The Gossip are the three-piece punk rock electro band from Olympia, Washington’s underground scene who broke through in the UK in spectacular style in 2006 with the single and album Standing In The Way Of Control. Lead by the unlikely rock star, lesbian, feminist, fashion icon and ‘cool’ person Beth Ditto, the trio have just released their third album, Music For Men. The title comes from a night when Beth was at a gig watching a friend’s band, which had a female member, and observed the male audience members’ reaction to it. The Gossip’s drummer Hannah Blilie recalls ‘and those words popped up in her mind. Music for men. This is music for men, and it just kinda stuck. It’s tongue in cheek, it’s not serious. It is their first studio effort for a major label since leaving indie legends Kill Rock Stars for Sony in 2008. And it’s every bit as good as their last one.

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For a person with the musical history of ex-The Clash and Big Audio Dynamite frontman, Mick Jones, he is a very unassuming man. I meet him on a humid afternoon in West London as he and a team of helpers are madly trying to finish putting together the Mick Jones Rock n Roll Public Library — an exhibition of some 10,000 pieces of musical and pop culture memorabilia that Jones has been collecting since childhood. While I wait for my time to speak with the man, as he poses for a photo shoot with a London paper and finishes putting pieces of jewellery into a glass case in a room titled American Artefacts, his press officer relays to him: ‘Southampton University want to offer you an honorary doctorate.’ Jones’ response is: ‘Why would I want to do that? I haven’t done anything.’ But that’s far from the truth.

Mick Jones is the guitarist and vocalist from The Clash – the group widely described as ‘the only band that matters’, whose politicised lyrics and musical experimentation continues to influence musicians to this day.

In the 80s he formed Big Audio Dynamite to critical and social acclaim, and currently performs in Carbon/Silicon with Generation X’s Tony James. He’s also a renowned producer, having helmed The Libertines’ breakthrough album ‘Up The Bracket’ and Hard Fi’s ‘Stars Of CCTV’.

It is less than an hour until the media and other invited guests will arrive for the exhibition opening and Jones is just beginning to place the individual contents of a box of old cameras into an upright glass case.

‘We’re not ready, as you can see,’ he says, but is more than happy to talk as he works.

‘The basic idea of all this was that I had all this stuff and I thought ‘it doesn’t do me any good if it doesn’t do anyone else any good’.

‘I’m trying to put something back; give people something that they can enjoy. I get a lot of enjoyment out of my stuff. It jogs my memory. And when people see it, they have their own personal memory, their own trip; it makes them think about things in their life.’

There certainly are a lot of touchstones of cultural value that visitors will relate to around us – from a signed Beatles poster, to gold records, tour passes, posters, records, clothing, photos and too much more to begin to list.

And that’s not to mention the monetary value. In any auction room or even on eBay these items would be worth a fortune, but Jones is unconcerned about such things.

Nor is he worried about any damage that may occur from the extraordinary opportunity he is offering attendees to handle and even copy items with a giant scanner.

‘It’s only stuff,’ he says.

‘I wouldn’t be worried about it. It’s only here to enjoy while it’s here.

‘That’s just the kind of person I am, you know. When we first started (setting up) someone asked if I wanted to make lists (of all the items), or just wing it. And of course we’re winging it.’

But despite the items’ intrinsic value – and sometimes intensely personal nature, like the hand-written note from Joe Strummer, probably once slipped under a hotel room door, admitting defeat and asking Jones for a reconciliation – to him it just ‘is what it is’ and he remains oblivious to, and untouched by, its ‘worth’.

All Mick Jones is concerned about is ‘doing something with it’.

‘People don’t really have ‘stuff’ in the same way as they used to’ he explains, ‘They put all their music on MP3 and they don’t have the space to put ‘stuff’. Or they put it in storage and then go and visit it on the weekends, instead of visiting their parents.

‘It’s part of the dissolution of society, in some way. If we can, I want to redress that,’ he says.

‘Around the turn of the century I started to want to share (what I had) in some way. I felt compelled to do something. I’ve always been a person who likes to try and do things, and I believe the only way to do something is to actually do it. Believing in that is how I ended up doing this.’

But more than a social remedy, and probably most interestingly to his many fans, Mick Jones’ Rock n Roll Public Library is his new musical project.

‘This is my music at the moment. It’s a big musical arrangement, it seriously is.

‘It’s an extension of the music, but in a visual sense. It’s like when you close your eyes and listen to music and pictures come into your mind’s eye. That’s what this is,’ he says.

‘It’s very personal. The whole thing inspires me. I wonder sometimes what I’m doing. It’s almost got a life of its own. It makes me all dewey eyed.

‘However, I gotta say that I don’t spend a lot of time getting all dewey eyed and mushy about the ‘old days’.

‘These are the good old days now.’

And while you won’t get a chance to see The Clash, in any incarnation, playing again – ‘(The Clash and the songs) were the best with the guys who knew it best, the guys who did it the first time around’ – he is giving people the chance to play with, or at the least be ‘produced’ by, a member of The Clash during this exhibition.

Mick Jones explains: ‘There are two other rooms here. A live room provided by Strummerville (the musical charity set up in honour of The Clash’s front man Joe Strummer) and the other room is a replica of my studio in Acton.

‘We’re getting people to come in and knock out a few tunes. There are people out there queuing now. And other people will be coming down by prior arrangement.

‘Something will come out of it. We’re inviting people to create something. And then we’ll make a creation out of those creations.’

But don’t any preconceptions of what might come out of it. Jones isn’t just into rock and roll, or political messages.

‘There’s still a lot to be said, and I still like the greats, but I am interested in other stuff as well. I like that Rihanna girl and her song ‘Umbrella’, ella, ella, ella. And that song ‘Crazy’ by Gnarls Barkley. I like new shit, I like what’s going on now.

‘I love The Streets. He’s a poet,’ adding, ‘Of course I still listen to Dylan and Bruce.’

And his advice to the musicians out there now – ‘Relax and don’t worry about it. It doesn’t matter if they don’t like it.’

And that’s Mick Jones for you, really – the epitome of relaxed.

Rock’n'Roll Public Library, 18 July – 25 August, 2 Acklam Road, Portobello Green, W10 5XL. 11-7 Wednesday-Sunday. Admission is free

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Echo and the Bunnymen were spawned in the creative and fertile hub of Liverpool’s late-70s punk scene, borne from oft-discussed ambitions eventually called out. The three original members, who ‘didn’t really know what they were doing’, chose to perform — sink or swim — in support of Teardrop Explodes, and became cult icons; post-punk pioneers.

Guitarist Will Sergeant recalls the time, 1978: ‘It was at Eric’s, the Liverpool punk club at the time. Everyone played there – The Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Ramones – pretty much everybody. It was just where you went. I lived eight miles away and sometimes I’d walk home because you just had to be there.

‘I’ve liked music since I was about 11-years-old. One of the first bands I was into was Roxy Music. That was one of my total inspirations. Eno at the back with a tape player and a joy stick. He didn’t have a keyboard, he was just messing around with a tape player and I thought: I can do that.

I’ve never really been bothered to learn how to play anything. I just seemed too hard.

‘With the whole punk thing, anybody could start a band and anybody did. There were loads of bands that came out of Eric’s – Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Pete Wiley, Julian Cope – it was a source of culture’, he says.

‘Every week we’d talk about the idea of starting a band, and it just sort of… Teardrop Explodes were going to do a gig and they asked us to support them, but we didn’t really know what we were doing. We just knew E and A (on guitar), and had a drum machine ticking away in the background. Les said he’d play bass. We didn’t even know what bass was’.

And that, as they say, is history – Echo and the Bunnymen was born – Ian McCulloch on vocals and guitar, Sergeant on guitar and Les Pattinson on bass.

And they swam.

‘(At the Teardrop gig) we’ve gotten up on stage; we’d never heard Mac sing… We started the drum machine, I was playing one string on the guitar and I was crapping myself. He started to sing and, from god knows where, he was amazing. He’d made up all these lyrics… It was 12-minutes long, which for punk, was pretty prog’, Sergeant says.

‘When we came off stage he came running up and we were like: ‘that’s amazing’’.

And they weren’t the only ones. The band impressed a few other people that, and the subsequent nights, and were invited to record a song.

‘We were still thinking it was all a bit of a joke’, Sergeant says of this time.

‘We did a song for a label, and it was ‘single of the week’ and everything. It was less than a year from our first gig to ‘single of the week’. It must have only been six months at the most’.

It was vindication for the band that had rapidly begun to believe their own hype.

‘We just thought we were the best band in the world and that we were the only original thing coming through’, Sergeant remembers.

‘It was punk passion. We just wanted to be cool. That’s what it was all about’.

But with that passion and ambition and initial success, came resentment from their own, as well; a trait Liverpool was well known for.

‘Everybody used to go and watch everybody else, but it was generally to slag them off’, Sergeant says.

‘That was kind of normal. Liverpool had a very bitchy vibe then. There were certain bands that we quite liked… I’m trying to think of one… (laughs). We didn’t like The Smiths, we hated them. We thought we were the best and nobody else was worth worrying about.

‘It was an exciting time; but I wasn’t excited’, he says.

‘I was a little miserable turd. I was like: everything’s rotten. I wasn’t enjoying it at all.

‘That’s one of my biggest regrets… Everything seemed fake (at the time). But it’s only now that I can, kind of, accept it. I actually go to America on my holidays now’.

Echo and the Bunnymen had initially signed to Sire records (‘We signed to Sire. We didn’t know anything about labels. We ignored the industry stuff. We thought they were all idiots’.) before moving to Warners ‘because Sire spent all their money on someone else…’

It was on Warners that the band recorded their debut 1980 album ‘Crocodiles’, which became a UK Top 20 hit.

‘We couldn’t really play’, Sergeant recalls, ‘but it sounded alright in the end. I can just about play it now (laughs)’.

The band’s cult status was followed by mainstream success in the mid-1980s, as they scored a UK Top 10 hit with ‘The Cutter’.

‘‘The Cutter’ was something we’d had floating around for a while’, Sergeant recalls.

‘It was like a drone-y thing at the start…

‘We went to London to record it as a single and we got news that our Liverpool flat had been broken into, so I went back home and Brody did my guitar parts. I wasn’t even on it’.

But within 10 years of the band’s creation date, things were on the outs, with funding singer and guitarist Ian McCulloch leaving the band.

‘I’m the only one that’s never left’, Sergeant says.

‘We sort of carried on (after McCulloch left); it was a dig at Mac.

‘We’d gone ten years and he decided to leave. We weren’t going to stop; we’d done a lot of work.

‘But that was obviously never going to work and we got slagged off. It might have been different if we’d changed the name… We developed into a bit of an electronic thing, and I was just floundering around, not doing anything.

‘Some friends said we should get back with Mac so I phoned him one night.

‘We pretty much hated each other at that stage. (Being in a band) is like working in a sausage factory: you don’t have to like the person you stand next to at work.

‘(Now) we’ve got a strong working vibe going on. We’ve all grown up a bit’.

And the new and reformed line-up – comprised of Sergeant, McCulloch, plus Gordy Goudie on guitar, Stephen Brannan on bass, Paul Fleming on keyboards and Nick Kilroe on drums – is due to grace us with another album in 2009.

‘Yes, I’ve been told it will come out this year’, Sergeant says of the album.

‘It’s nearly done, it just needs mixing.

‘It’s called The Fountain’.

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Punk rock goddess Brody Dalle is back from the depths of The Distillers’ demise with her new band, Spinnerette. Bringing ex-Distillers guitarist Tony Bevilacqua, and with a little help from husband Josh Homme’s Queens of the Stone Age producer, Alain Johannes, on ‘plastic surgery’ duties, Spinnerette is a slicker, more polished beast than anything Dalle has lead previously. The band’s debut EP, Ghetto Love, opens with a title track that immediately portrays her husband’s musical influence. It’s groovier, more mature, and with a less punk rock vocal sound than we’re used to from Dalle. These new songs could almost be considered alt-pop; but she reminds us of her roots with some gravelly screams regularly thrown in. And live, her stage presence is still pure punk: ‘We’re all about fun’, Bevilacqua says, ‘What would you say?’ To which Dalle replies: ‘We want to make really original music; I think that’s what it comes down to. Spinnerette in some ways really is gnarlier than The Distillers, you know?’

‘I think it’s because of the dynamics. Distillers didn’t really have any dynamics, it was just a train wreck, you know, all the way through. Which is really exciting, too, but it’s difficult’.

‘Yeah’, Tony adds, ‘It was either really loud, or kinda loud. There were maybe a few kinda loud things, and everything else was really loud, and really fast’.

It is three years ago that The Distillers ended, and since then, Tony says, ‘We caught up on all the sleep we missed for two years being on tour’.

Brody breaks it down: ‘We broke up, I got pregnant, had a baby. My daughter’s three. We made a record; we lost a few people, and made some new friends.

‘And now we’re back on the scene, man’.

But she admits that the bitter end of The Distiller (she has said: ‘Things were really fucked up at the end. And the way [Distillers drummer] Andy [Granelli] left, I really felt like he stabbed me in the back, because he joined [another band] and never said anything. So that was painful’.) and the new family role she now occupies, did have her considering musical retirement; but only for a moment.

‘Yes, I did think about packing it in’, she says.

‘But music is kinda more like a compulsion, something I can’t really help doing. So I do it. It’s how we make a living. It’s what I’ve been doing since I was 13 years old. I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I didn’t do it.

‘I don’t have any other job… this is it, you know. I don’t know how to fly a plane, or I don’t have any desire to be a nurse’…

‘I do’, Tony interjects.

Brody: ‘You want to be a male nurse?’

Tony: ‘No, a female nurse’.

‘That might be rather difficult’, Brody laughs.

Back to the subject at hand, she continues: ‘(Motherhood) changed everything for me.

‘As far as the type of music I want to write, or my songs, it doesn’t really affect those kinds of things. Well, maybe the subject matter…

‘But when you have a child it makes you realise what’s important in the world. I.E: the giving of love, that’s the biggest thing. And your family and your friends are the most important. And relationships, and trying to untangle the past and figure it all out so you can go into the future, you know’.

Spinnerette is comprised of Brody on vocals and guitar and Tony also on guitar, with, variously, in the studio and on tour, Jack Irons, Nicole Fiorentino, Bryan Tulao and Dave Hidalgo Jr, and Alain Johannes.

‘I write the songs, I bring them in’, Brody explains.

‘Then Al (Alain Johannes) gives them implants and a face lift, in the most positive way. And maybe some butt implants too’, she teases.

‘And Tony does some jangles and some sprinkles, and writes some great leading things, and rad stuff, and wollah’.

At the end of February Spinnerette played their first official live shows – bar a few home town warm-ups – in the UK. But was Brody worried that her punky Distillers fans wouldn’t like the pop-ier new band?

‘I figure that if they didn’t want to be there, they wouldn’t’, she says.

‘They’ve heard the EP, I think they understand kinda the direction we’re going in… And you’ve got to give people the benefit of the doubt.

‘People like all sorts of music, whether they have a mohawk or not. I know I did, and I do. Just because I don’t have a mohawk anymore doesn’t mean I don’t listen to, you know, any sort of punk rock’.

Tony says: ‘It seems like people have been pretty open-minded about it. The response that I’ve seen or read on the internet or whatever – everyone seems to be pretty positive and into it. So that is cool’.

‘It’s really exciting’, Brody says.

‘But it’s really exhausting (playing live) when you haven’t done it for so long. It takes a lot out of you’.

‘You have to get into shape, tour shape’, Tony says.

Brody: ‘Tour shape takes about a week’.

Tony: ‘And we’re only here (in the UK) for five days so we’re still… trying to’…

Brody: ‘We’re still really ragged’.

Tony: ‘But the shows were pretty rad. The crowds were great both nights. Good turn-outs.

‘I think the shows are pretty loose, but really fun, because the energy’s there. Sometimes you can’t wrangle it if your body’s out of it, if you haven’t played a week’s worth of shows. But (this time) it’s made for good shows’, he says.

‘I love playing shows (outside of America). America’s very clique-y, you know, people go to one type of show and like one type of band’, he says.

‘In America it’s such a scene, you know, you come out of a show and everyone’s like this [and folds his arms], and it’s like ‘why are you even here?’ ‘You seem so bored, why don’t you just go somewhere else?’

‘People (in the UK) are more energetic and look like they want to be here. The UK’s one of my most favourite places to play.

‘The sooner (we can come back) the better’, Tony says.

Until the next gigs, Brody says, the band will be doing ‘a lot of working. We’re going to make another record as soon as we can. It’s already ready to go.

‘We plan to keep writing, tour and make videos and do as much as we can’.

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Reface, a new interactive website, has invited street artists to upload their work to the site, a selection of which will be projected onto buildings over two weekends during the upcoming Perth International Arts Festival. The project will test whether people’s attitudes to street art are different if the images are known to be impermanent.

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Gogol Bordello’s frontman, Eugene Hutz, was born in Kiev to a Romany family which fled their home following the Chernobyl disaster when he was a teenager. He spent years travelling through Eastern European refugee camps before arriving in Vermont, in the north-east American region of New England, as a political refugee. He eventually established himself in New York as a musician and artist, and became the resident DJ at the Bulgarian Bar, Mehanata, which, thanks to Eugene’s ‘kidnapping’ of touring Romany and Gypsy bands and artists to perform there after their official seated concert hall shows, helped turn it into the ‘CBGBs of Gypsy Punk. Gogol Bordello formed after its original members met at a Russian wedding in Vermont, and soon snow-balled into a fully-fledged immigrant orchestra. Debut shows at famous New York venues, including the Mercury Lounge and the Bowery Ballroom, saw them banned for performances that were ‘too over the top’.

It was around the release of the band’s second album, Gypsy Punks – Underdog World Strike, in 2005, and ‘starting fires in all the backyards from Moscow to Vancouver with tours’, that the mainstream press really started to embrace Gogol Bordello and their hyperactive, charismatic, chaotic frontman. It was around this time also that Madonna started turning up to Gogol Bordello’s gigs.

While working on Gogol Bordello’s third album, Super Taranta, that Hutz woke one morning to find a message from Madonna on his answering machine: ‘I’m calling from London. Let’s get in touch, I’ve got some projects in mind’.

The projects were the main role in Madonna’s directorial debut, the short film, Filth and Wisdom, and that Live Earth performance. Hutz says he took on the projects not because of Madonna’s fame or furtune — ‘I don’t come from a family or social type that worships any kind of celebrity culture. So to me, it was irrelevant if she’s famous or not famous’ — but for her artistic determination and respect for his band: ‘The essence of is it the person’s creative power, whether they really have a love for what they do. That’s what I look for and it’s easy for me to connect with people who are determined and willing. It was unchartered territory, but there was a lot of independent spirit. It didn’t reek with a huge campaign and promotional thing. Stuff clicked and it felt right. I knew that I would have quite a liberty with Filth and Wisdom. And I did’.

Much of the music on the soundtrack is written and performed by Gogol Bordello.

‘Madonna was very supportive of our band. She’d known about us for some years. It was very flattering and inspiring. She really was great with our band’.

Next will come the release of Gogol Bordello’s fourth, as yet untitled, album.

‘The material is all basically written. I wrote it in Brazil, where I’ve been living for about a year. It was always a romantic place for me and it’s also a music heaven. But that doesn’t mean the new album is going to be samba. It’s a lot more textured. It doesn’t stink of a flavour that’s cheap. It’s more a spirit. And for that you have to spend time there and get to know it’.

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New Zealand-born, globe-trotting, communal-living, psych rockers, The Datsuns, have a new album, a relatively-new drummer and a new living set-up, so expect something fresh from the Anitpodean ex-pats. ‘The new record has a lot of different styles and influences’, says The Datsuns guitarist and vocalist, Christian. ‘When we were doing this record a great thing was that we could try different things that we hadn’t done in the past’, he says, thanks to the addition of new drummer, Ben, offering as an example: ‘The last track on the record is an eight minute psychedelic song; it was a pop song but we turned it psychedelic. We said to Ben ‘play psychedelic drums’ and he did. It was completely improvised. He enabled us to do anything we wanted to do’.

Ben actually joined the Datsuns fold around two years ago, when the band’s previous drummer quit just three days before a major tour.

‘Ben’s a very old friend of ours. Between him and our old drummer we’re about the only five guys in (their home) town who play musical instucments’, Christian laughs.

When the previous drummer quit, the band rang Ben to see if he could fill in.

‘He was really hung over, washing dishes and I don’t think he really got what we were talking about’, Christian explains.

‘He rang back about five minutes later and said ‘yes’. He learnt our whole catalogue in three days. He’s been with us for two years now. He’s a really great drummer who can play a lot of different styles from metal to jazz’.

So, with new creative blood coursing through the band’s veins, The Datsuns’ new album, Head Stunts was conceived. But not without a few headaches, first.

‘We all lived together, and always have done the whole time we’ve been together. It’s quite ridiculous, we’re like The Monkees’, Christian laughs.

‘It’s just been recently that we’ve moved apart. I’m the only one left in London now (after the band lived there together for three years). Dolf lives in Stokholm and our drummer is in New Zealand.

‘We’re trying to make it as difficult for ourselves as possible.

‘We recorded the album in Sweden. We were going to record in Germany and we all moved there and lived there for nine months. We rented a flat and rehearsed every day. We did lot of jamming in Germany. We were almost at one point going to do a really psychedelic record, we had all these really long space jams. We got pretty psychedelic in Germany.

‘It was very beautiful (in Germany) but we got very bored and didn’t like the way the record was turning out, so we went to Sweden.

‘Sweden’s really great. They’re really into rock and roll’, he says.

‘(Recording) was a lot of fun. The studio we used was full of old equipment. You couldn’t step anywhere without stepping on stuff.

‘Half of it didn’t work, but that’s the fun bit, plugging in and seeing what you get.’

What they got, Christian explains, is: ‘an eclectic mix of rock and roll’.

‘That is what I like about rock and roll — you can do so many different thing and it’s still rock and roll.

‘This is really what we’re all about. It’s a very good representation of who we are. I’m excited about playing these songs. I hope people enjoy them.

‘We’re all fans of rock and roll and that’s the point of intersection’, Christian explains of the band members’ influences.

‘If everyone in the band had an iPod you’d see a lot of different stuff going on there, that’s what makes us interesting. We all like rock and roll but come at it from a different point of view. I’m into Zeppelin, Dolf’s into the Beatles. When we have a song everyone will see it in a slightly different way and it’s the intersection of different view points that makes it interesting.

‘It’s an interesting record if you’re a fan of rock and roll’.

Interesting also, is how the band came up with the album title, Head Stunts.

‘Naming the record is probably the hardest thing’, Christian says, ‘it seems like it’d be easy to pick a name, but it’s not.

‘One day when we were in Germany, Phil (lead guitarist) found this wall-sized piece of cardboard in the street and dragged it back to the flat and started writing on it. He was writing anagrams for stuff, writing song titles. He covered the whole piece of cardboard with all these names and poems.

‘One of the anagrams was Head Stunts (an anagram of The Datsuns)’.

[audio:http://www.fileden.com/files/2007/9/22/1451852/02%20MF%20From%20Hell.mp3]

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