I’ve been reading up on the history of The Temptations, and I hadn’t realised what a dramatic, epic story it was. With so many changes to the line-up over the years, it almost reads like a soul soap opera. But looking back on your career to date, what makes you the most proud?

Being able to survive. Once you know the history of The Tempts, with all the ins and outs of different guys coming in, and the deaths and the tragedies, here we are 47 years later, still doing it. Ordinarily, a group that has gone through as many changes as we have would have been through a long time ago.

A lot of that longevity must be down to you, as the sole surviving member of the original line-up. Were you always the band leader?

I’ve been the spokesman for the group from day one. As far as the records, that was Motown’s concern, because they were the record company. But as far as the members, and who was in the group, that was pretty much up to me.

Did you do the hiring and the firing?

Well, I hate to sound callous – but you know, somebody’s got to do it. I don’t necessarily want to fire anybody, but in most cases, something would happen that would just make it circumstantial. So we would have to let a guy go, for health reasons, or for many different reasons. I just wasn’t firing somebody because that was my role; it would have to be something very detrimental to the group for me to do so.

A lot of times, it’s a group effort. I would always some of the other guys what they thought. Our president, he’s got a cabinet, and we have to ask to see what their thoughts are. So it was pretty much a diplomatic kind of thing.

Looking at your contribution to the band, it’s interesting that as the leader of the band, you’ve never taken on the lead vocals. Instead, you’re known as “the tenor in the middle”. Why has that been so?

If it’s a song that I really feel good about, then I would do it, but most cases I was just happy keeping it together. We all got the same money, so it wasn’t that the ones that were doing the lead were getting more money than me. I guess we all have a role to play, and mine was to keep The Temptations going and to take care of business. So I’ve always been the man behind the scenes.

In many of your hits, you each take it in turns to sing single lines. Is there one particular line that you can point to, where we can all recognise you?

On I Can’t Get Next To You, I sing “I can make a change, just with a wave of my hand.”

I’m personally very fond of your output from the late Sixties and early Seventies when you worked with the late Norman Whitfield, who took over from Smokey Robinson as your chief musical mentor. How did that change come about?

Well, we started losing record sales. Berry Gordy was always having a competitive thing going with his songwriters and producers. He said that if Get Ready didn’t crack the Top Ten, then Norman Whitfield would have the next release. Get Ready did real well, but it didn’t go Top Ten pop-wise. So Ain’t Too Proud To Beg came out, and we had a great eight or nine year run with Norman.

People sometimes call it your “psychedelic soul” period, but it doesn’t sound psychedelic to me. “Psychedelic” sugggests fantasy and escape, but a lot of your songs of this period – Ball of Confusion, Law of the Land – were rooted in realism and social commentary.

I can understand why some people refer to it as psychedelic soul, because prior to Cloud Nine we were doing sweet ballads like Please Return Your Love, My Girl and Since I Lost My Baby, and those funky R&B tunes like Ain’t Too Proud To Beg and I Could Never Love Another. So when you change from those kinds of songs to something that’s got a whole other spin to it – and here comes the psychedelic era at that point – I can understand why they would relate to it as psychedelic soul.

When we came out with Cloud Nine, it didn’t jump off at first. For about a week or two after Motown released it, we were kind of concerned, because normally when our record came out it would run up the charts real fast. But it took a minute for Cloud Nine, and I guess our fans were thinking: wow, the Tempts have really changed up on us. But the next thing you know, it took off, it sold a million copies and we won our first Grammy.

It sounded so different. I remember the first time I heard Papa Was A Rolling Stone on the radio. At the age of ten, I’d never heard anything like it before. It felt groundbreaking.

We were the first act at Motown to venture off over into that kind of style of music, and we were the first Motown act to win a Grammy, so it paid off very handsomely all the way round.

That social commentary aspect is something that seems to have disappeared from a lot of modern popular music. Do you miss that at all?

Its just like anything else; there’s always a change. The Sixties has been noted as the most tumultuous decade in the last hundred years. All kinds of movements were involved. Dr King was making his move. You could sit right at home and see world leaders lose their lives on TV. There was women’s lib; there was civil unrest at school campuses. We were living in some crazy times, which would breed that kind of creation, as far as making music goes. So I guess it was just indicative of the times that we were living in.

Was there a lot of competition between the Motown acts, to try and get the best songs that everyone else wanted?

The way Berry had everything set up, at the beginning he would say: Hey, I think I’ve got a song for the Temptations. That could come from Norman Whitfield, or from Smokey Robinson, or possibly from Holland Dozier Holland. But once Smokey really started having consistency, he was the man. But Motown was so competitive from within. They would have a quality control meeting up in Berry’s office on a Friday. A lot of things were decided in those meetings, depending on whoever had recorded the best material during the course of that week.

Who are you still in touch with from the old Motown days?

Well, all of us are still good friends; we just don’t see each other. Because Motown is no longer the Motown that we knew, or that the world knew, everybody has moved on with their lives in different places. But when I see Smokey, it’s just like we never missed a step.

When you play to British audiences, how different are we to your American audiences?

England is almost like coming to our second home. We’ve been over there so often, and for so long, that the English people just love us unconditionally, even if we were never to get another hit record. They really love and appreciate the hits that we have. England just loves that old Motown music! We’re getting ready to celebrate our fiftieth anniversary, and the music is just as fresh and well received as if it was being made today.

Great soul music always stands the test of time. I think it matures like a good red wine.

I agree. And Motown music, Philadelphia International music, Stax music, and all the music from the Sixties and the Seventies is still wonderful. They’re not making records like that today. I listen to the music that’s being made today, because I’m in the business, but the music that we all made was much better.

You didn’t just turn on the machines. You put your heart and soul into it.

That’s right!

Labels: eveningpost, interviews, popmusic

Riding a commercial and critical high in the wake of his classic Transformer album, Lou Reed alienated many newly acquired fans with its downbeat follow-up Berlin (1973). Said to be one of the most depressing records ever made, the album flopped in the States and was never performed live. In the UK, where we don’t let a healthy dollop of misery deter us, Berlin went Top Ten. To this day, it remains Reed’s second highest charting album.

In December 2006, Reed fulfilled his long-held ambition of performing a stage adaptation, complete with orchestra and children’s choir. This DVD was recorded at an early New York show, with Julian Schnabel directing the cinematography. Schnabel’s daughter Lola provides the atmospheric movie clips that weave in and out of the performance footage, illustrating the decline and fall of the story’s anti-heroine Caroline.

Reed's second and final Berlin tour came to Nottingham's Royal Concert Hall in June. For those who attended that memorable, magical show, this DVD provides a useful musical souvenir. As in Nottingham, the album’s original guitarist Steve Hunter leads the band. (If Berlin was meant to be a downer, then no-one seems to have told the irrepressible Steve.)

Those who recall the many extended guitar jams between Lou and Steve at the June show will be either disappointed or relieved by their near total absence from the DVD. Indeed, the whole show is a markedly more sombre affair, the dimly lit stage bathed in tones of muted, sickly green. The album’s second half is a particularly harrowing parade of misfortune, punctuated by crying children and gloomy choral wails.

Things don’t even pick up for the encore. Antony Hegarty (of the Johnsons) adds a mournful guest vocal to Candy Says, leaving even the habitually impassive Reed looking visibly moved.

****
Release date: Monday October 27th.

Labels: dvd, eveningpost, popmusic

WARNING: This is possibly the most boring interview I have ever done. Contributory factors included a rubbish phone connection to Dawn's tour bus in the States - we struggled to understand each other at times, and transcription was a nightmare - and Dawn's own hesitancy and nervousness. (Almost every answer began with an "Um" followed by a long pause, and tailed off at the end with an "I don't know...")

But hey, shame to waste it! Enjoy!

(Dawn's on the right.)

Where are you today? According to your schedule, you should be in North Carolina.

Yeah, we’re on the tour bus right now.

It says here that you’re playing two dates tomorrow: in Baltimore and Washington DC. Was that a misprint?

Tomorrow, in one day? Maybe, maybe not! I don’t know! (Laughs)

Do you just take each day as it comes, and not worry too much?

I do. I think you have to, on this schedule.

How long is it since you’ve managed to get back to your home town in Florida?

I was home maybe a week ago, for a few days. We get to go back every now and then.

The animated video for your current single Look At Me is really entertaining. How closely were you involved?

The script was written by this Texas guy, who based it on his favourite 1980s cartoons. The video is awesome; I love it. But I don’t really feel like it’s me. You’re sitting in front of a green screen, and then all of a sudden you see this made video, and you think: oh wow, look at that helmet that I’m wearing, and there’s the car I’m driving! It’s all kind of odd, because it wasn’t there when we were making the video.

You’ve been doing a lot of work in the UK and Europe this year, as that’s where your greatest amount of success has been so far. Are you now trying to break the States?

That’s what we’re doing right now. We’re trying to get more support, by doing television shows, and lots of interviews, and just getting summer out of the way, and meeting fans and stuff like that.

You had a lot of initial love from the music bloggers in the States, back in the early days. Does that kind of “blog love” translate into a wider popularity in the quote-unquote “real world”?

I think sometimes it can make or break a band. But I’m not sure whether that happens if the band’s already big.

You must be doing a phenomenal amount of travelling this year. Is it broadening the mind, or does it become routine like any regular business travel?

I still love travelling and seeing different places. Usually I don’t get to see much when I go to the towns, so maybe one day I’ll be able to actually go and take a look at some museums and stuff.

What have been your top travel destinations?

I loved Norway when I went up there. It was beautiful and green, with the water and different kinds of boats. I don’t know, I just really enjoyed it.

Any highlights from the festival season?

My favourite thing is meeting the bands that I really love. I got to see Yeasayer probably three or four times this year.

Which acts would you say were your fellow travellers? If someone was mentioning a whole bunch of bands in a list and your name was on there, who else would you like to see in that list?

What, like people who have been travelling with us?

I’m thinking kindred spirits. People who are doing a similar sort of thing, with a similar sort of vibe.

Magistrates [an electro band from Essex]. Cut Copy, who are definitely a dance groove, party down kind of band. CSS definitely; I love them.

You recorded your album with Bernard Butler in the UK. What was he like to work with?

For me, I guess he was like a father figure. It was one of our first times in the studio, and he made me feel at home. It was really comfortable. Reggie was already a huge fan, and I knew some of his songs, and I was like: wow, we get to work with this guy!

Are the band finding time to write new material? If so, how will it be different?

We haven’t really decided what direction we want to go in. We do have some new songs, that we’ll be playing on the UK tour.

In terms of the band dynamic, how democratic are you? Is there a leader?

We’re all pretty equal. We read things that come along, and we just sit and discuss it for a while. I wouldn’t say that one of us has more say than the others.

You’re known for playing basically happy music, but you’re playing it in increasingly troubled times. Is this a good time for escapism?

I think any time is good for listening to happy music – because maybe it clears it out, I don’t know. But the music does have some underlying sexual tension, and it’s kind of like comedy. Even though it sounds happy, it might not necessarily be happy music.

When I saw you playing Nottingham in June, you all looked like you were having a great time. But if you’re touring night after night, are there ever situations where you have to manufacture the joy?

Well, that’s the thing about playing live. Even if you’ve had a shitty day, you can get up there and just let it all out. That’s my favourite thing about being in a band. I don’t get tired of playing live, ever. That’s the truth of it.

That sounds like one of the best reasons for being in a band. Every shitty day becomes a good day by the end of it.

It’s true. Especially when you have good fans out there.

Photo taken at Lollapalooza in Chicago on August 3 2008 by incendiarymind and reproduced under a Creative Commons non-commercial attribution license.

Labels: eveningpost, interviews, popmusic

(Re-posted from Freaky Trigger's Popular)

“I don’t think it mean anything to you.”

This song’s four-week stay at Number One coincided with the first (and second, third, fourth, fifth…) occasions where my passions were - at least in the strictly physical sense - requited. He was fair, athletic, pretty-boy handsome, and frankly well out of my league in the normal scheme of things - but in the cloistered all-male confines of the English public school, one took one’s pleasures where one found them, and I took considerable pains to signal my availability.

Darkened hallways, knocks on doors, cigarettes, shadows on bedside walls, sly touches, white lies - these were the symbols of our encounters, which eventually and inevitably brought far more suffering than pleasure.

Running simultaneously with all of this nocturnal furtiveness, my daytime existence had never been happier. Once our A-levels were over, our school in Cambridge became transformed from prison to boarding camp. Seemingly endless days were spent lounging by the river, or drinking in The Anchor, The Mill, The Fountain and The Granta, where we pumped our pennies into the jukeboxes, soundtracking our first tastes of freedom and independence with selections from the best singles chart since… well, since the last time I was in the senior year, five summers earlier.

For all of these reasons, the singles charts of June and July 1979 remain my absolute favourites. Dance Away, Boogie Wonderland, Pop Muzik, Shine A Little Love, Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now, Boys Keep Swinging, Hot Stuff, Number One Song In Heaven, We Are Family, HAPPY Radio, Masquerade, Roxanne, Up The Junction, The Lone Ranger, Say When, I Want You To Want Me, I Fought The Law, Love Song, Accidents Will Happen, Light My Fire/137 Disco Heaven, Silly Games, Babylon Burning, Space Bass, C’mon Everybody, Good Times, Girls Talk, Born To Be Alive, Breakfast In America, Bad Girls, My Sharona, Chuck E’s In Love, Death Disco, Playground Twist, Can’t Stand Losing You, If I Had You, Voulez-Vous, Beat The Clock, The Diary of Horace Wimp, Kid, Morning Dance, Harmony In My Head, Reasons To Be Cheerful, After The Love Has Gone… hell, even the also-rans such as the Beach Boys’ “Lady Lynda” and (most especially) Voyager’s “Halfway Hotel”… I’d challenge anyone to find a better soundtrack to teenage life, love, laughter and longing.

And topping them all: only Tubeway Bloody Army, if you please! Having previously dismissed them as bunch of third-rate fag-end-of-punk chancers who had been lucky to get a Peel session, nothing could have prepared me for the template-setting WTF Future Shock of “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?”, whose length and lack of chorus didn’t stop it from being THE defining pop record of that early summer. Everyone I knew loved it, a good half of them owned it, and you couldn’t spend more than a few minutes walking our corridors without hearing it (or its excellent B-side “We Are So Fragile”) booming out of somebody’s study.

Of course, and like most of us, my interest in Gary Numan rapidly waned - and it took a full 29 years and a freelance assignment for me to re-assess both the man and AFE’s parent album Replicas. Numan turned out to be one of my favourite interviewees: frank, forthcoming, perceptive and grounded, the worst of his demons long since laid to rest, happy to see his influence finally acknowledged, and - on the eve of his fiftieth birthday and his thirtieth anniversary in the music business, profoundly grateful for his survival within that business.

By way of a thank-you to his fanbase, Numan broke his anti-nostalgia rule and toured the Replicas album this spring. I had never seen him live before, and was astonished by his performance. As for his rendition of AFE, “ambushed by unexpected emotion” scarcely begins to cover it, as the the symbolic significance of those lyrics coupled with the overall mood of alienated longing hit harder than they had done in decades.

“It meant everything to me.”

Your debut solo album Lemurian has been out since August. What sort of reaction have you been getting?

It's all been really flattering – which has been strange, because I always tend to think the worst about stuff like this. It has given me a lot more confidence to do another one, and not be too worried about what people think about it.

Were you worried it was a bit too leftfield to connect with people?

It was the only thing I was worried about. My mates all said: oh, it'll be all right, people will like it – but the only thing you'd have to worry about is that maybe it will go over peoples' heads.

When I first played the album, the first things that hit me were all those warped, wow-and-flutter samples. I think there's a bridge that has to be crossed there – but two or three plays in, they just become a natural part of the fabric of the music.

Yeah, totally. It's strange for me, because obviously when I'm making the tracks I hear them over and over again, so none of it really shocks me at all. So I can forget that for other people, on their first listen, it might be a bit strange – but hopefully you can get into it after a while.

How did the idea come about?

I've always been into Boards Of Canada, who were the first people that I heard using it. I took it from a different angle – like a warm, hazy sound like you get on an old tape that has been out in the sun too long. It's something I've been obsessed with since I was really young, from listening to tapes in my parents' car that were warped. I thought they sounded better like that.

It just makes things sound nicer, for some strange reason. It gives a more gritty feel to the music. It almost makes it more human. It gives it more personality, rather than just sounding really clean, and turning into ambient, which is something I really don't want it to be.

Did you have a particular concept for the album, even before you started recording the music?

I knew I wanted to make music that sounded kind of warped, but it wasn't until I'd made loads of tracks that it started taking shape, and getting this summery feel. I didn't really set out for it to be a summery sounding record. As I gradually got more into it, it took that on for itself. I just ran with it.

Comparing the reviews, the same words keep cropping up: shimmering, sun-drenched, hazy. What were the climate conditions like when you wrote the tracks?

Not quite as nice! I started it last summer. I made a couple of tracks in a short space of time, and the weather was really nice then. So I thought: right, if I keep making tracks like this, it will get me away from the fact that the weather's going to be really shitty and horrible. I kept making tracks that sounded like they were for the summer, because I hate the winter so much. So maybe there was a bit of escapism.

How about this summer? Did you go to anywhere sun-drenched and heat-hazed and lie by an ocean?

I've just been in Nottingham for the whole summer, in the rain basically. It's typical: I make a really summery record, and I hoped that once I got to the summer, it would all be perfect – but we've only had about a week of sun. Typical, really. But never mind.

At what age did you start making music?

Probably about twelve. Probably even earlier – but you really couldn't call it music, it was just messing around with a tape player and keyboard. Then I heard Boards of Canada on John Peel when I was twelve, and that was it – I just got into music from then. It was their appreciation for writing melodies, basically. The most important thing for me now is nice melodies, and they were the best I've heard.

You've got some club dates in Nottingham coming up. When DJ-ing, are you setting a mood or are you aiming to fill a floor?

I want to make people dance. I try to get music in there that relates to what I do – but it's totally different, because my stuff just doesn't work in a club.

So what sort of avenues do you go down?

What I usually want to hear in a club is dubstep, but I'll try to play as much as possible. I've been playing a lot of sleazy Eighties synth-funk, because that's the stuff I'm going to try and make next. Things like Michael Jackson, and even stuff like Luther Vandross. If you can mix that with hip hop and stuff, then people go with it, which is lucky. And I do play a bit of acid house: the real early stuff from the late Eighties.

You've got an EP scheduled to come out later in the year. How's that going to sound?

It's totally different. It still sounds like my stuff, but it's a lot faster and it's really influenced by Eighties synth-funk. I don't know if it's going to put people off who like the album, but I just don't want to repeat myself.

Listen to Lone on MySpace.

Labels: eveningpost, interviews, popmusic

They may have looked like mild-mannered indie kids – but when it came to unleashing an all-out barrage of distinctly unholy noise, this experimental four-piece from Toronto held nothing back.

Teaming a traditional rhythm section with a sprawling array of electronic devices, the band welded rock dynamics to dance-derived textures and effects. No pre-programmed beats were deployed, and there were no laptops on hand to provide easy shortcuts. Pieces of kit were rapidly unplugged and re-wired on the fly, according to need.

The psychedelic squiggles and swirls sometimes evoked the progressive space-rock of the early Seventies. At other times, the brutal rhythmic energy strayed closer to late Nineties hard trance – but equally, we were never bludgeoned by over-repetition. Tempos were constantly switched, keeping us alert and focussed.

The similarly mild-mannered crowd nodded and twitched their appreciation, but never truly cut loose. Considering the visceral power of the performance, their restraint was perplexing.

(Photo taken at Pukkelpop, Limburg on August 15th 2008 by Maarten_Timmermans)

Labels: eveningpost, gigs, popmusic

Just over two years ago, Brazilian dance-punk sextet CSS – then known as Cansei de Ser Sexy (“tired of being sexy”) – made their British live debut at Stealth. For their fourth Nottingham appearance, a packed Rescue Rooms was treated to an early, short (it was all over by 9:25) and pleasingly chaotic set.

Opening with selections from their second album Donkey – a more streamlined but less memorable collection than their eccentric, fun-packed debut – it took the band a while to connect with the room. Notably less dance-orientated, the first few numbers felt buried beneath a muddy, guitar-heavy squall which betrayed a lack of technical finesse.

As the set progressed, both band and crowd loosened up, the introduction of keyboards adding welcome funkiness and flair. Teaming her sea-green bodysuit with a shaggy cape of multi-coloured rope, her eyebrows dyed dayglo orange, lead singer Lovefoxx goofed merrily around the stage, lost in her own parallel universe.

The show ended on a rowdy, exhilarating high. A disco mirror ball was procured; helium balloons were inhaled; shiny armfuls of confetti were strewn. A gloriously messy (if barely recognisable) “Let’s Make Love And Listen To Death From Above” gave way to an exultant “Alala”, leaving us with the frustrating sense that CSS had only just warmed up.

Labels: eveningpost, gigs, popmusic