One imagines that Barack Obama probably choked on his Wheaties when he unwrapped his copy of the New Yorker this week. On the cover of the magazine, the democratic presidential hopeful is depicted giving his wife, Michelle, a fist bump in the Oval Office while dressed in traditional Muslim garb. As if it couldn’t get any worse for the couple, Mrs Obama is dressed as a terrorist and an American flag can be seen burning in the fireplace beneath a painting of Osama Bin Laden.
It’s a poignant, not to mention controversial, cover. Why? Well, it’s arrived at a time when the race to become the next US president had, as one writer recently put it, entered post-post 9/11 territory. Considering the events of that day in September 2001 have shaped the America’s foreign policy in the seven years that have followed, the subject of 9/11 has rarely surfaced during election year. It seems that Americans are content with burying, but not forgetting, the bad memories.
This will bring them flooding back, however, along with Obama’s unfortunate ‘ties’ to the attacks on New York and Washington – from his middle name – Hussein – and the unfortunate similarity his surname has with Osama to his former religious relationship with Pastor Jeremiah Wright.
But one thing we won’t see is John McCain jumping on the New Yorker’s bandwagon. The republicans have already criticised the magazine, while Obama’s camp has called it "tasteless and offensive".
The magazine's response?
It says the cover "combines a number of fantastical images about the Obamas and shows them for the obvious distortions they are."
It remains to be seen as to whether the rest of America sees it that way.
It’s no surprise that Converse have decided to use Julian Casablancas to celebrate its 100th birthday. After all, his band did single handedly bring the shoe back into fashion seven years ago.
There must have been a moment last weekend when the organisers of the Zoo8 festival thought their safest bet was to lock themselves in the Tiger enclosure at Port Lympne Wild Animal Park in Kent. With artists including Dizzee Rascal and Athlete dropping out over contractual obligations, music tents falling down and drinking water more scarce, if some fan reports are true, than the most sweltering parts of rural Africa, it would have seemed like the easy way out.
Yet on Monday, Danny Blanche and Matt Dice, the festival’s co-directors, who promised in the build-up to the event that it would mix live music with “ferocious, fearsome and friendly animals”, spoke out. They did, after all, have a lot to answer to.
Not least the complaints from festivalgoers - many of whom had already aired their grievances while the festival was still taking place on rapidly constructed Facebook groups. “HOURS OF QUEUEING, CAMPSITE DREADFUL,” wrote one mother, on behalf of her “tired” daughter. Others complained about bands dropping out with no notice; that staff had little idea about arrangements; that the toilets were “grim” and that Ben Fogle was seen jiving with a monkey in the Dance tent. Ok, so the last complaint isn’t real (I don’t think).
In response to the tidal wave of critics and, I imagine, with a large intake of breath, Mr Blanche said on Monday: "Obviously, none of this was ideal or planned - and not the quality of experience that we had aimed to deliver - and for that we unreservedly apologise to all those affected by the situation.”
It was the perfect, polished apology. Yet, what I found so interesting reading their full statement was not so much the humbleness of the apologies but their openness in admitting as to what the real cause of the problem had been - “cash-flow”.
"Our biggest problem was one of miscalculation over cash-flow," Mr Blanche stated, possibly in the company of his bank manager, we may never know.
Under that admission, I believe, bubbles the biggest single problem to hit the British festival calendar in recent years: over-saturation. Festivals, no matter how big or small, are everywhere. If you’re counting, there are about 500 in the UK. A good thing you may argue. Well try telling that to the promoters who have pulled their events because of similar “cash-flow” miscalculations. Or the festivalgoers who have found themselves lost in fields of frustration, not love, this summer.
Aside from Zoo8, one of the biggest casualties on this summer’s festival calendar so far was Wild in the Country. The festival, which was also meant to happen last weekend, was cancelled late last week, not because headliner Bjork had dropped out over production concerns, but because it had become the latest victim of a “unique and well-documented set of market forces.” Another festival due to take place this summer, this time in Belfast, made a similar announcement last month. One of the organisers of Tennent’s Vital, which in the past has welcomed the Killers and Kings of Leon, said it had been cancelled because the festival had struggled to secure "top acts within a climate of apparent over-saturated scheduling of talent at this level.” In other words, there are too many competitors.
It seems ironic that in a summer that has seen the re-birth of Glastonbury, Britain’s most iconic festival, the season may well go down as one of the most unsuccessful in recent memory for those simply hoping to establish their name. Yet, who is to blame here? Should the organisers of new festivals check their diary before booking the nearest animal park? Or should the industry look at sharing out the pool of talent? You never know, it might be quite fun watching Oasis headline Longleat in 2009.
I’m confused. Am I the only person who thinks that Jay-Z headlining the Glastonbury Festival is a good idea? It has certainly felt that way following the intense media speculation that has surrounded the US rapper’s billing at the event, which, if you can fathom it, was confirmed all the way back in February.
When it was announced, the festival’s organiser Michael Eavis said that Jay-Z’s presence would help Glastonbury “break with tradition”. I subconsciously nodded with him as I read it. ‘Yes, I can see that happening,’ I thought to myself. Over the weeks that followed, however, it soon became clear that not many people endorsed his, or my now closet, opinion on the matter. Festivalgoers protested, ticket sales on previous years plummeted and, if your name was Noel Gallagher, you didn’t just assault Jay-Z, you declared that the idea of hip-hop at Glastonbury was just “wrong” full stop. “I'm sorry, but Jay-Z? No chance,” Gallagher moaned to the BBC, before saying that throwing “the odd curve ball” like Kylie Minogue was all right actually. Ok, Noel.
Suffice to say, I don’t agree with Gallagher. Not only are his comments misinformed (the percentage of traditional and non-traditional hip-hop acts at past Glastonbury’s has actually been quite high), they got me thinking as to just why people are actually offended. After all, has no one spared a thought as to whom Jay-Z could bring with him to Glastonbury?
Wife aside (the rapper recently married long-term girlfriend Beyonce) Jay-Z’s got a black book of collaborators that should actually make his appearance at Glastonbury the most anticipated in years. First of all, there’s the modern day Glastonbury messiah himself, Chris Martin. Not only has the Coldplay frontman had experience of fronting a band on the festival’s Pyramid Stage, but he also worked with Jay-Z on the rapper’s 2006 album ‘Kingdom Come’. Yes, his appearance on ‘Beach Chair’ might have been rather minimal and, if I’m honest, not particularly great, but theirs is a friendship that goes deep. Martin and his wife, Hollywood actress Gwyneth Paltrow, have been the first to defend the rapper’s booking, for example. When asked recently if Coldplay should be headlining instead of Jay-Z, Martin revoked any suggestion, saying “the best musician on the planet” was already at the top of the bill.
If further proof was needed about the possibility of Martin making an appearance at Worthy Farm then you should look no further than the fact that Coldplay have just suspiciously delayed the start of their US tour. Originally scheduled to begin on June 29th, ‘production problems’ have now pushed it back until mid-July.
Of course, if Jay-Z really wants to bring the guitar music that Noel Gallagher claims defines Glastonbury, then I’m sure he’ll put in a phone call to Linkin Park. In theory, with both acts due to play together in Milton Keynes the day after Jay-Z’s Glastonbury performance, this collaboration, originally united on the 2004 mash-up album ‘Collision Course’, really should happen.
But what if Jay-Z decides to stick to hip-hop? He has, after all, been quoted as saying that the traditional “barriers” created by music genres no longer apply to kids who listen to music in 2008. Well, if that’s the case, then the rapper’s set at Glastonbury could run into the Verve’s slot on Sunday. Kanye West, Mary J Blige, R Kelly, Rihanna, P Diddy…you name them, Jay-Z’s friends with all of them.
To me, all this doesn’t add up to the most controversial Glastonbury booking of all time, it adds up to potentially the most tantalising. And even if Jay-Z chooses to turn up with a DJ and a box of backing records, it will still be remembered as the year Glastonbury truly embodied its own philosophy: to stimulate culture in all its musical forms.
It took 10 minutes of tentative, borderline serious questions before Michelle Obama was treated like any other normal guest on America’s all female, all empowering daytime soapbox The View.
In what has to be the best episode of the programme since her husband put in an appearance earlier this year, Mrs Obama was questioned on everything from her sleek style to whether Mr Obama would install Hillary Clinton as his running mate.
Unsurprisingly she ducked that question, providing an answer that was long in word but void of substance. She’s a political charmer no doubt. And someone that certainly knows what she has to say to in order to actually say very little.
If singer Chris Martin is to believed, then, in 2006, the world came very close to losing Coldplay. In a recent interview to promote his band’s fourth album, Martin (who it should be said has a reputation for exasperated self-deprecation) claimed that the foundations of Coldplay were crumbling to such an extent as touring for their last album, ‘X&Y’, drew to an end that they had stopped talking to each other altogether. Too many “swanky dinners” and endless award ceremonies had, according to the singer, left Coldplay in a state of disrepair, and left Martin wanting to “erase the past.”
Upon reflection, Martin’s recent comments seem to carry some weight. When Coldplay picked up Best Album and Single honors at the 2006 Brit Awards, the singer famously told the crowd that the band wouldn’t be seen again for “many, many years”. Despite selling 10 million copies of ‘X&Y’, Coldplay were apparently “fed up”. As a stunned television global audience tuned in, Coldplay’s record label EMI quickly, and understandably, revoked Martin’s words – highlighting that the band owed them two more records.
After all that negativity, and subliminal claims of a hiatus, it comes as a surprise that one of those records has arrived a little over two years later. Even more of a surprise though, is the fact that on the elaborately titled, ‘Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends’, Coldplay sound so coherent and united. This is not the sound of four men “fed up” with their careers; it’s the sound of four men clambering to reclaim them.
But how have they achieved this? Well, whereas Martin has paid tribute to the bands re-alliance with former manager and friend Phil Harvey, who ducked out of proceedings for the stadium targeting ‘X&Y’, the more astute are more likely to spotlight the influence of producers Brian Eno and Markus Dravs. Both bring their oblique, yet uplifting renaissances of sound to ‘Viva La Vida…’. Eno, for example, provides it on the quite haunting ‘42’, which develops from a sparse piano introduction into a sonic burst of strings and tech-guitar, while Dravs frequently gives Coldplay what he once gave Arcade Fire: unnerving confidence (‘Viva La Vida’).The fact that ‘Viva La Vida…’ opens with an instrumental (‘Life In Technicolor’) probably says a lot about Coldplay’s intentions with this album.
Whereas Martin was once the predominant force driving the band’s music – one thinks of his piano instrumentals in ‘Clocks’ and ‘Shiver’, or even his acoustic guitar in ‘Yellow’ – the rest of Coldplay, particularly guitarist Johnny Buckland, have all come to the fore this time around. Buckland’s guitar chortles menacingly in ‘Cemeteries of London’, which sees Martin cast an eye over a dark capital city, and disports wildly on first single ‘Violet Hill’. There’s even a nod to the Hispanic surroundings that much of the album was crafted in on the deeply sung ‘Yes’, before the faint calling of a Scottish piper crops up later on ‘Strawberry Swing’.
If there’s one area where Coldplay fail to show much progression on ‘Viva La Vida…’, it’s in Martin’s songwriting. Yes he’s broadened his lyrical landscape to challenge everything from religion to the meaning of life and death, but it often comes across as one step too far. “You might be a big fish in a little pond,” he sings on ‘Lost’, before adding: “It doesn’t mean you’ve won, because along may come a bigger one.” Although the symbolism is there, Martin still lacks the ability to link his intentions together with any real sense.
But, that said, ‘Viva La Vida…’ on the whole is a fantastically unexpected and spontaneous comeback from a band that never really went away. Martin has said that the intention with the record was to get better, not bigger; and, for once, it’s hard not to take him seriously.
Released – 12/06/2008 4 Stars
This review was originally published on Tuesday June 10th here.
Clutching a comforting cup of tea, Anthony Ellis is recalling the first time he met Agyness Deyn. It was, he says enthusiastically, “four or five years ago” in a kitchen in the North of England where he was touring with his band the Five O’Clock Heroes. “She had longer hair,” he remembers, leaning over to signal just how long with his hand, “and she was very sweet even then.” As he continues to describe the encounter, which came some time before Deyn was proclaimed by fashion critics as the next Kate Moss, Deyn chats away obliviously to the man beside her. That man is Sam Embery, the band’s drummer - someone with whom she shares a sibling like bond.
As they giggle at a private joke, Ellis glances at them like a proud father. “You crazy kids,” he says, as if right on cue, before returning to his story. “I remember it very well and then when she came to New York, Sam was actually there at the time and those two would hang around a lot.” Seemingly, invigorated at the mention of her comrade, Deyn switches conversations. “We used to run around New York together,” she enthuses, in her sweet Mancunian accent, “we’d be like the kids and he’d be like go play, go play.”
All three are gathered together on an uncomfortable sofa in East London to talk about Deyn’s collaboration on Five O’Clock Heroes new single ‘Who’, a task that is made harder by the fact that all are nursing hangovers of differing intensities. It has, after all, been a heady few days. “It’s been so much fun though,” says Deyn, who has taken a break from her modelling career to help the band promote the single. “It’s felt like a month, this week, because we’ve been so busy.”
‘Who’ is the first song to be taken from the bands new album ‘Speak Your Language’, which, by Ellis’s own admission, is a far fuller record than their debut ‘Bend To The Breaks’, which was released in 2006. The guitars rhythms are more complex, the drum patterns steely and infectious, and the experimentation with brass has given Five O’Clock Heroes a far greater depth. Of course, it’s Deyn’s collaboration that for the moment has garnered all the attention, however. Which is something that, until this week, hadn’t even crossed Deyn’s mind.
“No because we were always like…I’ve been learning guitar for like a few years already and Anthony’s always been helping me with my music anyway, you know, so that was never really an issue,” she says. “But, I think, in the last week it’s been like shit - this is a bit crazy. Especially how fast it’s happened - from us messing around in the studio, having a laugh doing it and then how fast it’s gone from then to now, and now we’re here playing gigs and it’s kind of like a bit unbelievable, it’s really crazy.”
‘Who’ was never consciously written with Deyn in mind. It was originally the produce of a writing session that Ellis had with a French friend and it was only after Deyn heard the original version at his apartment in New York that Ellis decided to translate it. Already it’s proved to be a wise move. On the night before we meet, the band, and Deyn, pre-recorded a performance on Channel 4’s Sunday Night Project. A slot they could have only dreamed of in the past.
“We, the band, we’ve never had anything like that and that’s amazing,” admits Ellis, sincerely. “It was really special, I thought it was a really special moment actually.” Deyn and Embery start chuckling at Ellis’s sensitivity, in the way that children find it hard to grasp that parents can be sentimental. “It was emotional for my manager, she’s been with us for a long time,” he adds. “The thing is, because we’ve come from such an organic sort of start, it makes it so much more…” Ellis is clearly struggling for words now. “Everybody was there backstage, it was really nice. It was a really fun night actually.”
Anthony Ellis was born in England but moved to New York when he was nineteen. His arrival in 2000 came on the eve of the city’s most recent musical renaissance, which saw the emergence of bands like The Strokes, The White Stripes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Having moved to the city with the intention of developing a music career, Ellis suddenly found himself right in the middle of it. He was there, for example, when The Strokes played their infamous residency at the Mercury Lounge, and like everyone else present, he knew we was witnessing a significant cultural and musical moment. “They were all good looking,” he recalls, to Deyn’s obvious approval. “And they were setting up their own equipment and I was like, all I saw was their drums and I thought, ‘that’s a cool logo’, you know, and then they started. They had some serious energy in those days, they had energy, real energy, and were hugely influential on every New York band – it goes without saying.”
Inspired by what as happening around him, Ellis established Five O’Clock Heroes with similarly like-minded and enlightened people who also found themselves in New York at the right time. Although they eventually recorded a debut album, albeit with no money and therefore no studio time, the band have as yet failed to capture the same success as the bands that were so influential in their formation. Spend time with Ellis, who has a hint of the Julian Casablancas about him in the flesh, however, and it’s clear he has no intention on giving up.
Deyn shares his belief as well, that’s why the model isn’t concerned by claims that the band are using her profile to further their own career. “It brings a different dynamic to it as well, do you know what I mean?” she says, rhetorically. “And it is what it is, people can say stuff, whatever, but if you listened to all that stuff then you’d never do anything in life. You shouldn’t think maybe I shouldn’t do that because you know somebody is gonna be like, ‘that’s no good’.”
Having appeared on the cover of both the British and American editions of Vogue and been heralded as the face of her generation all before her twenty-sixth birthday, Deyn knows this better than most. She is very clever, for example, on the occasions that I enquire about her modelling career. With an innocent flicker of her eyelids and ruffle of her peroxide hair, she’ll answer the question for as long as she needs to, which is usually a sentence on fashion followed by three about music. But then Deyn loves music. Having been groomed by her brother in the history of Manchester bands – The Stones Roses, Oasis, Happy Mondays - she’s already got her own band in the pipeline and is often at Ellis’s apartment playing him her new material. “In a strange way she’s going through a phase of writing, like I was a long time ago and she’s always really excited to hear it back, to play it to people,” Ellis says, sounding slightly parental again. “Some of it’s weird and some of its great. No matter what it is it’s interesting because she is just a generally creative person.”
As talk turns to the rest of the year and the series of shows that Deyn will play with the band over the summer, I ask her how her initiation week in the world of music has compared to her modelling career. “Yeah, I kind of like it better,” she replies, sounding a little shy about her admission. Why? “I suppose it’s more manly,” she says, laughing loudly. It’s clear that, despite claiming to be "no Whitney Houston”, Deyn doesn’t want this to end when she boards the plane back to New York. “She definitely wants to go on the road,” Ellis says. “She can handle it, she’s proper hardcore. It’s just a question of time because she’s really, really busy.” Deyn nervously pulls at her dress. “But I’m prepared to be unbusy.”
The original article, published on Monday 16th June 2008, can be found here.
One imagines that Barack Obama probably choked on his Wheaties when he unwrapped his copy of the New Yorker this week. On the cover of the magazine, the democratic presidential hopeful is depicted giving his wife, Michelle, a fist bump in the Oval Office while dressed in traditional Muslim garb. As if it couldn’t get any worse for the couple, Mrs Obama is dressed as a terrorist and an American flag can be seen burning in the fireplace beneath a painting of Osama Bin Laden.
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