David Bowie I Was So Happy at Being a Dad Again People Back on Drugs
I due north 2010, LCD Soundsystem were in the procedure of booking a bout in support of their third anthology, This Is Happening. It was to end with a evidence at Manhattan's Madison Square Garden; testify of how the band'southward career had unexpectedly flourished. Five years on from their debut album, their fusion of trip the light fantastic music, electronic and post-punk, combined with acerbic lyrics, had turned them into 1 of the US's most acclaimed and influential bands. They had been garlanded with critical praise, and were recipients of multiple Grammy nominations and album-of-the-year awards. They were authors of All My Friends, a vocal that frontman James Murphy claims to have felt "embarrassed by, I thought it was likewise poppy, about cloying", but which Pitchfork later said was the 2nd-greatest song of the entire 00s.
Not an inconsiderable achievement, especially if you believe Murphy's line that he only began making music in his own right because his human relationship with the Rapture, the ring he was producing, had complanate, leaving him with zilch to exercise. He says he was and so mortified by the idea of getting on to a stage and singing that it took "a bottle of whisky to practice a show". "Singing's my nightmare," he says, blithely. "I was a singing guitar player as a kid and I found it really embarrassing, and then I stopped singing and became a drummer. I hateful, who does that? I don't want to be the singing guitar player who writes all the music – I want to play drums and get an engineer."
But, despite all the band's achievements, the gig's promoter didn't think that they could fill out Madison Square Garden, and suggested they get a big-proper name support ring in to boost ticket sales: "They were like: 'Well, we're concerned that it'southward a big room.' So I went, 'Fuck it, information technology'due south our terminal show. We're not selling out.' I've e'er thought there's a lot of ability in beingness flippant if you're willing to bear it through. It's similar, if two people have guns pointing at each other and the first person doesn't intendance if they live or die, the other one should put the gun down."
Some have interpreted this story as LCD Soundsystem announcing they were splitting up purely in order to sell tickets to a big show, but White potato says, brassy or not, the more he thought about it, the more than ending the band made sense. For i thing, he had been predicting their demise from the start: their debut single Losing My Edge, written when Spud was 32, was about feeling too old to be involved in music; even when the band took off, he kept telling interviewers he was going to quit before he was 40. He was also – literally – sick of touring. "I was probably sick seven months of every year, with bronchial infections, sinus infections, stuff I'd caught on a aeroplane … [I was a] germ manufacturing plant, depression on sleep, probably hungover, taking antibiotics that were like battlefield drugs … similar: 'I don't know if he's going to get gangrene and lose the lower half of his body, let's just give him this because we don't have an operating tabular array here,' drugs. I was merely like a fucking joke. My married woman said: 'You're just going to die, I don't even know why I married yous.'"
As a former punk from suburban New Jersey, who had sought advice from the notoriously anti-corporate producer and musician Steve Albini when setting upwards his first studio, White potato was uncomfortable with something about the way LCD Soundsystem's career was heading. "We were set up, especially in America, to make a similar record to our last i, and just exist way bigger. And that made me deeply distressing. Information technology merely kind of sickened me. It's playing a game, similar pro wrestling. You lot know who'southward going to win. And I felt equally if I would accept to fuck upward, make a record that's like – 'Fuck you, everybody' – which is so artificial when artists practice that, when they forcefully destroy themselves. And then it seemed like the nigh beautiful and honest thing to do was to just not do information technology."
And and so, LCD Soundsystem ended with what White potato describes every bit "a perfect swan-dive": the Madison Square Garden show spawned both a documentary, Close Up and Play the Hits, and a three-60 minutes, five-CD live album. Tater was free to indulge himself in a bewildering panoply of other interests. He acted in, and directed, films. He opened a wine bar and drove New York's transit authorization to distraction past endlessly petitioning them to change the audio made past the city's subway turnstiles to "a cute electronic symphony": "We've heard from him and have told him many times nosotros cannot exercise it," said a weary-sounding official in 2015. With Soulwax, he launched Despacio, a mobile DJ audio system that certainly offers testament to Irish potato's fabled obsession with sound quality, if not his financial acumen. The arrangement is so big that transporting it from venue to venue is "similar moving an army". The costs involved means information technology loses money every time they use information technology. "I also got gout," he adds, maxim he now handles the condition by not drinking spirits or beer and "not drinking any wine that'southward not natural".
There was simply one problem with all of this, gout however. Potato started writing music once more. Worse, it "sounded like LCD Soundsystem", which obviously presented a dilemma. "The options were: the music I'm making just won't be released, which seemed actually capricious, weird and forced; I'one thousand going to have a new pseudonym, a fake, also only absurd; or I'k going to brand a solo record, which ways I couldn't play with my friends who were in LCD if I was going to play alive." He laughs. "Which would make me feel like Sting, or something: 'I don't desire to play with Stewart and Andy any more, then I've got to play jazz.' It all felt so shit."
He sought the counsel of the late David Bowie (Murphy was supposed to be working on Bowie'south final album, Blackstar, of which more than later). Bowie told him if the idea of reuniting the band made him uncomfortable, so he should do it because beingness uncomfortable would make him work hard. "I didn't imagine David Bowie always felt uncomfortable," he shrugs. "Because, of class, I'yard thinking that David Bowie's feel of being David Bowie is the same as I would imagine myself having, which would be: 'Fuck everybody else, I'm David fucking Bowie.' Simply that wasn't his experience at all. He was David Jones, and he'd done nothing but make himself uncomfortable for his entire career."
Bowie's advice seemed to settle it, which explains why Murphy is currently tucking into a plate of upmarket bacon and eggs outside an upmarket due east London restaurant and talking about LCD Soundsystem's 4th studio anthology, American Dream, of which he is justifiably proud. "I knew nosotros were going to have to exist significantly better than we always were, for anyone to say we were fifty-fifty half equally expert as nosotros used to exist," he says. "The just reward nosotros had is that at that place are no photos of us all skinny and unstoppable and handsome – we were ever middle-anile."
Murphy is affable and endearingly geeky visitor. By his own admission, there are sure topics, including recording equipment and organic wine, that it'southward all-time not to bring up in interviews because once he starts talking about them, he finds it difficult to stop. But it's difficult to avoid the feeling that an intriguing mass of contradictions bubble just below the surface. He says he's no longer conflicted well-nigh LCD's return – "my wife thinks it's OK, the other ring members think it's OK, Bowie thought it was OK, so fuck everybody!" – but he is clearly bothered past the negative reactions of some fans. "I underestimated how upset people who really liked the ring would be," he nods. "I was someone who grew up obsessed with bands, how they were and how they treated 1 another, and how they treated fans. You know, it mattered to me when Lol Tolhurst left the Cure. I was heartbroken. They're the people I've always aimed the band at, and they're the ones who were hurt, some of them. They were just showing that LCD Soundsystem really mattered to them, that they actually identified with it. So I was distressing. I felt sad about that."
He says he is no longer beset by the kind of fears near irrelevance that fuelled Losing My Edge – "I kept saying, 'I'll do information technology until I experience like it'southward embarrassing to do,' simply it'due south not embarrassing to do. I play festivals. Nosotros are not an embarrassment" – but yous can't aid noticing that the subject of age keeps cropping up in American Dream'southward lyrics: "This is what'south happening and it's freaking yous out," he barks at one point, "I've heard it – it sounds like the 90s."
"Well, it's non going to become less of a theme considering I'm not going to miraculously somehow get younger, and the world is not going to fetishise youth less … but I don't experience former considering I'm not trying to make grime, I'grand not making trap music. There are scenes that are interesting, but they're so removed from me culturally that I don't feel, 'Uh-oh.'"
He says he loved Lizzy Goodman's oral history of the 00s New York music scene, Run into Me in the Bathroom, kissing his fingers similar a chef tasting a particularly sumptuous meal when its name is mentioned – which comes as something of a surprise. The book features a lovely clarification of Murphy'south MDMA-fuelled Damascene conversion from uptight indie rocker to dance-music fan in a Manhattan society. ("I watched his life completely change in that moment," says DJ and producer David Holmes, "and it was cute.") But elsewhere it doesn't offer the nearly flattering portrayal of him. At one juncture, a sometime associate describes him flatly as "a complete cunt": if no one else goes that far, a lot of interviewees seem keen to suggest that behind Murphy's exterior (it seems to exist a legal requirement for every journalist who meets him to describe him as cuddly or resembling a teddy acquit) lurks a hard, calculating control freak. Well, he shrugs, they're probably correct. "I accept a very toxic combination of beingness completely adamant, inflexible, decision-making and being totally shy, guilty at hurting anyone's feelings, hypersensitive to other people's needs, and information technology's simply paralysing."
That was the trouble with working on Blackstar, he says. He originally contacted Bowie, whom he had met while working with Arcade Fire, with the idea of making an album "with just the two of u.s. in a room, together", but by then Bowie's sessions with Tony Visconti and Donny McCaslin's jazz combo were under way. He went along, but couldn't work out what to do. "I experience like I'd perchance been brought in to play some kind of Brian Eno role and that is so far from what I am. Eno is, I think, open, manipulative and confident. I'm shy and self-directed and controlling. I have to micromanage."
In the end, after playing percussion on 1 track and suggesting a chord change on another, he quietly slipped away. "I thought, well, I only had a moment where there'southward this Bowie song and I suggested the chord change. I can go dwelling happy now. It wasn't selfless of me to back out. I'yard incapable of working in that situation. I'chiliad not being inflexible, I'm non being stubborn, information technology's simply not in that location. I can't produce. I think I'm done producing. I can't do it."
In fact, he says, he is coming to the conclusion that the way he works only works with the other members of LCD, which may well be some other reason why they've reconvened. "It's an incredible gift my band gives me by going into rehearsals and assuasive me to be a complete … like, 'Hey, infinitely better guitar player than me, tin you hand me the guitar and tin I evidence yous what I mean?'" He shrugs. "Even in the band I was in when I was a kid, I'd be telling everyone what to do. I'd exist leaning over the drums, telling them to melody their guitars, micromanaging. I've tried being in autonomous bands. I've tried. This is the simply way I can work."
American Dream is out now on DFA/Columbia Records
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/aug/31/lcd-soundsystems-james-murphy-i-was-a-joke-my-wife-said-i-was-going-to-die
0 Response to "David Bowie I Was So Happy at Being a Dad Again People Back on Drugs"
Post a Comment