Roll Generation Saved Hollywood lifted the lid on the excesses of 1970s cinematography, so does Down and Dirty Pictures get beneath the skin of the '90s. It draws a line from Steven Soderbergh's genre defying debut sex, lies, and videotape through to such recent successes as 21 Grams and Cold Mountain.

The intervening years spans several thousand reels of celluloid, covering everything from Richard Linklater's Slacker to Gus Van Sant's Good Will Hunting, Kevin Smith's Clerks to Larry Clark's Kids, Todd Solondz' Happiness to Tarantino's smash Pulp Fiction. The directors are only one aspect of the story, a hefty chunk dedicated to those with - and without - business acumen who drove the independent industry, and those who unwittingly sabotaged it from within.

The key figures here are Redford, the passive-aggressive Sundance impresario whose dealings were legendarily patronising, and the Weinstein brothers, Bob and Harvey. Miramax's familial junta stomped on many heads in a riot of bullying, manipulative antics. Yet the company’s role in seizing power from the embedded Hollywood studio system was pivotal to the developments of the decade.

Harvey Weinstein was the Miramax heavy on any given day, though that role was interchangeable with his brother. Although he claimed a deep love of film, the reality was quite different. As Biskind's book recounts, Chris Mankiewicz (son of legendary producer Joe) was drafted into the Miramax ranks to sort out the mess the brothers had created. His observation of Harvey was that "Whether he was going to be making films, or donuts, or machine gun parts, it was a product, and there was just a sense of ferocious ambition. He was a guy who wanted to have a career or make a lot of money."

That blind ambition established and shattered many directorial careers, Weinstein often involving himself in the artistic lives of those whose films he financed - earning him the nickname 'Harvey Scissorhands'.


"We don't want to grow up and be another Walt Disney." Bob Weinstein, 1989.

"I'm not looking to make an NC-17 movie anymore...The mantra at Disney is to keep the ratings 'R', and I'm happy to do so. I don't want to cause Disney any problems. Why ruin a perfect relationship?" Harvey Weinstein, mid-1990s

Indeed, Miramax entered into a consortium deal with those masters of filmic dross, Disney, in 1993. This mutually beneficial arrangement allowed Miramax to claw their way out of a financial mire and blitzkrieg the independent film market, though it put the brakes on their more creative urges. This is plainly illustrated in Harvey Weinstein's comment above, emphasising his commitment to the dollar over artistic integrity.

Biskind is adept at digging up anecdotal commentary from those at the centre of this tumultuous galaxy, and pulls no punches in relaying the dirt. His portraits of the key players do them no favours, and just as with Easy Riders, Raging Bulls he's no doubt burnt a great many bridges. You can't write a book like this without losing friends or breaching confidences, or without having an insatiable journalistic curiosity and steel balls.

On all levels Down and Dirty Pictures pushes the buttons. It leaves the reader with the overwhelming impression that the 1990s independent film phenomena had to happen, to revitilise and refresh the rapidly stagnating ditch that Hollywood had become. Sharon Waxman's Rebels On The Backlot covers the same period, but delves deep into six of the key directors responsible for the overhaul.

Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, David Fincher, Paul Thomas Andersen, David O. Russell and Spike Jones were those six, auteurs that created markedly unusual films that were lapped up by discerning audiences. Waxman asserts early on that Tarantino almost single handedly created a template for succeeding through alternative channels. "(He) very early in the decade broke every rule in moviedom to the roaring acclaim of critics, audiences, and (finally) the Hollywood establishment, then brought his irony-tinged violence and retro-cool ethos into mainstream culture."

This differs from Biskind's ordainment of Soderbergh's sex, lies and videotape as the evolutionary flashpoint that sparked a new species. The coverage of Soderbergh's career in Waxman's book focuses on the making of Traffic, a film that allowed the director to traverse the gulf to big budget filmmaking. Traffic was made in a largely improvisational manner, shots being set up quickly. "The whole movie should feel as though we showed up and shot and there was no design. By the end of the film the more real it feels and the less it feels like a Hollywood movie, the more the audience will connect with it."

While Rebels On the Backlot doesn't unearth the same kind of salacious detail that Biskind is so practiced at, it does a creditable job of revealing the tribulations experienced by some of the best filmmakers of this generation. Such as New Line chairman Bob Shaye whining about why Spike Jones' Being John Malkovich couldn't be called Being Tom Cruise.

While you’d think that the outrageous success of Tarantino, Soderbergh, Jones, Linklater, Smith and peers would have erased this kind of thinking, it would be fanciful. But as these two books show, despite the villainous subterfuge that riddles the film industry, there will always be those willing to tirelessly pursue an artistic vision.


Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film
- Peter Biskind (Simon & Schuster)

Rebels On The Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System - Sharon Waxman (HarperCollins)


Gavin Bertram.

Peter Frampton

Coming Alive Again

Ah, the excesses of the Seventies. The muscle cars, bell-bottoms, double live albums in lavish gatefold packaging - perfect for skinning up on. And no live album is more synonymous with the era than Frampton Come Alive. This slab of classic rock history was the highest selling album in 1976, going on to reach over 12 million sales.

This world conquering success came as a surprise, not least of all to Peter Frampton, who had been involved in the music business for well over a decade in the mid-1970s. Having achieved relative success with both The Herd and Humble Pie, the overnight success tag did not sit comfortably, and neither did the fact that he was suddenly the biggest act in the world.

Frampton had difficulty dealing with this success, and with the attendant record industry bullshit. Management and record company interference and greed, some bad decisions, and a horrendous car crash ultimately moved the spotlight on, yet he remains in the game.

For someone who once ruled supreme over the world's music charts, Frampton is particularly friendly - and approachable. This interview was arranged virtually overnight, which is a pleasant change from chasing people around the globe for weeks or months. About to embark on a Floridian holiday with his daughter before heading to Australasia in May, Frampton is relaxed, humorous and charming when we speak on the phone. This too is a pleasant change.

There are various reasons why Frampton is heading to the antipodes, despite having been off the popular music map for some time. Firstly, it's being billed as the 25th Anniversary tour for Comes Alive, though the timing seems a little off for that particular celebration. But he's also still pushing his most recent album, 2003's Now. And lastly, it's been 18 odd years since he was last in these climes, as guitarist on David Bowie's Glass Spider tour in 1987.

Now is the best of these reasons to go see the show. Generally these types of career revival albums are pale facsimiles of past glories, but not in this instance. For anyone whose only exposure to Frampton has been tracks such 'Baby I Love Your Way' or 'Show Me The Way' from Comes Alive, Now is a revelation. Quality song writing, and not in the mothballed realms of Golden Oldies radio fodder either. White boy blues of the late '60s British variety abounds, and there's a real authenticity about it. But then, as Frampton concedes, Now was a very selfish project for him.

"The pressure of Frampton Comes Alive has long since left, now it's a case of when I want to make some music, I don't even plan it, it happens when it happens. I didn't really think about anything apart from 'Am I going to have fun recording this song? Do I like this song enough that I want to record it? Do I think this will sound good with the band.'"

One of the reasons he was able to approach the album with this freedom was the fact that it was not released on a major record label. In fact, it was released on his Framptone Records label, and distributed in a fairly loose manner. The reasons for this were fairly simple.

"You probably know by now the record industry is in deep shit," he laughs, albeit in a sagely philosophical way. "It's just a fact that as we get to different decades in our careers, especially with the record labels getting in so much trouble as they didn't embrace the internet straight away, that unfortunately they got in so much trouble financially, it's very difficult to get a major label. It was pretty frustrating. But there is a happy ending. Perhaps because I'm still around and that Universal have my entire catalogue, including the Herd and Humble Pie, the next album is going to be on (Universal sub label) A&M Records, which is rather nice."

Now was recorded in Frampton's home studio, the first album he has had the luxury to pursue in that manner. He says he has been saving pieces of equipment for years with that goal in mind. And although he is an analog aficionado through and through, the album was recorded using Steinberg's Nuendo software - a big psychological step for the musician.

"I was very reticent to go that way - but Chuck Ainley the engineer did the aural litmus paper test, recording the same thing in analog and on Nuendo, and played them back together and swapped between the two, and it was very good."

Amongst the highlights on Now is an emotional rendition of George Harrison's 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps', a fitting eulogy to Frampton's good friend. He not only had the pleasure of knowing Harrison well, he also played on his landmark triple disc solo excursion All Things Must Pass. And as Frampton coyly notes, he wasn't even credited for it - though he generously marks this down as a mere oversight. Other than that, he says that recording session remains a highlight not only of his career, but of his life. He enthusiastically recounts this memory, affecting a fair Liverpuddlian accent when quoting the quiet Beatle.

"The best time for me was when we'd done the tracks and George called me up and said 'Phil wants more acoustics on most of it, would you come down and bring your acoustic and the two of us will track away'. Sitting with George in the big room where Sergeant Peppers was recorded, sitting on two stools looking through the glass at Phil Spector. In between changing reels George and I would jam, and I can't tell you what that was like; jamming with a Beatle is pretty incredible. And I got to jam with Ringo during those sessions and later. And of course when it was my turn to start a jam, I started with a Beatles song, because I could! It was just a thrill, it was probably one of the most special moments of my life."

The next highlight of his career was that great rock monolith from 1976, an album that has coloured his life in both positive and negative ways since. Frampton remembers vividly the flash of realisation that Comes Alive was going to be massive.

"I remember going away for a ten day getaway right after the New Year in '76, then it came out March 17th. We had one show booked in Detroit, about ten thousand seats. Here I am headlining there for the first time, and I went away and came back, and we had four nights sold out. That was the realisation, there it was, the album is zooming up the charts and I'm selling out multiple nights in cities, which was unbelievable."

As one would expect, he allowed himself some time to bask in his fame - three weeks in fact. And in some ways it was those around Frampton, those who should have been protecting him that brought him back to earth so quickly.

"This incredible pressure was put on me - 'Okay Sonny, follow that one up!' It was incredibly difficult to do. The I'm In Me record was done way too soon, I wasn't happy with it at all, the record company and management was enjoying my success and their new wealth shall we say. Which I was enjoying too, but the wealth that filtered down to me... that period was marred by some managerial jiggery pokery, meaning I got ripped off royally. It happens to everyone unfortunately, when you're not prepared for that kind of financial gain, there is a lot of people who start taking the piece of the pie. But they don't ask, they just take. That was very frustrating, to say the least. There were a lot of things that went along with that success that were not as good as they could have been. So, the good, the bad and the ugly, and I wouldn't change anything for the world, it's all been a great experience and I'm still playing what I want to play and doing what I want to do. So, I thank myself, for that wonderful record!"

No question then that Frampton Comes Alive has stayed with him like a tattoo. As has much of the audience he gained from it. Frampton says he gets a broad cross section of ages at his shows these days, from those that grew up with that album, to their children, and even their grand children.

"And they're all singing away!" he happily notes. "It's been rather interesting and very gratifying to see that whatever I've done during my career has stood the test of time. Obviously Comes Alive has helped immensely in that area, but people love Humble Pie as well. I have to be very thankful that the audience has broadened over the years - it could have been the opposite and never overflowed into other generations, but it has which is great."

One of the reasons for this is clearly the fact that Frampton played himself on the 'Homerpalooza' episode of The Simpsons, rendering him forever on the greatest cultural compass of the 1990s. He laughs when he remembers Homer's introduction of him to the crowd. "Hey kids, don't trust anyone over thirty! Now here's Peter Frampton."

"When we went to Australia with the Rock Symphony we did a press conference, and the gentleman who was introducing us said 'And the gentleman on the end - I know him because of Frampton Comes Alive and Humble Pie, but my son only knows him from The Simpsons. That was a big thing for me, to hear him say that. I didn't realise how lucky I am - and honored- until that point. It's one of the better written shows on TV, obviously. And doing it was such an incredible experience, because they asked me what I'd say or do in a situation. It was wonderful, that made it real."


Gavin Bertram.

Beans

Raping Silence

For a man who makes a living manipulating the English language as if it were silly putty, Beans is virtually monosyllabic when it comes to that journalistic cop out, the email interview. Answers like "Very" and "Not really" aren't much use for fleshing out a worthwhile story. Mutescreamer? Not really, no.

But when you can use words as well as Beans, aka Ballbeam, you can get away with a lot. After all, when you pack more vocal contortions into one track than most rappers can deal to on an album, you're doing something right.

Beans' career to date has been that of a dexterous underground genius, a wordsmith comet, sizzling the underbelly of that moribund hip-hop art form. An art form that on a visible level has defiled its own heritage, moving from the pioneering spirit of its futurist roots to its current state as a marketing device for pseudo bourgeois lifestyles. Or, as Shadow's 'Why Hip Hop Sucks in '96' so succinctly put it, "It's the money... money... money."

AntiPop Consortium, Beans' trio with M Sayyid and Priest, busted out of this paradigm until their unfortunate demise in 2002. Their two albums, Tragic Epilogue and Arrhythmia, created a new way, with twisted minimal tracks backing some of the most convoluted three-way lyrical excursions imaginable.

With backgrounds in performance poetry, and a firm grounding in hip hop lore, APC's experimental leanings gained them a small but committed audience. Beans, the most colourful member of the group, was the first to reemerge following their acrimonious demise.

Early 2003's Tomorrow Right Now was an indication of the direction he was heading in. An eclectic, gleefully challenging album, it was partly produced by APC sound guru Earl Blaize, and partly by Beans. From poetry inspired acapella word flows to electronic freak out instrumentals, Tomorrow was a galaxy and a half away from chart bound hip-hop, yet the distant relationship was implicit.

In many ways hip-hop pioneers had links to experimental music. From the fascination with Kraftwerk, Mantronix’ synthetic creations, Afrika Bambaataa's Afro-Futurism, to such staples as scratching and sampling techniques, from the start it was forward looking.

Of the experimental badge that has been thrust upon him, Beans is skeptical, saying it is a box that the media have created for him to make it easier for them selves. "It's beats and rhymes at the end of the day," he reckons.

Beans' new offering is another big step forward, and a far more cohesive package than Tomorrow Right Now. Shock City Maverick is the perfect title, as the album seems to announce a new frontier of hip hop, a brave new world of unconquered fluorescent horizons.

"I rock shit with no sample clearances and no guest appearances/But a reputation for consistent deviation." ('I'll Melt You').
"People are lazy and don't want different but variations of the same shit," says the man. "The level of mediocre shit people swallow nowadays is unbelievable."

One difference between his two solo albums is that Beans produced Shock City Maverick in its entirety. It's been something of a challenge to get his production skills up to that level, but he's enjoying the process. In some small way learning to operate from the other side of the desk to the microphone changed the way he puts his words together. "In my old age, I think I want the lyrics more simple and more happening in the music."

Or, as he's said previously, "If I use a lot of elements, considering the way that I rhyme, you get lost."

"That all has to do with the beat," he says. "It dictates everything."

No doubt. But coming from a performance poetry background, is there any difference in the dynamics or delivery of the two? "Just the cadence," Beans reckons. "I make no distinctions."

Having collaborated heavily over the years, Beans chose for the most part to hermetically seal himself in his studio for this album and spin his head out. "Collaborating on other people's shit is fine but for my own shit, I prefer to remain alone."

That said though, his next project is a collaboration with bassist William Parker and drummer Hamid Drake for the Thirsty Ear label called Only. After that it's another solo album, for which he's already picked a title, Thorns. Getting a little ahead of himself?

As it turns out he's one of those people who have everything mapped out in advance. Doesn't that make it less of an adventure? "Not at all," Beans considers. "Because I haven't made them yet and plans change..."

While he may not be greatly forthcoming via email, Beans lyrics say it all really. He's a true original, a freak patrolling the hazy perimeters of a genre that seems to thrive on sameness. As he says in a rare display of cyber-chattiness, "The music is what it is when money is involved. It's not all bad. I hear what I like and discard the bullshit."

Gavin Bertram.

Metal Gods

Judas Priest

In 1983 Rob Reiner's This Is Spinal Tap faux 'rockumentary' brilliantly parodied the arcane trappings of heavy metal. Critics and audiences loved it. Heavy metal bands hated it, Scorpions guitarist Michael Schenker even walking out on a screening. But then Germans aren't renowned for their senses of humour. Neither are heavy metallers. German heavy metallers? Forget it.

Why was Spinal Tap so bitterly received by the metal fraternity? Well, let's see... because it was essentially fact. What made it so funny was that it didn't need to stretch the truth, for the truth was bordering on the farcical already. If ever a genre had deserved to be skewered it was heavy metal, and Spinal Tap was merciless in its treatment.

You didn't need to look too far to see where Reiner got his inspiration. There were a plethora of OTT, egocentric, taste bereft metal bands around. Yet one stands above the rest, a band whose career resembles the twisted machinations of Spinal Tap. Judas Priest is that band.

The Birmingham five piece celebrated their 30th anniversary in 2004 with a reunion tour with original vocalist Rob Halford. Those 30 years have been quite something, including the following highlights:

* In 1986 two American youths attempted to commit suicide after listening to Judas Priest's Stained Class album. One succeeded, while the other was left severely disfigured. This resulted in one of the most bizarre court cases in history, with Priest being accused of encouraging the act by putting backwards messages on their records.

* Ex-drummer of ten years Dave Holland was imprisoned for attempting to rape an intellectually handicapped youth he was teaching the drums.

* In the late 1980s, the band recorded three songs with trenchant pop production team Stock Aitken Waterman, who had been responsible for early Bananarama, Kylie Minogue, and Rick Astley. This recording experiment was subsequently shelved.

* A documentary filmed in the car park outside a Priest show in America, Heavy Metal Parking Lot, has become a huge cult classic. It portrays the rabid behaviour of the bands fans as they prepare for the show, and it's been referenced in numerous rock videos.

* On the 1984 Defenders tour, half a million dollars damage was done at New York's Madison Square Garden by the band's crazed fans tearing the seating to shreds.

* 1986's Turbo was the first metal album recorded in digital - perhaps inspiring the notorious 'dolby/doubly' scene in This Is Spinal Tap.

* Vocalist Rob Halford came out in the 1990s, validating a longterm fetish for leather and studs.

* Priest are one of the finest practitioners of that metal signature, dual guitarists. Glenn Tipton and KK Downing's razor sharp combination playing was mimicked by any number of 80s acts.

With this kind of vintage, it needs to be asked - where are they now? Because for at least a decade Judas Priest have been off the radar, languishing in the ghetto that suddenly entrapped many traditional metal acts in the 1990s, as the form waned in popularity.

Without the charismatic Halford at the helm (he was pursuing a Tap-ish solo career - fairly successfully too) the band were drifting rudderless in a world that was no longer seduced by their charms. With vocalist Tim 'Ripper' Owens (now with Iced Earth) Priest were in a holding pattern, seemingly waiting for Halford's return.

While they recorded two albums with Owens, Jugulator (1997) and Demolition (2001), it was patently clear the arrangement was a short term one - for both parties.

"Tim had been seeing it coming for a long time,” explains founding Priest bassist Ian Hill, his Brummy burr sounding exactly like Timothy Spall from Auf Wiedersehen, Pet. He's on the phone from England to promote the spanking new album, Angel Of Retribution.

“Of all the interviews I did when he was with the band, there wasn't one journalist who didn't ask me when Rob was coming back. And with hindsight, it's beneficial for Tim to go and make it in his own right, rather than with Judas Priest. As long as he was with this band, he was perceived by most people to be filling in for Rob. It was very unfair on Tim, he's a tremendous vocalist, he's a great showman, he deserves to get on and I'm sure he will do."

But the Judas Priest story began in gloomy northern England in the early 1970s. Birmingham, the country's second largest city, was a grimy, bleak, depressing industrial sprawl. Many of its housing estates were virtually slums, and opportunities were few. Tipton once worked in the foundries of British Steel, whose moniker would be borrowed for one of Priest's greatest albums in 1980.

"It's a hard start in life," Downing has said. "You don't really know what's going on with yourself. When everything was against you, you're swimming against the fucking tide in every which way but lose - parents, schooling, breaking the law. It was rough."

The nascent Priest dropped the bluesy Rocka Rolla in 1974, before progressing to the more-metal-than-metal imagery of later 1970s efforts such as Sin After Sin (1977) and Killing Machine (1979). This encapsulated the exaggerated leather and studs image, Halford's penchant for riding on stage on a Harley, and the lyrical themes ('Beyond The Realms Of Death', 'Take On The World'). All this shaped not only Priest's future direction, but greatly influenced the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, which in turn spawned a legion of metal warriors.

But it was 1980's albums British Steel, Screaming For Vengeance (1982), Defenders Of The Faith (1984), and Turbo (1986) that threw the band under a broader spotlight. While the music and imagery had a distinctly futuristic aspect, Priest remained stubbornly of the heavy metal ilk, capturing the imaginations of audiences worldwide.

The demise of Judas Priest-style traditional metal was a result of various music trends. Firstly, thrash metal, while being influenced by the band, largely washed away the excesses of the past in favour of a stripped back approach. Then, early 1990s rock further distanced itself from the connotations of 'heavy metal', which was viewed as something of a joke for its macho imagery, extravagant stage sets, and belief in musical virtuosity. Amidst this, Halford chose to pursue solo work after 1990's Painkiller album.

"It was strange," muses Hill. "At the end of that last tour we did we'd been working constantly, it was album-tour-album-tour, with very little break. We were getting ready for a couple of years off. I think Rob wanted to carry on, and he asked if anybody minded him doing his own album. But the solo album turned into a solo project. And we drifted apart, and things got nasty there for a while, but it's all behind us now."

The Priest line-up that recorded the eclectically brilliant Angel of Retribution is considered to be the definitive one, despite the fact drummer Scott Travis only joined the band in 1989. Hill reckons there is an irreplaceable chemistry with this version.

"We just slotted straight back in," he says of the reunion with Halford. "Apart from drummers, it's been the same line-up since about 1972-73, and Scott's been with us 15 or 16 years. I think when a band has been together for that long then the component parts add up to more than the whole. And when one component goes missing like when Rob went it detracts greatly from the whole. Now he's back, everything's back together, the chemistry is the same."

Another reunion of sorts is Priest's resigning with Sony Records, having released the two albums without Halford on smaller metal labels, such as SPV in Europe and JVC in Japan.

"We wanted to get back with Sony, they have the large majority of our back catalogue, apart from the two Ripper albums, and the very first two albums. We just wanted to put the old team back together, and they were more than happy to take us on, in fact were eager to take us on which is great news. And of course they're a worldwide company as well, they can release it worldwide which keeps everything concise, keeps it all together."

The subtext is that Priest are keen to again reach the heights it did in the mid-1980s. As Hill says, the releases with Owens reached a smaller market, which in turn led to smaller audiences at gigs, and smaller production budgets. For a band that once had stupendous pyrotechnic and lighting productions, this was something of a fall from grace.

"It did miss that big sense of theatre, which ourselves and other bands have been known for in the past. Over the last 10 or 15 years metal became very fragmented, bands started to play metal of a certain type, you were a speed band, or a death band, or you were gothic or grunge. Heavy metal is about everything, it's not just about the harder side. There's a lighter, softer side to metal as well. And it lost that in the 90s. And as a result your fanbase diminishes, you're not as attractive to as many people. But now I think there's a resurgence in traditional metal, the versatility and variety is coming back into metal these days. Which is good news."

Gavin Bertram.

Hunter S. Thompson 1937-2005

Straight Into Frantic Oblivion

"These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies - captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences and how to record truth truly." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

"So we shall let the reader answer the question for himself. Who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived, or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?" (Hunter S. Thompson, age 16)

In September 1973 Hunter S. Thompson wrote to David Butler, his editor at Playboy magazine. Butler had commissioned a piece on big game fishing in the Mexican Gulf, an assignment the writer had pursued with his usual energy. The resulting article, The Great Shark Hunt, was initially rejected on the grounds it barely included mention of fishing. But it did mention the enthusiastic consumption of large quantities of drugs and alcohol.

Thompson's letter made it clear the editor knew what he was getting himself in for, saying "A journalist into Gonzo is like a junkie or an egg sucking dog; there is no known cure."

The writer had the courage of his convictions. He had developed his own style of writing and now they were all stuck with it. Thompson was happy with this situation. After all, no one asked his heroes - F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, Muhammad Ali - to change their methods. He'd found his voice and no one would change it.

Born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1937, Thompson's youth was a cocktail of hell raising and literature. He was in prison on the day of his high school graduation, subsequently joining the Air Force to escape the consequences of his wayward behavior.

Following a spell writing sports news for the base newspaper, Thompson contrived a discharge from the forces, and pursued a journalism career in New York. A string of hilariously unsuccessful jobs later, and he retreated to upstate New York to write his first novel, the unpublished Prince Jellyfish.

One thing is clear about the young writer - he was committed to the craft and did everything he could to learn how a writer's mind works. This included typing tracts of Hemingway and Fitzgerald novels, to nail down the rhythm and structure of great literature.

For it was literature that was his first love - his journalism was imbued with the spirit of it. He said of his Gonzo work that "It is a style of 'reporting' based on William Faulkner's idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism."

The seeds of this are found in Thompson's second novel, The Rum Diaries, written in 1962, yet only published in 1998. Based on the writer's own experiences, it tells the story of a reporter working for an English language newspaper in a rum soaked and dissolute Puerto Rico. Drawing on the Beat writers, The Rum Diaries exhibits the beginnings of Thompson's hyperactive descriptive style.

Traveling through South America, he filed a series of articles for the National Observer on subjects such as smuggling and democracy in Peru. These were well received by the journalism establishment of the East Coast, which saw Thompson in demand upon his return home in 1963.

In the United States, Thompson sensed a nascent movement. An ideology was forming which would peak during the Summer of Love in 1967. Like Bob Dylan, Thompson became a participant/observer of this scene, extolling its virtues while criticizing its excesses.

Settling in San Francisco with his new wife Sandy, Thompson became immersed in the burgeoning counter-culture. The Berkeley Free Speech Movement, Ken Kesey, the Hell's Angels, the Haight Ashbury. He was one of the few writers who covered the scene from the inside, translating it for America at large. While this put paid to his freelance arrangement with the National Observer, it created new opportunities.

Carey McWilliams, editor The Nation, commissioned Thompson to do a story on the vicious motorcycle gang the Hell's Angels. With an inside contact, he gained the trust of this closed fraternity, leading to him riding with them for a year - and ultimately being badly beaten by them. This intensive first hand research became the basis for his first book, 1966's Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gang.

A humming, energetic snapshot of the gang, Hell's Angels was a classic of the New Journalism that Tom Wolfe was espousing. This placed the journalist at the heart of his subject, with no consideration for outmoded ideals such as objectivity. A combination of journalism, fiction and opinion, it was enamored with raw experience over any pretence of straight reporting.

This idea perfectly fitted Hunter S. Thompson's outlook, as he'd long since rejected establishment values. "By the time I started Hell's Angels I was riding with them and it was clear that it was no longer possible for me to go back and live within the law. But an outlaw can be defined as somebody who lives outside the law, beyond the law, not necessarily against it."

The fundamental values of the hippie movement, the words of Bob Dylan, writers such as Wolfe, Kesey and Allen Ginsberg, and psychedelic drugs all had an impact on Thompson. Through this filter he glimpsed a possible America that contrasted greatly with the slowly unraveling one he inhabited. A sense of righteousness and fury would imbue his writing from then until his death. As he said, "Yesterday's fun had been officially transmogrified into tomorrow's insane nightmare."

Thompson began contributing political writing to Rolling Stone magazine as their National Affairs correspondent. Haunted by the beatings he'd seen first hand at the notorious Republican convention in Chicago in 1968, the events at York State, Vietnam, and the rise of Richard Nixon, the correspondence carried baiting, anti-right wing sentiments.

While working prodigiously hard as a freelance journalist, Thompson began researching another book in the wake of Hell's Angels success. With a theme based around the 'Death of the American Dream', he attempted to weave together all the factors contributing to the national malaise. It was a vast idea that he could not ultimately pin down sufficiently to hang a book on.

Well, not as he'd originally conceived. In June 1970, Thompson suggested covering the Kentucky Derby to Scanlan's Monthly. Teamed with genius English illustrator Ralph Steadman, the writer watched the crowd through whisky soaked eyes, scrawling down his observations. When it came time to edit these ramblings into something coherent, Thompson began tearing pages straight from his notebook and inserting them unedited into the story, The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved.

"I was sure it was the last article I was ever going to do for anybody," he told Playboy. "Then when it came out, there were massive numbers of letters, phone calls, congratulations, people calling it a 'great breakthrough in journalism.'"
Thompson pursued this Gonzo style of writing, which came to fruition in 1971 with the work for which he is best known, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Working on a Rolling Stone story concerning the possible police murder of Chicano journalist Ruben Salazar in Los Angeles, Thompson was dealing with radical lawyer Oscar Acosta. Unable to get Acosta in private, he suggested a trip to Las Vegas, where he had an assignment from Sports Illustrated to write 250 words on the Mint 500 desert race.
Using the same technique as the Kentucky Derby piece, Thompson wrote the Las Vegas book as levity from the heavy work on the Salazar piece. Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner loved the excerpts he saw, and published two large sections. Drug soaked, outrageous and innovative, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was an instant classic.

"As true Gonzo journalism, this doesn't work at all - and even if it did, I couldn't possibly admit it. Only a goddamn lunatic would write a thing like this and then claim it was true."

Then the Hunter S. Thompson legend began to take over. While he was a serious writer, and indeed a serious political force, a public persona had emerged. This saw Thompson as a caricature of himself, a drug fucked literary loony, a sideshow attraction sending missives from the frontline of American affairs. This was untrue, as Thompson's next book was his most incisive, yet the legend would stay with him for the rest of his life.

In 1970 Thompson had run for office as Sheriff of Aspen, near where he had settled in rural Woody Creek. His 'Freak Power' campaign was conceived to shake up the blue blooded straights that ran the town. Very nearly successful, it distilled in him a belief that a sea change in American politics was possible.

And so, in 1972 he relocated to Washington DC to cover the election campaign for Rolling Stone. It would be one of his toughest assignments, resulting in the book Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. Early on Thompson sensed that Democrat Senator George McGovern had a sniff at edging out Republican incumbent Nixon for the presidency. This proved not to be the case, but Thompson's political heft was now recognised. Later in the 1970's, he would be influential in Jimmy Carter's successful bid for election.

While his later books contained some of the genius found in the Fear and Loathing editions, nothing ever really came close to reaching those heights. Over subsequent years Thompson was criticized for crushing his talent through chemical bingeing, for becoming a victim of his public persona. Some of this was true, but the reality was that Thompson's output through the late 1960s and early 1970s was prolific and virtually faultless. He was something of a rock star writer, and like Dylan, his best work was irrevocably connected to the times.

His voice during that period was an important part of the milieu, and never again would it be so charged. His later work would be compared to it, even though the times had changed and he could never capture the public's imagination as he once had. As his earlier audience drifted into middle age and away from their youthful idealism, he was condemned to being something of a relic. But he never lost faith in the ideology that had been espoused by the greatest minds of his generation, and he kept preaching that line until he died.

A first hand witness to many of the epochal events of that era - the Summer of Love, Chicago '68, Watergate, the fall of Saigon, the Rumble in the Jungle - his unerring perspective offered an antidote to the party line. As Nelson Algren said, "Now that the dust of the '60s has settled, his hallucinated vision strikes one as having been the sanest."

Conjecture over why he chose to take his own life may be a waste of time, but despair in these times would almost certainly have been a factor. He was in pain, and his enjoyment of life would soon be gone. Worse, he had to endure another four years under George W. Bush, of whom he said before the election, "He talked like a donkey with no brains at all." No matter how like a drug politics was to him, this was too much. This was worse than Nixon.

So now he roams 'The Edge' - the mythical place he wrote of in Hell's Angels. The Edge, where you are truly alive, risking it all for another hit of undiluted adrenalin, where you are master of your destiny and no one can touch you.

"The Edge... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others - the living - are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later."

"Well, at least I'll know I was there, neck deep in the madness, before the deal went down, and I got so high and wild that I felt like a two-ton Manta Ray jumping all the way across the Bay of Bengal."

Gavin Bertram.

Metallica

Frayed Ends of Sanity


"Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" enquired John Lydon when the Sex Pistols finally imploded at the end of their 1978 American tour. The question was essentially rhetorical, yet it's remained one of the most vexed moments of rock'n'roll history, acting as something of a metaphor for the music industry at large. The relationship between the band, the fan, and the grinding wheels of commerce has changed phenomenally over rock music's 50-year tenure.

In this business, it’s both money and power that corrupt, and it’s not just the fans who are victims, so too are the bands. Sure, they're complicit in their own fate, but can you blame someone who's crawled out of the gutter with a pure artistic vision for being blinded by the trappings of success? They’re suddenly afforded a lifestyle that they're simply ill equipped to deal with it.

It is a painful experience to witness this kind of fall from grace, especially when the band in question was once important to you. Here the Sex Pistols reference gathers momentum. When Metallica appeared they were at the vanguard of a movement that upheld many of the central tenets of the punk phenomenon. Thrash metal was at heart an anti-social, questioning genre, beholden to no one. Due to the fickle state of the American music industry in the early 1980s, like the hardcore scene it was an underground movement that was a self-supporting community. Bands arranged their own gigs, toured extensively by van, and released their own demos. It was unimaginable that this most abrasive form of metal could possibly go overground.

Metallica were, from their inception in 1981, leaders in this scene. Their earliest independent releases - 1983's demo No Life Til' Leather and debut album, Kill 'Em All - garnered the band a rabid following who immediately emotionally invested in the band's hostile stance. Tracks such as 'No Remorse', 'Seek and Destroy', and 'Metal Militia' reflected the violent and uncompromising realities of Reagan's America. And, pre-death metal, grindcore, and every other extreme strand of metal to come, Metallica and peers speed and outright aggression made them pretty much the heaviest thing around.

But how does a band go from an album called Kill 'Em All to a live album with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra conducted by Michael Kamen in several easy moves? It's perhaps one of the most spectacular flip-flops in rock history, a progression that left many early Metallica fans bewildered and feeling betrayed. Here was a band that had made a pledge to their fans to never sell out, to never turn it's back on metal, and who had even stated unequivocally that they would never make a music video.

Well, they did that years ago, and in 2004 trumped that broken promise in spectacular fashion, appearing in a self-commissioned documentary about the recording of their 2003 album St Anger. Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster was not the self-aggrandising ego fest you’d imagine from a vanity project. For starters, it was made by the highly credible directors Joe Berlinger & Bruce Sinofsky, who had previously made Brother's Keeper (1992) and Paradise Lost (1996). Secondly, the band was going through some of the worst times they had experienced, providing excellent subject matter. Thirdly, the band waved their right to make editorial cuts to the film, rendering it a painfully honest viewing experience.

In fact, the spectre of the spoof 'rockumentary' This Is Spinal Tap is raised by many of the scenes to be found in Some Kind Of Monster. Berlinger and Sinofsky have an acute eye for the little details that give the game away. Guitarist Kirk Hammett reading a copy of the investment bible Fortune that has the Rolling Stones on the cover. Frontman James Hetfield's refusal to work any times other than noon to four pm when he returns from a lengthy stint in rehab. Drummer Lars Ulrich selling his massive art collection for 20 million dollars at auction.

But the most telling scenes are of the group in therapy sessions with Dr Phil Towle, a performance enhancement coach who had previously worked with football teams, and with Rage Against the Machine. The issues dealt with in these sessions slice to the heart of why Metallica have changed so much over their career, and beg the question, why do they keep doing it?

To put into perspective exactly what happened to Metallica, and how mammoth their success has been, consider these facts: 90 million album sales; 6 Grammy Awards; the number one act played on rock radio; the biggest concert draw in North America over the last ten years.

This success is largely attributable to the latter part of Metallica’s career, following the release of 1991’s self-titled album. Producer Bob Rock planed away the sharper edges of Metallica's sound, bringing to the fore a diluted, radio friendly hard rock sound. While this lost the band some of their original audience, it opened the door to the more conservative rock masses, and subsequent albums Load (1996) and Reload (1997) went a lot further down this road.

Certainly the band's change in direction didn't do their bank accounts any harm, but as Some Kind Of Monster portrays, it destroyed any kind of group harmony or healthy creative process. This in turn led to a lack of desire to even continue.

A Loaded magazine article in September 1996 captured Metallica at the worst of their rock star excesses. Dressing like pimps, travelling around North America by luxury jet, snorting coke at every opportunity, it was an insight into how far from their original fan base the band had grown. "No one ever writes about the drugs and stuff, no one ever tells the truth," slurred Kirk Hammett at one point. "The drinking and shit. Fuck, we're really fucking bad, yet no one ever prints a word... Hey do you guys want another bump?" For someone who had grown up with the band's prosaic, everyman drinking roots, this was a bitter pill to swallow.

Absent from this bacchanalia was Jason Newsted, who joined the band when original bassist Cliff Burton died in a bus smash while touring Europe in 1986. Not one to buy into the rock star bullshit, it was Newsted's sudden departure in 2001 that set in motion the band’s therapy sessions. As Phil Towle told Australian broadcaster Red Symons, "Jason's leaving rocked their world, so they began looking inside themselves to see why he would want to leave the millions. They were motivated to get better, they didn't like the way they were with each other."

It is for this reason that Lars Ulrich says Some Kind Of Monster is not a film about Metallica, it is a film about relationships. The band had become so dysfunctional they were barely communicating, leading to the realisation they barely knew each other despite the years together. Also, their lives have changed so much over the 20 years of their career – wives, children, changing lifestyles. But being in the pampered microcosm of rock stardom hasn’t really allowed them to adjust to these everyday responsibilities.

Towle quickly becomes a central character in the documentary, a living cliché of a therapist. Middle aged, vaguely parasitic, with a terrible line in knitwear, Towle's rhetoric spans the range from insipid through to addled. The irony is that although he insinuates himself into the band's structure like a dangerous charlatan, he actually does them some good.

The therapy sessions are intensive, leading early on to James Hetfield's departure into rehab. He walks out of the studio, and his fellow band members neither see nor hear from him for the better part of a year. In the interim they continue working on the album, and on fixing themselves. When Hetfield finally returns, a lot has changed both for him and the rest of Metallica, leading to much friction. This is really where the resolution of historical scars begins, in an often painful and brutally honest fashion. It's scintillating viewing, the likes of which most bands would be loath to release to the public.

One key scene is when the band calls time out on the therapy sessions so they can concentrate on touring. Towle, who by now considers himself the fifth band member, is not entirely happy with this. “It was tough for me, I 'd been with them for a long time,” he told Symons. “I don't like the way I handled myself in that sequence, I don't like watching it. I like watching Lars rally behind James - that was one of the key resolutions for them. But I’m finishing up my final stage with them now”

In some ways the heart-rending honesty of the documentary signals a return to the old ways of the band. This was band, after all, who released a video in the late 1980s titled Cliff 'Em All - a collection of bootleg live footage, and other footage of the bands after hours exploits. It showed a bunch of relatively normal guys having a good time. Some Kind Of Monster ultimately shows a bunch of relatively normal guys who have struggled with success, fortune, death, addiction and a raft of other issues. That they chose to air this all to the world in some way redeems their past failings.

"When the screening (for the band) was over, we were floored," says Bruce Sinofsky. "They loved it. They said, 'You did what you said you were going to do. This is the truth.' We braced ourselves for notes like, 'I don’t like how I look in this scene - cut it,' or, 'My playing sucks in that scene - cut it.' But there was nothing that they were afraid of."

Gavin Bertram.

Anthrax

Double Jeopardy

For those who thought thrash metal was a distant memory, best reminisced over with whisky and a damp eye, 2004 was like digging up a time capsule. First there were reunion albums from two of the greatest Bay Area thrash exponents, Death Angel and Exodus. And towards the end of the year there was a new Anthrax album. Make that a new old Anthrax album. No, an old new Anthrax...ah, never mind.

The Greater of Two Evils is the new Anthrax re-recording the best old Anthrax tracks, as voted for by their fans. While perhaps this shows some discourtesy to former members, it is still a great package. Most of the classics are present, from the seminal ‘Metal Thrashing Mad’ and ‘Caught In A Mosh’, to the awesome ‘Among The Living’ and ‘I Am The Law’. But they're not only re-recorded, they're also reinterpreted and rearranged, with added aggression and attitude from vocalist John Bush. For a band that’s well over 20 years old, Anthrax still sound vital.

This is not lost on Bush, who's on the phone from New York City a week after his friend, ex-Pantera guitarist Dimebag Darrell, was gunned down in cold blood. Although this is still raw in his mind, Bush has more optimistic subjects to ponder. "It feels like quite an accomplishment to tell you the truth," he says of the band’s age, though he's ‘only’ been around since Joey Belladonna left in 1992. "I think that I speak for the other guys that the objective was always to have longevity and to not just come in and shoot your load and then be gone. To create a legacy that was long."

The Greater of Two Evils documents that legacy, cunningly spanning the dynasties of both front men by having Bush sing the songs originally credited to Belladonna. While this has led to dissent from fans of the first Anthrax line-up, there can be little question it is a worthwhile album. "The reason we did this was because I've been singing these songs live for 12 years now, and people haven't been able to listen to them. It made sense to do a version with me singing them.”

Handing the decision as to what tracks would appear over to fans is a brave move, especially when they didn't see fit to include ‘I'm The Man’ or even ‘Bring The Noise’. Though, while Bush admits on the whole the results were fairly obvious, "There seemed to be large contingency of people who seemed to love the song ‘Lone Justice’, who have to have that song. So we had some fun with them by throwing it on as a hidden track."

‘Lone Justice’ was just one track on the album that created difficulties for Bush, due to the fact that his vocal range - a low down, gravely yowl - is so different from Belladonna's falsetto screech. "We did things to make it easier for me to sing them, tuning them down a bit, which made it sound heavier anyway. I feel confident about singing them in the ranges that I did, my voice is pretty strong right now. There were a couple of things that we had to change that weren't sounding comfortable. But for the most part they were pretty true to the originals."

It wasn't just Bush adjusting to the songs, as Anthrax underwent another line up change last year, with founding bass player Frank Bello leaving, to be replaced by another ex-Armoured Saint, Joey Vera. This left only guitarist Scott Ian and drummer Charlie Benante from the original line-up, second guitarist Dan Spitz having left a while back, Rob Caggiano taking his place. "It's never good having to go through any kind of line-up change," opines Bush. "It bums fans out. But you have to look at it as kind of a marriage, people grow apart, people change, people have differences of opinion. You hope you're all on the same page, but sometimes you're not."

Regardless, the new line-up has gelled, and with metal in general building up a head of steam right now, things are looking up. "People are excited about it again, people are into playing guitar again,” exclaims Bush. “There was a weird time in the early nineties where being a heavy metal band was really uncool. I remember when Anthrax was nominated for an MTV award and we went up against Soundgarden, and they won. They went onstage and said 'We're not a heavy metal band, we don't even know why we're getting this'. I didn't like that... but that was the mentality of the scene at that time. I don't think that's the same mentality that people have now.”

Gavin Bertram.

The Brigadoon

New Zealand in October 1975 was a very different place. Rob Muldoon was about to be elected Prime Minister, Dragon had moved to Australia, carless days restricted petrol consumption, and the economy was in recession.

From this bleak situation grew one of New Zealand's greatest criminal episodes, a drug trafficking syndicate that would be dubbed 'Mr Asia'. When this was unravelled in 1979 it was exposed that Terrence John Clark, originally from Gisborne, was the head of the organisation. And his ultimate downfall came after the execution in England of one Christopher Martin Johnstone.

Johnstone, who had grown up in the Auckland area, was the one the Auckland Star investigation team headed by Pat Booth had suspected was the kingpin of the syndicate - to them, he was Mr Asia. He lived in Singapore from mid-1976, arranging shipments of heroin to various corners of the globe, helping to build Clark's empire into one of the biggest trafficking operations of its time.

It was in 1974 that the seeds of the syndicate were sown. Johnstone, then 23, had been looking for ways of supplementing his income from a job in a menswear store. Through colleague Greg Ollard (who would also lose his life to Clark) he gained a connection on the Dutch Straat freight ships. Central to this was 'Chinese Jack' - Choo Cheng Kui, who would arrange shipments of Thailand marijuana.

This took the form of ‘buddha' or 'Thai' sticks - highly compressed cannabis wrapped around a bamboo stick. "The local pot was being grown, but there wasn't a great deal of demand for it because the buddha sticks were just so superior,” an ex-dealer has said.

While his efforts in 1974 were successful, Johnstone was an ambitious man. He’d met a few similarly ambitious men, amongst them Peter Lawrence Miller, George Papaconstantinou, and Clark. It was Miller, Papaconstantinou and Johnstone who in early 1975 were suspected by police after a tip off of picking up narcotics dropped at sea. It was round about this time that various companies were set up under the 'Milltone' umbrella.

It was in August 1975 that Milltone Charters Ltd was established, a front for future plans involving the yacht Brigadoon. This 18-metre yawl had been built for Johnstone's father Brian, who had sold it several years before. Milltone Charters purchased the yacht for $50,000, and the company directors began organising their push for the big time.

Miller was to skipper the Brigadoon to Thailand to pick up half a tonne of Thai sticks in a deal brokered by Chinese Jack. The drugs were to be brought back to New Zealand where they would flood the burgeoning market. Clark's part in this arrangement was as a key distributor upon the yacht’s return. But while the expedition would ultimately be successful, it was fraught with misadventure.



Even before the Brigadoon had left Auckland, the New Zealand police were aware of the planned trip. Auckland's criminal fraternity being relatively small, word had got around. It wasn't just the police who were aware of it. Murray Williams of the Auckland Star team knew the trip was afoot, as he was friends with two of the crew.”

"They had this secret in common. Plans were already being laid to sail the Brigadoon to Thailand, pick up a 450,000-stick marijuana consignment and slip it back into New Zealand. The vessel was on the hard at Westhaven, one of Auckland's yachting centres, and the younger brother had been put in charge of provisioning and buying equipment."

The two brothers were Michael and Kevin Lampshire from Auckland's North Shore, who would join Miller and at least one other crewmember for the trip. They were wholly unqualified to attempt the excursion, having limited sailing experience between them, none of it on blue water, and virtually non existent navigational skills.

This didn't deter them from setting off on 26 August 1975, heading up to New Caledonia and Papua New Guinea through the Timor Sea. It was on the first leg, that things started to go awry. The crew's food had gone rotten, leaving them with little to eat. Upon landfall in Noumea, a crewmember had been caught shoplifting some food. New Zealand police monitoring the progress of the yacht received a call from the New Caledonian police about the arrest. Believing they would apprehend the crew upon their return, the New Zealand police advised them to let the crewmember go.

The next debacle came when the Brigadoon became trapped in a maze of coral reefs northeast of Noumea for over three weeks, due to Miller's poor navigation. They also ran aground numerous times, including three times in the Timor Passage.

After this nightmare leg, they crew were happy to get to Thailand. Moored in Bangkok, on the Chao Praya River, they were guarded by armed Thai police. Johnstone arrived in Bangkok to make the connection with Chinese Jack, and not long after the $30,000 needed to purchase the drugs was couriered in. It is believed this was the work of Andy Maher, the man later convicted of Johnstone's murder in Northern England.

Some of the crewmembers of the Brigadoon witnessed the production of the sticks in Udon, Eastern Thailand. Whole families working in the fields harvesting the drug, while others bound the heads to bamboo sticks and compressed them with a hydraulic press. 1000 sticks could be compressed into a block 3 centimetres by 18 centimetres for easy transportation.

The 400 kilograms of Thai sticks was ferried to near Bangkok, where it was loaded onto the Brigadoon under cover of darkness at the mouth of the Chao Praya River.

With its cargo loaded, the Brigadoon set off on the return journey, stopping east of Bangkok at Pattaya to collect supplies. Here they had a fault with their engine, forcing them to crudely resist the assistance of a cruising yacht that tried to help. Johnstone departed to New Zealand to prepare for the yacht's arrival. He was to return to Pattaya in 1979 however, where a heroin transaction went wrong, and he lost up to half a million of Clark's money. This directly led to his death.

The Brigadoon sailed slowly on towards to Indonesia. Now the next disaster occurred, as the Lampshire brothers contracted malaria, desperately requiring medical attention. Thinking better of making landfall in Indonesia with a hold full of Thai sticks, the illicit cargo was stowed on an unpopulated island. It had been Miller's intention to leave the forth crew member on the island to guard the haul, but he thought better of it. This proved a wise decision, as he wasn't able to return and pick it up for over three weeks.

Arriving in Makassar, on the Indonesian island of South Sulawesi, the crew were arrested for not having visas. They were held for three weeks, and with the brothers out of action due to their illness, this left Miller in a difficult situation. He had legal problems and no crew for the return journey. Johnstone was called back from New Zealand to attend to things.

In Makassar, Johnstone made the association of the Australian skipper of the Konpira Maru 15, salvage expert John Chadderton. It is alleged that Johnstone paid Chadderton $30,000 to tow the Brigadoon back to New Zealand. Chadderton, now living in Perth, admits to the tow, but says he was entirely unknowing of any criminal activity.

"All that happened was there was a tow of a vessel that obviously requested assistance. We did that. The boat abandoned the tow at sea, we returned to the vessel and they didn't want to know us. And I thought, well, what a pack of wankers these people were and I sailed on."

This may be true, but the Stewart Royal Commission of Inquiry Into Drug Trafficking that documented the Mr Asia saga after its downfall says Chadderton later established the Timor International Marine and Oceanographic Research Company with Martin Johnstone.

With the help of Chadderton, the Brigadoon sailed south through the Timor Passage to Gove on the tip of Australia's Northern Territory. Pat Booth's book The Mr Asia File says, "Marty Johnstone certainly looked the part of the company director from Sentinal Road in his three-piece suits - better to look smart than be cool in the Indonesian heat - and an apparently inexhaustible supply of cigars."

Johnstone departed the vessel in Gove to return to New Zealand, and the Brigadoon was on its final leg. Yet still the problems weren't over. After the tow was abandoned off the top of the North Island, the yacht ran aground at Taemaro Beach, and local people were enlisted to help.

Further down the coast where Johnstone and cohorts had been camped, the 39 coal sacks of Thai sticks were unloaded. By now it was late March 1976, and the Brigadoon had been away for seven months.

The police had in the interim given up on the surveillance. "I think the drug squad had put out some alerts and were waiting for more information," says retired detective Brears Basham. "But I don't think they ever gave up. Information had dried up, no one knew where it was, nothing had arrived back in the country, so they presumed something had gone wrong or it had gone somewhere else. But once there was a big flood of sticks they didn't take long to put one and one together."

The product - with a value of between 3 and 5 million dollars -finally hit the Auckland streets. The profits trickled in over the next few months, providing the financial basis for the future operations of the Mr Asia syndicate.

And the Lampshire brothers, abandoned with malaria in Makassar? They would have been in trouble if the younger one hadn't had a good voice, picking up a gig in Zed's Hotel as a cabaret singer. After a number of months the New Zealand government paid their airfares home.


Gavin Bertram.