Mike Oldfield as good as Can shock

In defence of Mike Oldfield.

In a parallel universe, back in 1977 Mike Oldfield topped himself midway through the recording of his fourth album Incantations. Chronically depressed, painfully shy, he couldn’t take the adulation and the attention that his three hit albums had brought him. He’d hidden away in remote cottages, shut himself in studios and generally kept the world at bay for nearly five years. Now he was under some pressure from his label Virgin to take his music on the road. It was therapy or suicide and Mike chose to lock himself in the garage, turned on the engine and inhale that sweet sweet carbon monoxide.

Or maybe it wasn’t so tragic: he just went Syd Barrett/Roky Erickson mental.

Or maybe it wasn’t so tragic: he just disappeared and was never heard from again.

Or maybe it wasn’t so tragic: he just suddenly quit music altogether and opened a chip shop.

Whatever happened, today all you pissy little hipsters with your bumfluff beards and skinny jeans and Morrissey haircuts and chunky specs just love him. The original vinyl copies of Ommadawn and Hergest Ridge that you paid way too much for nestle in your collection next to your original Jamaican copy of Big Youth’s Screaming Target and the Harmonia bootlegs and some unreleased Wooden Shjips 12 inches that you wank off over on a regular basis. The original Roger Dean Virgin label gives it a warmer sound, doesn’t it?

And you, bald over 40s bloke, would alternate the Joy Division Unknown Pleasures t shirt with a Tubular Bells one to show that you were still down with the avant garde kids.

And fucking Mojo would have Oldfield gazing soulfully from every fourth cover and the smug bastard Guardian would constantly run these 50 great lost album features about the greatest albums that were never made where Incantations would regularly pip Smile to the number one slot.

But when Schrödinger opened the box, the cat was still alive…

In the real world, Mike signed up with Exegesis, a rather nasty cult therapy group that cured its acolytes by physically and psychologically abusing them relentlessly, destroying them and building them up again, much as the Chinese commies did to all those Iowa farm boys back in the Korean war. Whatever they did, in Mike’s case, it worked. He was transformed from a shy retirer into a hyper-extrovert – some have said ‘overbearing cunt’ – obsessed by extreme sports, fast cars and powerful motorcycles. The Bill Oddy-like diminutive hippy was replaced by a confident clean cut chap in a hip white suit.

The music changed too, though in subtle ways. After 1978′s epic double Incantations, Mike abandoned the uncompromising album-length suites for a while. He toured. He had hit singles. He reworked the theme from Blue Peter. In some ways, in the 1980s he shadowed the trajectories of contemporaries like Yes and Genesis, moving from ‘head’ music to the heart of the mainstream.

In the post-punk musical marketplace, Mike was far from fashionable. He sold millions of records, certainly, but this was despite Virgin records rather than because of them. Can a man be more cursed than having his music filed under ‘new age’?

And while Yes and Genesis have been ‘rehabilitated’ – surely you’re prepared to admit that The Yes Album and Nursery Crymes have their merits? – Mike Oldfield is loved by no-one except his millions of fans. As one hater told me: there’s always a nagging suspicion that Tubular Bells is something that Jeremy Clarkson would like. You’d certainly prefer Dennis Nielsen as a fan. Which, of course, he was.

For me, the first four albums are staggering pieces of music, works that nearly 40 years on, I can still hear in new ways, still find new things in. I wore the grooves out on my first copy of Tubular Bells. I played it almost every night in 1973, power cuts permitting, and later used to ‘trip’ to it on Saturday afternoons. There are light and dark passages in Tubular Bells, Hergest Ridge and Ommadawn are both bleak and sad, a message from a man who was slowly going mad. The disturbing multiple overdubbed guitars on Hergest Ridge – like 10,000,000 bees swarming in a cathedral – and the maddening ever building crescendo on Ommadawn are still as potent now.

Oldfield’s music has more in common with Can, Faust and Guru Guru than with the homeopathic tinklings you hear in crystals’n'candles shoppes.

It’s not minimalist music, though it was a jumping-off point for me to discover Steve Reich, Terry Riley and Philip Glass. Tubular Bells also pointed me in the direction of Soft Machine and the wilder edge of krautrock. It got me used to long-form pieces, ultimately softening me up for everything from John Coltrane to the Western classical canon.

More importantly, it whetted my appetite for music the like of which I had never heard before. Everything else that I was into at that time – Bowie, Roxy, Sabbath – all had some anchoring in the familiar. Oldfield’s music for good or ill encouraged me to seek out the shock of the new.

After Incantations I lost interest, though recently I’ve rediscovered just how good that album was. His best music in the 80s was filmic – his score for Roland Joffe’s The Killing Fields is particularly good – though again, fine as some of it was, the best was at the start.

Perhaps it’s unfair to prefer the works of suffering artists. Would Van Gough be a painter of minor interest had fluoxetine been prescribed? Would Dostoyevsky’s novels be somehow shallower and less interesting if he’d undergone Cognitive Behavioural Therapy?

It’s the gift of the artist to transform pain and suffering into something of worth and beauty.

Mike Oldfield created worlds and to enter them is to visit a landscape that’s as dreadful and unsettling as it is placid and pastoral. You feel the panic as well as – occasionally – the peace.

Filed under: avant garde, Classic Rock, Krautrock, Music journalism, Progressive rock, Psychedelia, hergest ridge, incantations, mike oldfield, ommadawn, tubular bells

Queens Of The Stone Age – Rated R [Deluxe Edition]

This is a review of the anniversary deluxe edition, written for Classic Rock.

Rolling Stone’s 82nd best album of the decade. Tits.

There’s a case for saying that we’ve just been through yet another of rock’s golden ages.
The years between – roughly – 1999 and 2008 (please, ‘the noughties’ makes us puke) saw
Jeremiads about the death of guitars once again fail to come to pass. Great years for the
underground but they were also good times for very mainstream bands too, bands you saw on telly that your uncool mates might have heard of too. We got career-best albums from Machine Head, The Foo Fighters, Slipknot, Green Day, Judas Priest and Tool. We had awesome newcomers like Opeth, Mastodon, Coheed & Cambria, My Chemical Romance and The Mars Volta. And even Metallica eventually made a record that wasn’t totally shit.

The first great rock’n’roll release of the new decade/century/millennium was the second
album by Queens Of The Stone Age. Josh Homme never set out to be a trailblazer for
proper rock music, but things just kind of worked out that way. After years when the charts
were dominated by hip hop, pop and R&B, when ‘rock’ was a sickly category, either retro
fallout from grunge or Britpop or heritage acts stumbling onstage to die, here was an album
that sounded the way that a 21st century rock band should. Queens were robust and tough
and vibrant. They were eclectic. Queens had metal, punk rock, prog rock, psychedelic rock,
krautrock, glam rock – every damn variant of cool rock you can think of – wired into their
DNA.

The opening lines of Feelgood Hit Of The Summer “Nicotine, Valium, Vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy and alcohol” serve notice that this is no album by a bunch of businessmen with guitars. It ain’t U2. They were not here to service a demographic or to provide content between the ads on modern rock radio. Yes, oh my goodness, that’s drugs they’re singing about, mum. Cover your ears.

The self titled first QOTSA album was still really a Kyuss album. It was the last ‘stoner rock’ album that Josh Homme made. Rated R was something else again. Produced by Josh and Chris Goss, a long time friend and mentor of Homme’s, it made enough compromises to get the band on MTV without selling the essential soul of the band. It was made with a loose line-up of madmen and geniuses, a gentleman’s club of cool that included Rob Halford, Pete Stahl, Mark Lanegan, Barrett Martin and of course Nick Oliveri.

Even a decade on, the album well played and imprinted on the consciousness, you hear new stuff all the time. Like the robotic beats and repetitive riff on In The Fade, which call to mind both Neu! And The Groundhogs, sounds slippery and different every time you listen to it. Or the mellower low key psychedelia of Auto Pilot, which sounds strangely contemporary, suggesting a direction not taken that other bands could build an entire career around. And at first BetterLiving Through Chemistry sounded like a failed trip hop experiment; now it sounds futuristic and oddball again. Monsters in the Parasol is almost Doors-like, a dark surreal ode to dropping acid in the desert. Rated R progresses from the singles Feelgood Hit of the Summer and The Lost Art Of Keeping A Secret through to the discordant brass annoyance at the end of I Think I Lost My Headache. It’s showing off. Homme wants us to know that this is a band that can do anything. You want MTV friendly fodder? He will just fuck you raw with MTV friendly fodder. You ask when Kyuss will reform? They’re still here, at the guts of QOTSA.

Songs For The Deaf, the third album, is arguably the better. But Rated R is still a magnificent work, seeming much bigger and broader than 11 songs over a mere 42 minutes.

To celebrate a decade since its release and generally reactivate interest in this album – it certainly doesn’t need remastering or anything – there’s a bonus disc of live material, most notably the Reading Festival show, as well as  -sides and oddities. Like all such discs, it adds precisely fuck all to your enjoyment of or knowledge of this album. It does remind you that the QOTSA live experience is not something to be missed. It pads the box nicely, too.

Whether the new golden age of rock’n'roll is already over is a moot point. Too much tongue in cheek retro, too many bands retreating back to the underground: mainstream rock might be in recession again. Josh Homme has been arseing around with joke bands and ironic supergroups for too long now. Hearing this ought to be the wake up call that demands he get back to his proper work. The next golden age is nothing without him.

Filed under: avant garde, Classic Rock, Heavy Metal, Krautrock, Metal Hammer, Music journalism, Progressive rock, albums released 2000, Josh Homme, Kyuss, Queens Of The Stone Age, rated r, STONER ROCK

Peter Hammill London Cadogan Hall

Live review for Classic Rock presents…Prog. I’ve been a fan of Hammill since I was about 14; I had a really ancient scratched copy of The Least We Can Do Is Wave To Each Other, swapped – as I recall – for a copy of Funky Junction Pay Tribute To Deep Purple and The Eternal Fire Of Jimi Hendrix. Well worth it.

You could hear a pin drop but nobody had the poor manners to actually drop any. Peter Hammill was paused to strike the piano and maybe sing some more. But in the few nano seconds after the reverberation of the last note faded, and the next begun, it was like being in the eye of a storm. Tense rather than calm.
The Mercy is the best song from his most recent solo album Thin Air and indeed one of his best songs ever: in many ways it is almost a typical Peter Hammill song. A beautiful, rippling melody, a complex structure that eschews the standard verse/chorus pattern and words shot through with anguish, loss, his voice always calm but on the edge of rage or a roar of pure pain.
It’s one of the night’s memorable moments. Hairs on the back of the neck stuff.
Hammill’s solo career has always run in parallel to his work with Van Der Graaf Generator, allowing him a more confessional and – sometimes – quieter platform for his writing. Tonight is proof that along with a rare coterie of songwriters – Neil Young, Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen are the only others that really spring to mind – his work in middle age is every bit as vital and engrossing as his work in youth. Arguable, more so.
In fact songs like (On Tuesday She Used To Do) Yoga, originally written and recorded in 1975 on the harrowing diary of the death of a relationship Over, take on an added edge of bitterness and wry self-deprecating humour coming from a bloke in his 60s.
Hammill is not some dysfunctional genius, some pained too-sensitive-for-the-world middle aged adolescent. Offstage, he’s probably as capable of banal moments in front of the telly as any of us. But over the past 40 years, as an artist, he has mined his own failings and shortcomings without quarter, exposing something raw and even embarrassing, something truly honest.
Sometimes in the course of this long and troubled performance, you actually wince at what he reveals. It’s like watching somebody confess at a show trial. Dressed all in white, alone onstage, he looks vulnerable.
Sometimes, though, it’s just a concert. You need a few of Hammill’s brilliant ‘greatest hits’ like Shingle from Nadir’s Big Chance – truly one of the great classic albums of the 70s that nobody knows about – and Habit Of The Broken Heart from Van Der Graaf’s The Quiet Zone/The Pleasure Dome to balance out more recent material. But it’s songs like Friday Afternoon from 2006′s Singularity and Undone from Thin Air that actually prove the most intense and emotional points in the show.
Finishing with A Better Time from 1996′s excellent career high point album X My Heart, we leave feeling emotionally wrung out but in no doubt that we have been witness to one of the great English singer songwriters of the age with no signs that time has wearied him.

Filed under: avant garde, Classic Rock, Krautrock, Music journalism, Progressive rock

Buyer’s Guide to Jazz Rock

This is a piece written for Classic Rock in 2008. Normally I hate reading and writing stuff like this. Lists. Consumer guides. But I’m a whore. I did it for the money. I had a bit of ‘guidance’ with the list, so I probably wouldn’t have included Colosseum and would have put something by Soft Machine in its place. And whither George Duke, Spirit, Ian Carr’s Nucleus, Seventh Wave, Alan Holdsworth and newcomers Diagonal? I know, I know…

Let’s begin with a warning: jazz rock can be terrifying and it isn’t for everyone. But you can take comfort from the fact that it alienates and angers as many ‘proper’ jazz ‘buffs’ as it does rock fans. If you think Dylan going electric was a big deal, you should have heard the hissy fits from the hep cats when Miles Davis went on stage in the mid-60s and started playing along with a bunch of crazy muthas with Afros who fed their instruments through wah-wah pedals.

Jazz rock, or fusion, was the last gasp of jazz, the final surge of energy and creative power before lapsing into the hideous heritage industry that it has become today. Jazz rock is pretty hard to define. For bands like the Mahavishnu Orchestra it involved hard rock structures but with complex, improvisational elements.

Rock and jazz have a few ancestors in common – the blues, even ragtime – but it wasn’t until the mid-60s that the two converged in what came to be known as jazz rock/fusion. Bands like The Grateful Dead, The Byrds and The Doors cited jazzers such as John Coltrane as major influences (listen to The Doors’ Light My Fire back to back with Coltrane’s Ole), although jazz fans and musicians tended to regard most rock as inferior.

By 1967, rock had become more creative, and for the first time jazz artists began to take influences from the likes of Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, The Beatles and Sly & The Family Stone. There were also commercial considerations: jazz had waned as the dominant form of popular music.

It was a two-way street: rock artists like Jeff Beck, Ginger Baker and the late, great Tommy Bolin wanted to stretch themselves as musicians, and acceptance by the jazz fraternity was like passing the cycling proficiency test. Had he lived, there’s little doubt that Hendrix would have followed the logical course set by his Band Of Gypsies and become a jazz-rock star.

From roughly 1967 until the mid-80s, the intermarriage of jazz and rock produced some of the most stunning, original and mesmerising music of the 20th century (to be fair, it also produced more than its fair share of unlistenable toss.) Much of what we know as progressive rock – Yes, ELP, post-Red King Crimson – was essentially jazz rock lite. Today we can still hear the influence of the Mahavishnu Orchestra and Miles Davis in bands as diverse as Tool, Mastodon and The Mars Volta.

Essential – The Classics

MAHAVISHNU ORCHESTRA
Birds Of Fire
CBS, 1972
“A person would be a moron not to appreciate [John] McLaughlin’s technique,” Frank Zappa once said. “The guy has certainly found out how to operate a guitar as
if it were a machine-gun.”
Birds Of Fire was the Mahavishnu Orchestra at their absolute best, a multi-ingredient fusion – jazz, rock, blues, Celtic folk, Indian classical – churned out at an amazing breakneck speed.
John McLaughlin’s guitar work was staggering, and keyboard player Jan Hammer and violinist Jerry Goodman were also virtuosos. The seemingly telepathic interplay and improvisation is a joy to hear.

JEFF BECK
Wired
CBS, 1976
Beck was one of the few rockers to make the transition to jazz. His 1976 masterpiece Wired – particularly his cover of Charles Mingus’s Goodbye Pork Pie Hat – is one of the few albums you could describe as jaw-dropping and mean it.
Entirely instrumental, and at just under 35 minutes comparatively short, Wired is an album that passes in a blur of high-speed funk, ultra-heavy technoflash guitar solos and thrilling power chords. Yes, it’s Beck shamelessly showing off, but it’s hardly self-indulgent.
It’s like a shopping list of musical ideas and directions, each of which could have spawned an entire album in its own right. Marvellous.

Superior – The Albums That Helped Build the Genre

BILLY COBHAM
Spectrum
Atlantic, 1973
As the drummer with Miles Davis and the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Cobham was one of the foremost musos of his generation. Spectrum, though, is more than a bunch of difficult drum solos.
Opening with the truly amazing Quadrant 4 – which highlights the high-speed roller-coaster guitar of the young Tommy Bolin – Spectrum is all about the interplay between great musicians, crossing every boundary from hard rock to the soulful heavy funk of Red Barron. The drumming, as you’d expect, is from the realm of the angels – listen particularly to Stratus, where Cobham proves the superiority of the human over the drum machine.

RETURN TO FOREVER
Hymn Of The Seventh Galaxy
Verve, 1973
There’s some debate among aficionados as to whether this or its follow up, Romantic Warrior, is the superior RTF album. …Galaxy is a less polished album, leaner and meaner, full of high-jazz musicianship and a low-down hard-rock attitude. The inventiveness on the title track, and keyboard player and leader Chick Corea’s reworking of his own Latin-flavoured Captain Senor Mouse, are definite highlights, as is After The Cosmic Rain which showcases bass player Stanley Clarke’s propulsive style. RTF is kind of the next stage left after Yes’s Close To The Edge.

MILES DAVIS
A Tribute To Jack Johnson
CBS, 1971
Miles Davis always bragged that he could put together the best rock band ever and blow everyone away. With this album, a soundtrack for a movie about boxing champ Johnson, recorded with John McLaughlin and Billy Cobham, Miles lived up to that boast.
Two extended jams, kicking in with Right Off, McLaughlin playing heavy blues rock guitar, breaking down into moody psychedelia, James Brown-like funk and going back to bar-room rock, this is probably a clue as to how the mooted Hendrix/Miles collaboration might have sounded. A good jumping off point for Miles’s electric work.

WEATHER REPORT
Heavy Weather
CBS, 1977
Easily the most accessible jazz rock release here and the most commercially successful, Heavy Weather actually spawned the hit single (albeit a minor hit) Birdland. However, it was possibly that success that closed the book on fusion’s more creative years and gave birth to the ghastly easy-listening mutation that was jazz funk.
Regardless, this album still sounds as fresh today as it did at the time. Weather Report went straight for the jugular, delivering marvellous tunes, keeping the instrumental flash in the background, and made an album that was less jazz rock and almost jazz pop.

Good – Worth Exploring

FRANK ZAPPA
Hot Rats
Reprise, 1969
After he disbanded the Mothers Of Invention in 1969, Zappa surrounded himself with some little-known but extraordinary musicians to record what became his breakthrough album, praised or damned as the Zappa record that people who don’t like Zappa like.
From the instrumental opener Peaches En Regalia, through the scatological blues of Willy The Pimp, this album album heralded Zappa’s foray into jazz rock. While Mahavishnu and even Miles had a sort of spirituality, Zappa remained cynical, deflating the undeniable brilliance of the arrangement, writing and performance with the usual lame dirty jokes. A brilliant album nevertheless.

COLOSSEUM
Valentyne Suite
Vertigo, 1969
Colosseum’s second album finds them reaching beyond their limitations as, essentially, a Cream-influenced blues rock band and groping to create something revolutionary. The extended jazz rock jams and particularly the 15-minute title track are reminiscent of what US bands like Blood, Sweat And Tears, Chicago Transit Authority and Chase were also doing at the same time. Essentially these were the handful of bands from rock backgrounds who were able to make a convincing transition to jazz. Along with King Crimson’s In The Court Of The Crimson King, Valentyne Suite is one of the early milestones where prog rock and jazz rock met.

TONY WILLIAMS LIFETIME
Emergency
Polydor, 1969
There’s no argument that this album is seriously flawed: Williams can’t sing for toffee, and the production is truly awful. That said, the music made by then-prodigy drummer Williams and his band is pure electric hellfire. To the staid jazz establishment of the time, it must have been as shocking as Anarchy In The UK.
Emergency emphasises the rock in jazz rock, John McLaughlin’s guitar almost anticipates classic heavy metal, while Williams’s drumming veers from hostile to ecstatic joy in the space of a few beats. Years ahead of its time, this album is a slightly ragged and tattered masterpiece.

Also Try

Although the best jazz rock was released between 1967 and ’77, there are a lot of paths and tangents for the explorer to follow. Jazz rock in Britain is best represented by Soft Machine’s Third (’70), with more profoundly avant-garde noises following from the likes of Henry Cow’s Unrest (’74) and cult classics like Centipede’s Septober Energy (’71). The early works of Blood, Sweat And Tears, such as Child Is Father To The Man (’68), the Buddy Miles Expressway – most notably Expressway To Your Skull (’70) – and Chicago Transit Authority’s self-titled 1969 debut represent strand of US jazz rock which came from rock bands rather than from jazzers ‘slumming’ it.
European jazz rock is where things got really weird and wonderful: Wagnerian French band Magma released several sci-fi concept albums, most notably ’73’s Mekanik Destruktiw Komandoh (which reimagined John Coltrane fronting an orchestra from Saturn), while the altogether gentler Gong fused jazz rock with late-period psychedelia on their excellent ’73 album Angel’s Egg.

Avoid

ANYTHING BY KENNY G.
Kenny G represents the dire depths to which fusion eventually sank. Flushed with and egged on by the commercial success of Weather Report’s Heavy Weather, a few jazz-rockers decided to chuck out all that scary, innovative stuff and just play some peaceful elevator music to soothe the folks after a hard day being yuppies.

Filed under: avant garde, Classic Rock, Heavy Metal, Jazz rock, Krautrock, Music journalism, Progressive rock, Psychedelia, Frank Zappa, jazz rock fusion, miles davis

Progcast One

This is a podcast for the launch of Classic rock Presents…Prog that I took part in last year. It also features editor Jerry Ewing, and writers Malcolm Dome and Nick Shilton.

Progcast here

Filed under: Classic Rock, Heavy Metal, Krautrock, Music journalism, Progressive rock, Psychedelia, Progressive rock

Mark Linkous

Mark Linous

I met Mark Linkous a few times in the mid 90s and again about five years ago. I wish I had some great insight to give you based upon these meetings which consisted of a couple of interviews, a conversation after a gig and a few chance meetings where only small talk and small gossip was exchanged. Perhaps I should tell you that he was a generous man, a kind man, a beacon of hope in a hopeless world. He may well have been, but I’m fucked if I noticed it. Maybe I should say that I saw right away that he was spiralling towards an unhappy end. That would just be bullshit.

For example: one of the occasions that I spoke to him was in London in 1996 just before he went back to his hotel, had an overdose and collapsed in such a way that he almost had to have both legs amputated. When I spoke to him he seemed fine. A bit laconic and tired, but no more so than any other jet lagged American junkie muso that struggled to answer my asinine questions in those days.

Hearing what happened that same week was shocking. But it was one of those classic overcoming adversity narratives that everybody loves and nobody wants to question too deeply. You know the story: he’s a great artist, but he has problems  with drugs. He nearly dies but he survives against the odds. Then he comes back and makes a stunning life affirming piece of art. And gets the girl. Freeze frame and roll credits to some high energy 80s power ballad.

But let me tell you something: surviving death and feeling overjoyed at being alive, you’d be surprised how fucking quickly that fades. You’re left with the same problems that you had before with some new ones added for good measure. Linkous could never walk properly again and had to wear braces on both legs. He never complained but then you’re not allowed to complain. You’re supposed to feel blessed, or lucky to be alive, an optimistic good sport, not some self obsessed depressed and miserable old cunt with two gammy legs.

Linkous, we’re told, struggled with depression all his life. Like many people who do, he self medicated with drugs, which may have compounded his problems but some of which may have numbed him physically and mentally enough to make it to the end of another day. Maybe we’ll never know what the text message he received was, the one that supposedly upset him enough to go and get his rifle and shoot himself through the heart. That’s not important. The cause can be any trivial, insignificant event. All thinking people consider suicide at one time or another. It takes a ‘perfect storm’, where all the necessary elements come together. Most suicides start days or weeks before triggers are pulled or high windows are opened.

What Linkous had in common with Elliott Smith, Jeff Buckley, Ian Curtis, Pete Hamm, Nick Drake, Vic Chesnutt, Kurt Cobain, Billy MacKenzie and  Per Yngve ‘Dead’ Ohlin is not that they created introspective music that contemplated the shadowy side of life. No, what they had in common was being male.

Men are nearly three times more likely to kill themselves than women. Among men under the age of 35, suicide is the second most common cause of death. Suicide is more common than homicide. Among middle aged men – Linkous was 47 – the rate has soared over the past decade.

There are kneejerk explanations for this: men can’t talk about their feelings the way that women supposedly do; men are a redundant sex; men are full of bad chemicals that makes them predisposed to depression and suicidal tendencies; men are just plain bad. Is is economic boom or bust? Too much responsibility or too little? The truth is that nobody knows why and all snap ‘common sense’ judgements are wrong. All of the artists mentioned who killed themselves were able to express themselves very articulately through their music. Linkous wasn’t a great confessional songwriter; he conjured up skewed wonderlands, a musical and verbal equivalent of the films of Tim Burton or Jan Švankmajer. But it’s unlikely that you’ll find many clues to his death on any of the Sparklehorse albums other than that Linkous was no stranger to the ‘dark side’.

Linkous had drug issues and was also upset by the suicide of his friend Vic Chesnutt earlier this year. Suicides sometimes have a nasty habit of spreading like a contagion.

It has been suggested that people who are depressed are actually seeing the world as it actually is, and it is everyone else who is deluded, clinging onto false hope, convincing themselves that life is worth living. People who kill themselves are just incapable of bullshitting themselves anymore.

But what could anyone have done? Maybe not allowing him to live as a virtual recluse. Maybe intervening in his drug use. Maybe forcing him to talk about what was going on in his mind. Nothing he’d have thanked you for or actually allowed anyone to do.

Linkous was a great talent. Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot is one of the best albums of the 1990s. He never topped it but always seemed to promise that he would. Maybe his Dark Night Of The Soul collaboration with Danger Mouse and David Lynch is the classic last word. Maybe something he had secreted in his beloved studio is the final masterpiece.

More likely there will just be a few tantalising odds and ends and a lot unresolvable questions.

Filed under: Classic Rock, Goth, Music journalism, NME, Progressive rock, Psychedelia, Mark Linkous, Sparklehorse, Suicide

ROBERT CALVERT Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters (Atomhenge/Esoteric)

The great Calvert

Although often described as “overlooked” or “neglected”, Hawkwind’s sometime frontman Bob Calvert’s first solo album  actually scraped the album charts and was – along with an afghan coat, a quid deal of red leb and a Mayflower paperback edition of one of Michael Moorcock’s Elric books – an essential possession for the mid 70s adolescent Brit stoner, filed there alongside Warrior On The Edge Of Time, Fish Rising and something pre-Virgin by Tangerine Dream.

It’s a Hawkwind album in all but name, the line-up augmented by various Pink Fairies, Viv Stanshall, Jim Capaldi, Arthur Brown and (uncredited) Brian Eno. It’s popularity with the ‘heads’ can be put down to the Pythonesque sketches that link the songs – surreal skits about Luftwaffe pilots wearing make-up and dodgy Yank jet salesmen that are even funnier when herbally enhanced – but also to four absolute killer space metal songs The Aerospaceage Inferno, The Widowmaker, The Right Stuff and Ejection. It was everything that Hawkwind promised on Silver Machine and Urban Guerilla.

It’s more straight ahead punk rock before there was punk rock metal, alluding to other Calvert songs and stories, moving “sideways through time”, that sort of thing. Calvert, as a boy wanted to be a fighter pilot but a perforated eardrum put paid to that dream. With Hawkwind he lived out his fantasies – a few years later he appeared onstage dressed as some glam rock combination of Biggles and Lawrence Of Arabia. And in these songs he seems to be flying with an afterburner.

The concept is about the Lockheed Starfighter, sold to the revitalised West German Luftwaffe in the 50s to help build the Federal Republic as a bulwark against the commies at the height of the cold war. The crashed and burned in alarming numbers as poorly trained pilots and ground crews earned them the nickname Flying Coffins and The Widowmaker.

Calvert’s songs have an almost JG Ballard-like fascination with the crashing aircraft, eliciting an almost sexual thrill from the disaster. You sense that he didn’t so much want to fly a starfighter as crash it into the ground.

Of all the songs on the album, the greatest is the masterful Ejection, probably the best song ever written about bailing out of a fighter plane. Legendary rock hack Nick Kent, a longtime champion of Calvert and Hawkwind, described Ejection as having the best riff since (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction and although he was no stranger to hyperbole, in this case he was bang on.

The remastering on this edition gives the sound a much needed punch. The only disappointment is the additional tracks: a more complete collection might have included The Widow’s Song, planned for inclusion with Nico on vocals, though eventually recorded by Calvert and his girlfriend just before his untimely death.

That’s a petty quibble though: a brilliant monument to the great psychedelic warrior poet of the English underground.

Tommy Udo

Filed under: avant garde, Classic Rock, Goth, Heavy Metal, Krautrock, Music journalism, Progressive rock, Psychedelia, hawkwind, Robert Calvert, Viv Stanshall

John Martyn – maverick of prog

This was written for Classic Rock presents Prog, a profile of the late great John Martyn who has been a musical presence in my life since I was about 12 (the song Dusty, from his album The Tumbler was included on the Island records compilation You Can All Join In – the third album I ever bought!)

Bearded men with acoustic guitars always appeared to be the antithesis of prog: by their very nature, folkies seemed to be making regressive music, retreating to “tradition”, to rootsiness. They also seemed to epitomise that most nausea-inducing spectacle: the sensitive young man, the lonely boy outsider, the bedroom poet who can’t get a girlfriend and tells the world so in dreadful self-pitying verse. Who among us has not guffawed uproariously at the scene in National Lampoon’s Animal House when John Belushi descends the stairs to find some anaemic beatnik with an acoustic guitar serenading a girl with a sensitive folk ballad, seizes the guitar and smashes it savagely against the wall? Who among us has not wanted to do the same to the whey-faced bum-fluffed fun-annihilators who produce their bloody 12 strings and start picking out the opening of Neil Young’s The Needle And the Damage Done at parties?
Growing up in Glasgow in the late 70s and early 80s, one of the party favourites of the acoustic guitar and scraggy beard massive was John Martyn’s May You Never, a haunting Celt-tinged blues ballad from his classic 1973 album Solid Air. You probably heard it murdered many times by some flat voxed James Taylor wannabe before actually hearing the original.
Your reporter then was probably not alone in having, for many years, an unreasonable prejudice against Martyn based solely upon those who sought to interpret his work. This prejudice, like so many, was a stupid one. It was also a prejudice that was happily blasted to pieces in 1978 when he performed Big Muff from the astonishing One World album in a live film for the Old Grey Whistle Test. Fed through a labyrinth of effects pedals, it sounded like the madder end of dub, it sounded like music that had more in common with Can than with any of the rootsy folkies that I then so detested. It was one of those what-the-fuck??? moments that we have all experienced upon being confronted with music that blows our minds. Man.
And any preconceptions that Martyn was some knock-kneed introspective bedroom wallflower were soundly destroyed a year later when he headbutted my mate in a bar in Glasgow.
Martyn had been enjoying a small sherry after dinner, as it were, and my pal had, metaphorically speaking, spilled his pint. Martyn drew his head back and cracked him in the nose. There was blood. Soon, after a few minutes spent tearing lumps of flesh from each other’s faces, Martyn put him in an armlock and rammed him face first into the wall. “Stay the fuck down cunt!” he growled in the sort of Glasgow accent that can loosen the bowels. My chum, slumped in a heap, was no longer in a position to argue. At which point one of the bar staff tried to calm John down and get him to leave. Martyn grabbed him by the throat: “You want some too ya fuckin’ fanny? Do ye?” The hapless   pint puller acknowledged that he did not, in fact, want some or indeed any. Martyn slowly released him and was led out of the bar.
Twenty minutes or so later he was onstage at the Glasgow School of Art and we were in the audience, my friend still pressing a wet towel to his now-ruined nose. Martyn was mesmerising. It is still a performance that I remember clearly: much of the material was drawn from One World, at times spacey, dub crazed, at others jazzy and late-night. May You Never had the hairs on the back of everyone’s necks bristling. In a month when I also went to see The Pop Group, James ‘Blood’ Ulmer, Kevin Coyne, Suicide and Pere Ubu, Martyn’s remains the most disconcerting and memorable show. Was it really 30 years ago? Well Jesus.
Afterwards I saw him and bass player Danny Thompson and my busted-nosed friend sitting together in the bar. All pals together after some eye to eye apologies and manly handshakes. Martyn was by now very convivial, a beardy uncle, telling us about his trip to Kingston, Jamaica to record at The Black Ark with Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry (“Now Scratch, he is really fucking mental, by the way,” said the pot of the kettle) and recommending that we listen to Pharoah Sanders and Davy Graham. We did. He also said he’d come and see our band the following week. He didn’t, of course. Probably just as well. He’d probably have kicked fuck out of us for crimes against music.

Martyn was many things. He actually was a sensitive poet, though a proper one, firing off autobiographical despatches from a life that was happy but knew more than its share of sorrows. He was a Glasgow hard man when it suited him, though he was born Iain David McGeachy in New Malden in Surrey and spent only part of his early childhood in Scotland. He grew up in the respectable South Side of the city, brought up by his father and grandmother. Still, to outsiders, when he lapsed into that Glasgow snarl which he sometimes did, he may as well have been the Razor King from the violent streets of the Gorbals.
When he was in his teens, Martyn straddled the sub cults of beat and mod, dressing like a tramp to go to folk clubs but donning a sharp suit on a Saturday night to go to the dancing with his girlfriend.
Glasgow had a thriving folk scene in the 60s, thanks in part to the influence of the great Scottish traditional song revivalist Ewan McColl and the active encouragement of the Communist Party who had decided that this was authentic people’s music in opposition to commercial trash like rock’n'roll. By 1965, a new generation – Martyn among them – inspired by Dylan was discovering folk music. New clubs, particularly Clive Palmer’s Incredible Folk Club in Sauchiehall Street, catered to this less traditional traditionalism. Clive’s group The Incredible String Band ,, regulars at the club in 1965 were already starting to branch out and experiment with other ethnic musical sounds. Martyn was a contemporary of the ISB as well as Billy Connolly and Bert Jansch. His biggest inspiration and mentor was the now largely forgotten Hamish Imlach, who taught Martyn to play blues guitar and allowed him to play the odd song of his own between sets. At just 17 he was a prolific writer and performer, though hadn’t seriously thought of music as a career.
Like many Scots, Martyn permanently migrated south of the border almost as soon as he had the bus fare.  He started playing in folk clubs in London. A meeting with label boss Chris Blackwell resulted in his becoming the first white artist to sign with Island records, until then best known as a UK outlet for Jamaican bluebeat, ska and reggae. John’s 1967 debut album London Conversation is a fairly standard folk album of the time (mostly self penned, obligatory Dylan cover) though the flute and sitar on Rolling Home hint at a more expansive sound to come. His voice had yet to develop into the slurred instrument that he said was his attempt to sound like a tenor sax.
The second album The Tumbler was still more adventurous, thanks in part to the happy fusion of Martyn’s pastoral songs with jazz flautist Harold McNair’s ethereal woodwind sound. But John was dissatisfied with his recorded output. “I got bored with the folk/acoustic thing. You can’t keep churning that out, it stifles innovation, kills the personal touch,” he said.

In 1970 John was hired as guitarist on an album by Beverley Kutner that was to be produced by Joe Boyd, who had been instrumental in the success of Fairport Convention, The Incredible String Band, Pink Floyd and Nick Drake, who would become a close friend of Martyn’s. John and Beverley became an item, began writing together and released the subsequent album Stormbringer as a duo. Stormbringer marks a big departure for John. It was the first time he used the echoplex on his guitar, a sound that would become his signature. On the next album The Road To Ruin, Martyn fell out with Boyd over the multiple overdubs. He also worked with a band for the first time, one that included his long-time collaborator bassist Danny Thompson, a muso for hire who had worked with The Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention and Pentangle. Thomson moved John in a jazzier direction, becoming the perfect foil for Martyn’s guitar and voice. They worked together right up until John’s death earlier this year.
John began to experiment with effects pedals, feedback and keyboards. He collaborated widely, most notably with Steve Winwood of Traffic, Paul Kossoff of Free and Back Street Crawler, Richard Thompson ex of Fairport Convention, improvisational jazz drummer John Stevens, Phil Collins and John Giblin who were then working together in Brand X.
The music became free ranging, from the complex 1973 classic Solid Air (written about the decline of Nick Drake,who would die the year after its release) to the echo laden 1977 masterpiece One World. Island boss Chris Blackwell became a close friend and encouraged Martyn in his collaborations. Other Island artists like dub producer and certifiable genius/madman Lee Perry worked with John, a fruitful if unlikely combination. While in Jamaica he played on Burning Spear’s roots reggae classic Man In The Hills as well as some sessions with Perry and Max Romeo. He later claimed that he was paid in Tia Maria and porn films.
He was no record company darling. Chuffed with the success of Solid Air, Island received the follow up Inside Out anticipating more of the same, some nice mellow pastoral jazz folk. What they got was about 40 minutes of wild electronics, free jazz and vocals that sounded like a drunk in space. In retrospect, it anticipates the Island era of Tom Waits nicely. At the time, to put it mildly, it was misunderstood and critically panned. Martyn had a serious disregard for the press ever since.
Martyn’s music was not difficult in the sense of being unapproachable. It was definitely ‘progressive’ by any definition. Not all of it: much that was recorded after 1980′s harrowing Grace And Danger was conventional by comparison. He was always a great songwriter, though, and his songs as covered by Eric Clapton, Dr John and Wet Wet Wet probably earned him far more in royalties than any of his own recordings.
Martyn never settled into a comfort zone. In the 90s he signed with then hip as fuck label Independiente. His 1996 album And saw him experimenting with trip hop and drum & bass. Later he made an album of startling covers called The Church With One Bell, where he played music by Lightning Hopkins, Portishead, Dead Can Dance, Elmore James and others. And on his 2000 album Glasgow Walker he abandoned the guitar and wrote the whole thing on keyboards.
The last time I spoke to him, interviewing him around the release of the CD box set Ain’t No Saint, he was still wildly enthusiastic about music, chuffed to bits that Pharoah Sanders had asked him to work on a new album with him, and generous about younger bands. He was also talking about releasing music on the internet.
Sadly, now that he’s dead, there’s an almost inevitable process of rediscovery and reassessment going on, not unlike the cult which grew up around Nick Drake.
“I don’t want to talk about Nick. It’s creepy, ghoulish and strange; this lionisation is too late when you’re dead. If they’d dug him enough then, he’d still be here now. I’ve often thought of faking my own death and watching the record companies fucking drum up all the shit they can…” he told Classic Rock in 2000.
So beware of cashing in on his incredible legacy: if there’s one guy who’d get so pissed off up in heaven that he’d jump back down to Earth and stick the heid on you, it’s definitely him. Definitely.

Filed under: avant garde, Classic Rock, Music journalism, Progressive rock, Psychedelia

Notes from underground

One of my favourite albums ever, recently reissued. This review originally ran in Classic Rock.

The Deviants

Ptooff!

Esoteric

The (Social) Deviants were the great steaming turd in the hippy dippy strawberry incense world of the late 60s London underground scene. First and foremost they were psychedelic hooligans, upsetting the nicey nicey comfy reveries of the docile hippies, scaring them from the stage of the UFO club in the wee small hours. While everyone else was turning off their minds, relaxing and floating downstream, The Deviants were making trouble. They were like The Sex Pistols a decade too early – they were, in fact, one of the first bands ever to be described as ‘punk rock’ – and as well as the sneering attitude and leather trousers, they also pioneered the DIY ethic, promoting community gigs and releasing their first album Ptooff! independently.

Their revolution-first-music-second ethic has borne up rather better over the years than many of their contemporaries. Opening track I’m Coming Home sounds like a low budget strung-out version of The Doors who are just straight enough to grasp a rudimentary I’m A Man riff while frontman Mick Farren sneers and spits his way through the ensuing acid deranged mess. There is the amazing Nothing Man, a Fugs/Zappa-like collage of disjointed music, noise and FX with Farren reciting an equally crazed poem that almost seems to prefigure sampling. The anti-consumerist Garbage is definitely a punk rock song, maybe something by The Fall, that they miraculously managed to channel from the future. The final song Deviation Street is like eight minutes of Bo Diddley playing on an airport PA with lots of stoned-freak conversations recorded and laid over the top. It’s an attack on self-satisfied hippie complacency more savage than anything Lydon would later dish out.

There are two tracks by bass guitarist Cord Rees that don’t really fit, where he mistakenly imagined that The Deviants could be a ‘proper’ band. But in an odd way it’s these glaring flaws and the fact that this is such an amateur effort – in the best sense of the term – that makes Ptooff! an album that is in every way as pioneering as Piper At The Gates Of Dawn or Sgt Pepper.

This welcome reissue restores the original fold-out quasi pop-art cover, 1967 sleeve notes by John Peel and new ones by Mark Powell.

No phoney nostalgia here. This is the real sound of the English psychedelic underground and A Whiter Shade Of Pale it ain’t.

Filed under: avant garde, Classic Rock, Heavy Metal, Music journalism, Psychedelia, Boss Goodman, English underground, International Times, Mick Farren, Paul Rudolph, Pink Fairies, Psychedelia, Russel Sanderson

VoiVod now

VoiVod are one of the most important bands ever: without them there would be no Tool, no Mastodon, no Opeth. They were the first to transcend thrash for a new take on progressive rock. And remarkably they continue, having survived the death of founder and inspirational guitarist Piggy. This was written for Classic Rock presents Prog, an interview with Snake about the long and influential history of the band.

Admit it. Something about the term ‘Canadian music’ makes your heart sink just a little. It’s like ‘Irish cooking’ and ‘Scottish goalkeeping’, a description of something that is generally woeful. It suggests ‘like American music, but not quite as good’, music that’s a bit worthy but also a bit dull. It’s unfair, sure, but true nonetheless. In terms of actual numbers, Canadian bands who matter lag way behind the US, UK and Europe. But the good news is that the ones who do matter – Rush, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and of course Voivod – really matter a lot.

Voivod are one of the bands who changed metal in the 1980s, ripped up all the blueprints and forged something whose repercussions are still felt today. Emerging from thrash, one of metal’s most fertile eras, their music pushed beyond the modest expectations of fans and critics in the mid 80s to create, if you like, the First Wave Of Progressive Heavy Metal. Not that it was really much of a wave: you had the embryonic Dream Theater, you had the underground stirrings of bands like Atheist, but we’re not really talking about a ‘movement’. Voivod’s fourth and fifth albums Dimension Hatröss and Nothingface were sort of high concept post-thrash, they defied easy categorisation and sounded like nothing else that any of their contemporaries were doing.

Voivod’s unique manifestation of metal owes everything to the band’s founder and spectacular guitarist, the late Dennis ‘Piggy’ D’Amour.

“The big change really started to take place around the time of [second album] Rrröööaaarrr, ” frontman Denis ‘Snake’ Bélanger tells us. “Piggy really wanted to push the band forward. He was a lot older than the rest of us and he had been listening to a lot of different music for years. Not just 70s prog rock, he had a really weird collection of records. He was also into contemporary classical music, Stravinsky, Bartok, Paganini. He was into a lot of things. We’d go round to his house and just pull stuff out at random. ‘Soft Machine. What does this sound like?’ After Rrröööaaarrr which I think was our last straight thrash metal album, we started to look at writing more and complex music.”

Piggy painstakingly taught the rest of the band the music he had grown up with (“He could play the whole of Yes’s Relayer album backwards!” remembers Snake).

The changes started to manifest themselves on the band’s transitional third album Killing Technology. They had shifted from being a good if not exactly innovative thrash band in the mould of Kreator, to something new, incorporating complex, jazzy guitar attacks and time signatures that were highly unusual in those straight ahead 4/4 days, as well as elements of hardcore punk and industrial music. They had less in common with their thrash contemporaries and more with hardcore bands like Husker Du and Black Flag who were also breaking out of the confines of their particular genres.

“We were actually sitting around listening to things backwards,” Snake recalls. “Piggy would play something and we’d think that’s cool. He was playing us Yes and Genesis, but lots of really odd obscure stuff like Egg. And while I wasn’t a big prog fan, I was listening to a lot of stuff like the Cure, Psychedelic Furs, The Gun Club, so there were a lot of different approaches coming in at that time.”

With Dimension Hatross, released in 1988, Voivod really got into their stride. The music finally gelled, it sounded at times as if King Crimson had followed up 21^st Century Schizoid Man with a pulverising metal album (instead of all that pastoral sensitive Greg Lake stuff). Just when Metallica were pushing thrash closer to the mainstream with …And Justice For All, so Voivod were pushing it right over the edge with Dimension Hatross.

It was a concept album based on an idea by drummer Michel ‘Away’ Langevin, who drew the character on the band’s album sleeves, with lyrics by Snake. The Voivod character, a futuristic post-nuclear vampire cybernetic warrior who bore more than a passing resemblance to Hammerstein from 2000 AD’s ABC Warriors strip, accidentally creates a new universe while smashing particles. He is then caught up in a civil war between the universe’s two factions the Chaosmongers and the Technocratic Manipulators which results in an apocalyptic end to everything. Don’t expect it to be adapted as a west end musical any time soon.

“Michel was a visionary. He was listening to Van Der Graaf Generator at that time and wanted to stretch the kind of lyrics that we were writing. We wanted to mix a lot of influences together and we were really brainstorming about what we would do. We were almost engineering the music as the concept grew. We were adding things all the time. We wanted to make the listener put on headphones and be gone somewhere else for an hour. And I think we achieved that.”

With the follow up Nothingface, generally acclaimed as Voivod’s masterpiece, the concept, the music and the band’s general vibe was as insane/genius as it could ever be.

“Nothingface was actually based on real events,” says Away. “In the town of Jonquière, in northern Quebec, where we grew up, they built the biggest aluminium factory in North America. And of course there has been a high incidence of Alzheimer’s Disease because of the aluminium that people working in the plant and living nearby have absorbed.”

Nothingface uses the material for a cosmic battle between Voivod and the evil forces behind planetary mind rapers.

“It’s about giant factories that look like spiders,”says Away. “They crawl around the planet and dig for aluminium and when there is no more aluminium they fly to another planet. They are like starships, these giant factories. Nothingface is the story about the people living on the planet invaded by spiders. So all those people are losing their legends and their culture because of Alzheimer’s disease.”

And just in case anyone was in any doubt where the band were coming from, the album included a mind melting cover of Syd Barrett era Floyd’s Astronomy Domine.

Both fans and critics of metal often had low ambitions and expectations for the music in those days. Big hair, big egos and tight trousers. The days when Brett Michaels was seen as a real bad ass. Voivod certainly had a hand in changing all that.

Of course, these days the influence of those albums has been well and truly digested and disseminated, you can hear a little or a lot of Voivod in Tool, in Neurosis and particularly in Mastodon. Listening to this year’s phenomenal Crack The Skye, you can unquestionably hear the spirit of Voivod in there. Not imitation, but sincere admiration.

“The first time I toured in Europe was when I was in Today is the Day. We came over with Neurosis and Voivod,” says Mastodon drummer Brann Dailor. “I used to watch Voivod every night. They had such camaraderie in the way that they played, something that I wanted in any band that I formed, something I didn’t have in Today Is The Day because I had joined them very late after they had been together for a long time.”

“It’s something that if you hear it then I’m very proud of it,” says Snake. “I love Mastodon, they are a fantastic band.”

Voivod have always had high profile fans in other bands. Mike Patton is an admirer and was planning a track to an aborted Voivod tribute album, as were Primus. Dave Grohl is an enthusiastic champion – Snake sang on one of the tracks on Grohl’s Probot album while Away designed the sleeve. Sonic Youth, always with impeccable taste, admit a huge debt to and admiration of Voivod.

“Sometimes when I hear the Foo Fighters I go ‘Wow, that’s Piggy’s chord!’ that dissonant chord, y’know,” he says. “I think it proves that we did something new and brought it to others.”

And Norwegian black metallers Darkthrone dedicated Atomic Coming one of the tracks on their 2006 album The Cult Is Alive to Piggy, who had just recently died.

“Hell fuckin’ yeah, Voivod totally rules!” enthused Darkthrone’s Nocturno Culto.

Perhaps that’s Voivod’s curse, to be an influential band that other musicians admire but with limited appeal elsewhere. They’ve had their share of misfortunes: sales of Nothingface were disappointing. The follow up Angel Rat fared even less well and fractures started to appear in the band’s line-up. Bassist Jean-Yves ‘Blacky’ Theriault quit the band after finishing work on Angel Rat. The band stumbled on as a three piece before Snake left, a decision exacerbated by drug problems. Eric ‘E Force’ Forrest then joined as bassist and singer and just as the band were regaining some momentum, disaster struck. In what seemed like an eerie rerun of Cliff Burton’s death, Forrest was seriously injured in a car crash in Germany. Piggy was diagnosed with a brain tumour, though fortunately he recovered after an operation to remove it.

After a hiatus, Snake rejoined the band and they made their self-titled 2003 album. It was OK, but seemed like a step back, just another thrash album.

“I think a lot of fans didn’t get us, they might like one album but not the one that came after, because we tried never to repeat what we had done,” says Snake. “We weren’t a band who found a formula and stuck to it. You take a risk. It’s like a mission. You don’t know, if you make experimental music, that everything will work. You just have to do it and see.”

Piggy died after developing cancer in 2005. But the VoiVod story doesn’t end there. With a new album called Infini just out, all of the surviving Voivod members have contributed to songs that were set in motion by Piggy before his death. Using riffs and solos he recorded, the band have constructed a record that once again edges out into the cosmic badlands. Not exactly Killing Technology 2.0, it’s still dense with ideas and may be a jumping off point for a new era of the band.

“I’m just really excited to be doing this, flying over to Europe to play festivals,” says Snake. “I’m glad that progressive metal is just so good and creative just now. It’s demanding and it’s great that people want something more than Poison.”

Filed under: avant garde, Classic Rock, Heavy Metal, Krautrock, Music journalism, Progressive rock