Byline: Phoenix Jay

Portrait of a lady

“I would like to have been together with my family. I would like to have seen my sons growing up. But I don’t have doubts about the fact that I had to choose to stay with my people here.” – Aung San Suu Kyi

In April 1988, at the English home she shared with her Tibetan scholar husband Michael Aris and two young sons, Aung San Suu Kyi received an unexpected phone call from her native Burma. Khin Kyi, her mother and a former ambassador to India and Nepal, had fallen critically ill. By December 28, Khin Kyi was dead and a new military junta had seized power, slaughtering thousands of people in the process.

Faced with the extraordinary choice of continuing as an Oxford housewife or sacrificing her family life to serve her country, Suu Kyi had returned to Rangoon. There, amid unprecedented political upheaval, the daughter of independence hero General Aung San became the de facto figurehead for the pro-democracy movement. Her destiny to become a Nobel Peace Prize-winning dissident was sealed.

Twenty-three years later, on the eve of historic by elections, Marc Eberle – a German filmmaker based in Phnom Penh – secured unprecedented access to ‘The Lady’ as she took the dangerous step into everyday Burmese politics. The resulting BBC documentary, Aung San Suu Kyi – The Choice, captures how Suu Kyi chose to remain imprisoned in her Rangoon home rather than rejoin her family in Oxford for fear of being banned from ever returning to Burma. And for the first time, in her own words, she offers a glimpse into the “personal regrets” she has had to endure as a result. The Advisor met with co-director Eberle, who will be on hand for a Q&A at the film’s Meta House screening in January, to talk military dictatorships, the dark art of resistance and what it was really like meeting ‘Mother Suu’.

How did the idea for the film first come about?

I met Burmese comedian Zarganar here on his first ever trip abroad in December last year. He had some questions about film festivals because he was organising the first ever film festival in Burma, the Freedom Film Festival. I thought ‘This is incredible! I have to go over for that.’ But at the time it was still very tricky as a journalist to travel into Burma. Only the month before, Zarganar had been released after 11 years, on and off, of imprisonment. He said: ‘We’ll help you. Don’t worry.’ I had to get my camera in; I had to get a tripod, equipment, radio mics and all that. It was obvious I wasn’t a tourist, yet I was coming in on a tourist visa. They didn’t even look at my equipment. And Zarganar was escorted out of the airport by the secret police, the same security guys who formerly were spying on him. Now they’re carrying his bags. This is how the change happens. So I was filming this festival with one of Zarganar’s friends who happens to be the son of Aung San Suu Kyi’s chief of security. That was the ticket in. Access all areas. Incredible!

Sounds like the way the authorities treated Aung San Suu Kyi during her years of house arrest. At one point in the film she says of the street outside her compound: “It was like this: open, shut, open, shut, open, shut…” 

It was a very conscious practice. In the version we did for HBO, which is 10 minutes longer than the BBC version, we have more from this former military intelligence guy and he explains it’s like a pressure cooker: ‘If there’s too much focus on the lady by the international community, we take the lid off and put it on the other pot, which is the national situation. And if because she’s got too much freedom that creates too much pressure, then we put the lid back on the original pot.’ So that’s how they do it: rice cooking, Burmese-style.

The first thing Suu Kyi said to me – I didn’t ask her any specific question, I just said’What do you want to talk about? Fill me in. What’s happening in Burma?’ – she started by saying ‘Well, it’s not what you think. You…’ – meaning the West, represented by this whitey in front of her – ‘you all romanticise way too much about this.’ And she was completely right. She’s just a lady and Burma is just a country in transition. ‘What is happening here is just another election.’ Maybe we are romanticising too much, because she’s made this transition from icon and human rights activist to an actual politician. She’s gambled away a lot of her political credit over the last few months with this political mess: the Rohingya and all of that.

You get the sense that some people aren’t entirely comfortable with the compromise. 

Hillary Clinton directly says that. ‘She’s got to get into this business of rolling up her sleeves, and getting into the dirty business of politics,’ which is very funny, I thought, coming from Hillary Clinton. That’s why she’s in the film.

Do you feel the way Suu Kyi is viewed, not just by the West but by her own people, is going to change?

It has changed already. There are lots more voices now in Burma that are critical of her – in her own ranks, her own party, too. U Tin OO, deputy leader of the NLD, says in the film that she’s made a deal with President Thein Sein, not the government. I know that when she met the president’s wife, they hugged and were crying. The president’s wife said ‘It is so good to finally have you with us.’ Suu Kyi really trusts the wife; that’s why she trusts Thein Sein. But as U Tin OO says, she still doesn’t trust the government. What remains is this toxic legacy of 40 years of totalitarian dictatorship. And like the Khmer Rouge here, it was a senseless dictatorship that completely wrecked the state for the people, who have to fend for themselves.

Does the film have special relevance to Cambodian audiences?

What’s interesting is that the Burmese could learn from Cambodia because Cambodia is ahead in terms of opening up and changing this whole system of governance and society in a very quick, dynamic transition from the Untac days until today – the advance of democracy and freedom. That’s why Zarganar came here: to look at what these guys are doing and learn. What the Burmese can learn is, of course, dependent on your point of view. The government can learn how to get away with shit because the international community won’t act in time. They’re learning already; this is their very clever way of getting Suu Kyi on board their ship then managing to reunite all the ethnic minorities across the board, except the Muslims, of course. Now everyone’s pointing the finger at the Rohingya and saying ‘Out!’ They’re scapegoats. It reminds me of Germany in 1933; the Nazi party coming to power and suddenly passing these race laws – completely unacceptable, especially if you’re a human rights activist who’s been campaigning for the past 20 years. When asked whether the Rohingya are Burmese, Suu Kyi said ‘I don’t know.’ That was her official response and that’s a very troubling answer for me. But what they can learn is that now that she’s part of the government, they’ve changed the press law and there has been a lot of reform; Burma is now one of the freest countries in Southeast Asia.

How long did you spend on location?

It took three trips, totalling more than a month of filming in Burma. That’s very quick for a documentary like this. We knew the cut-off point would be April 1, the by election, because we don’t want to get into the news story at all. We’re not interested in politics; we’re interested in her. We had wanted to make a film about her piano, but she wouldn’t let us upstairs; she wouldn’t let us film the piano, she wouldn’t let us film her playing the piano. She was very uncooperative; didn’t help us in any way.

In one scene, when Suu Kyi opens her compound to the press, you film her protesting that people are geting too close without permission. Behind the public image is a very private woman, it seems.

She’s a human being; very vulnerable, very scarred and traumatised. Her housekeeper says that every year, on her father’s birthday, she laid out all the silverware and looked at it, and she would never go out into the garden during her whole time under house arrest. Imagine! And she would never talk about private things to her housekeeper because if she opens that door just slightly, she’ll collapse. There’s so much weight and personal cost she’s suffered. She can’t really give in to that kind of emotion; be a mother, or a wife.

A vital survival mechanism, but it must have taken its toll.  

It’s a very Asian way of dealing with these things. She’s much more Asian than we would like to think by taking her Oxbridge accent into account. The way she runs the show in Burma, and her party, the whole thing is a lot further away from our Western references than we would like to think, most of the time. Between the lines in the film, for example, U Tin Oo, deputy leader of the National League for Democracy, says they weren’t entirely for this election at all. She was, but the old men around her in the NLD didn’t want to sell out for such little power gain – only 43 seats out of a total of 640-plus. If you give away your hand of cards for these 43 seats, they say it’s not enough; we’d rather wait for the next general election in 2015. I don’t want to judge that – it’s their decision – but what’s interesting is that all these guys around her say no, but she says yes and then they’re in.

In one sequence, you show Burmese cartoons suggesting the generals fear her. 

In the rough cut, we had a super funny scene showing a Burmese government initiative. They’re all so superstitious; they changed which side of the road they drive on from left to right so everyone’s steering wheels are on the wrong side now, and they didn’t manage to change the traffic signs in time so they had lots of accidents and many people died. And they changed the numbers on the currency denomination to nine, wiping out people’s savings overnight. What they did in the sequence was a tree planting initiative across the whole of Burma; every commune was forced to plant this particular kind of tree called Kyat Suu, which is the inversion of Suu Kyi. They wanted to negate her power using black magic by planting this tree across the country. This is how far they go in order to keep her powers at bay.

Former military intelligence officer Major Aung Lin Htut says General Than Shwe and Khin Nyunt “were inexperienced and not clever enough; they were not capable of negotiating with Suu Kyi”.  

Than Shwe lacked the necessary sophistication to deal with this woman who was so stubborn; fighting for her stance. I’d imagine anybody would have a hard time dealing with her.

Did you have a hard time dealing with her?

[laughs] Yes, very much so.

But you’ve had what many people haven’t – access to this extraordinary icon. What impressions were you left with?

Like every human being, the personal image is much different than the iconic image. How can you be an icon in the first place? You can’t. It’s not fair to the person, because you can never live up to the expectations the world has. As I said, she doesn’t like to talk about private things such as her family, yet she agreed to the first interview – which we use throughout the film, the one where she’s in the yellow dress – where she says it all. Never, before or after, was she willing to reply to any question directed at her private life. ‘If it’s not about politics, don’t even ask me.’

You can sense the pain she’s had to endure in her personal life.

I understood where she was coming from, being so hardened and difficult to deal with, or very grumpy towards us at times. We asked her to tell us some personal stories about what it was like returning to Burma in 1988, but she said: ‘No, this is far too serious. This is politics and I will not tell stories.’ We did three interviews with her, but could only really use one.

Much of the film seems more about what isn’t said, most notably the interview with her youngest son, Kim, who – and I hesitate to say this – seems damaged.

I had the same impression. We approached him and he was very shy and at first reluctant to meet. He eventually met with BBC director Angus McQueen and was a genuinely nice guy. He lives on a barge in Oxford. That moment when he stands up and walks out of the frame, this is so strong because it gives you the sense that there are gaps and pain. That’s why this film is so interesting. That’s the story: the human drama. It’s something tragic.

WHO: The face of Burmese democracy
WHAT: Aung San Suu Kyi – The Choice film screening
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd
WHEN: 7pm January 6
WHY: “People ask me about what sacrifices I’ve made. I always answer: I’ve made no sacrifices, I’ve made choices.” – Aung San Suu Kyi

 

The colour of music

The artist sweeps one arm over a canvas unrolled on the studio floor like a psychedelic welcome mat – a vast technicolour mash-up of lively forms and textures. From the next room, the dull rhythmic thud of bass bins threatens to stir the sticky air. “I will do something connected to his music, to show the rhythm of the sounds, the movement,” she says, nodding towards the door. “I use colours to express emotions and shapes to show the mood. You can see the DJ’s hands moving here, and over there is the sound.” An index finger jabs at enamel that’s been dribbled over acrylic like the zigzag of a hospital heart monitor. “And here you can see the equaliser, like the sounds that come out of the speaker when Warren’s playing.” More pointing, this time at a bright swirl of paint: “This sound here is like a DVD spinning. Each shape expresses an emotion: happiness, excitement…”

Chhan Dina and Warren Daly are daring to tread in some of history’s most well-heeled footsteps. The duo – one a classically trained Cambodian artist; the other a DJ from Ireland – are redefining for the 21st century the complex relationship between sound and vision. They’re in fine company. In Book X of his 4th century BC Republic, Plato describes the ‘music of the spheres’ – the poetic notion that the spinning of the planets generates a sort of celestial harmony. Pythagoras went a step further, musing that these heavenly tones had “a visible equivalent in the colour spectrum”. At the time, only seven planets had been discovered. Two hundred years later Aristotle applied seven numbers to the seven tones of the musical octave, the distinguished foundation of the sound-colour relationship. By the 18th century, Newton’s experiments with prisms seemed to prove its existence through the laws of physics.

And that was just the theorists. Legend has it that Leonardo da Vinci was the first to experiment with the projection of coloured lights, which spurred would-be inventors into trying to make instruments that could spew out coloured lights and sound at the same time. By the time the 20th century rolled around, Alexander Wallace Rimington’s ‘colour piano’ had been seen in public, spawning new oddly named contraptions: Thomas Wilfred’s Clavilux, the Optophonic Piano created by Russian painter Baranoff-Rossiné, and Alexander László’s Sonchromatoscope. Their creators had just one thing in common: they were trying to create a new artistic genre.

Dina and Daly, who met three years ago when he trampled her foot during a swing dance class at Equinox, are 21st century László’s, merging electronic dance music with live instruments and artists and audience participation to create a multisensory experience – a trip without a trip. Led by Daly, who in 2000 co-founded online record label Invisible Agent, they’re building on the work of 1960s San Francisco arts collectives that used disco balls and light projections on smoke to produce trip-like sensations (The Brotherhood of Light, which toured with The Grateful Dead, was inspired by the Beat generation and Ken Kesey’s ‘expansion of consciousness’ Acid Tests).

From acid to aciiiiiiiiiiiiiiiid: enter electronic dance music, 20 years later. It’s had a hard time matching the visual spectacle of screaming singers, windmill-armed guitarists and feral drummers thrashing about on stage. In 1992, British chart show Top Of The Pops hit a record low when The Orb’s ‘performance’ amounted to nothing more than the pair playing chess while their single Blue Room was piped through speakers. With more DJs using software to play mixes ‘live’ on computers, there’s been criticism that the act (some might say art) of physically choosing and mixing records has been replaced with someone simply pressing play and standing back. But as Peter Walker writes in The Independent, “For those acts that can’t get away from being a couple of blokes twiddling knobs – Underworld, The Chemical Brothers, Daft Punk and Orbital – an arms race has ensued to offer fans something to look at while they play. The art of visual entertainment has come a long way, with all of the above using successive albums and tours to test out new on-stage theatrics, from Daft Punk’s pyramid to Underworld’s towering tubes of light and the Chems’ song-specific graphic spectaculars.”

Daly, who has played at Ireland’s famous Temple Bar Music Centre, is well aware of Orbital, famed for their visuals (“The visuals are kind of our lead singer; they’re the lead singer jumping around and pulling faces”, Phil Hartnoll has said). “I was just in time for when Orbital and all the parties were happening in the early ‘90s in Western Europe,” says Daly. “We were putting raves on in fields and getting chased around by the cops.” (Did they ever get caught? “Yes, quite a lot, but let’s not talk about that.”) “You’d have quite a mix there: people DJing; people doing poi; tents, people making food. There was a real community feel to it. You didn’t just come along and watch one guy banging tunes out; there’s a number of different activities going on. We’d make fluoro backdrops, back in the days when fluoro was still cool – the days of glow sticks and Vicks VapoRub.

I started to do visuals at these events in the late ’90s, going out with a camera, making videos of the city and countryside, things happening and people doing things, cutting them all up and splicing it live on screen – putting effects on it, exploding and imploding it, putting colour layers over it; effects that would probably look really cheesy right now, but back then it was like ‘Wow! How’s this guy doing that?’ Now you’ve got software you can just download with all the clips already installed, but we were using two VHS recorders with a cord plugged into the decks.”

In a new series of events at Meta House, December 22 being the soft launch, Daly is fusing pop culture, high culture and low culture by hooking up painters, musicians, graffiti artists, digital artists and DJs into one big psychedelic show. “There will be three DJs playing back to back, each with our own set-up. It’s going to be like a nerd’s dream: a table full of flashing lights and different equipment, but we really want to take it away from where it’s just people looking at us. It’s not about me. I want to play quality tunes, expose some artists and get a buzz going out there in the place. We want to hang canvases up on the walls and get people in the crowd involved; give them a paintbrush.

“We want to mix it up. One example would be Scott Bywater, part of the Cambodian Space Project. He made some electronic tracks and we released them. He played guitar and read poetry over it and some of us have done remixes. When I first heard it, I wasn’t sure – guitars, poetry; am I going to be able to listen to this? Then I heard it and was like ‘Wow, this is ace. This guy really knows what he’s doing.’ He’s using Garage Band on a Mac and asking me all these questions about getting new sequences in there and putting drum beats over them. I thought ‘You’re the singer, you’re the guitarist; you’re the glue on stage for this band and now you’re interested in all these things that DJs and electronic producers use.’ He’s really starting to harness it, too.”

Such experimental fusion is, he says, the future of live electronic music. “There’s a huge lull. You had this massive surge starting in the late ’80s right up to the millennium, when dance music was at its peak. You had big names filling out stadiums – The Prodigy, Leftfield, Massive Attack; commercial, but with underground sounds bubbling up underneath. Then live bands took over for a while and now people like Scott Bywater are saying ‘I’m going to get a laptop.’ And the people with laptops are saying ‘There are guys over there who can play instruments. I’m going to talk to these guys, take some samples and reverse them, and do stuff together.’ We want to make a new form of music.” And it sure beats the hell out of watching two blokes playing chess.

WHO: The sonically and visually open-minded among us
WHAT: Swagger
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd
WHEN: 9pm December 22
WHY: It’s the future, man

 

Manic impression

 “When I die, I want people to play my music, go wild and freak out and do anything they want to do.” – Jimi Hendrix

The greatest electric guitarist in the history of music was just 27 years old when he was found on the floor of his girlfriend Monika Dannemann’s home in Notting Hill, London. And it was at precisely the same age that Darrell Young, better known as Niki Buzz – founder of 1980s US hard-rock power trios Vendetta and M-80 – picked up a guitar for the very first time. It would not be the last. “I’ve been imitated so well I’ve heard people copy my mistakes,” Hendrix once said. What his Rock Hall biography describes as ‘the greatest instrumentalist in the history of rock music’ would make of Play Like Jimi, an Amsterdam-based tribute band fronted by Buzz, can only be imagined. For as John Mayer writes in Rolling Stone magazine’s 100 Greatest Artists Of All Time, “Hendrix invented a kind of cool. The cool of a big conch-shell belt. The cool of boots that your jeans are tucked into. If Jimi Hendrix is an influence on somebody, you can immediately tell. Give me a guy who’s got some kind of weird-ass goatee and an applejack hat, and you just go, ‘He got to you, didn’t he?’” As Hendrix devotees celebrate what would have been his 70th birthday on November 27, days after the news that previously unreleased Hendrix material is due out next year (People, Hell and Angels will be the 11th posthumous Hendrix album), The Advisor corners Play Like Jimi’s flamboyant front man, who plays 13 instruments; won a James Brown-sponsored music contest when he was 13; has performed with everyone from The Ramones to Patti Smith, once formed a band with the only man ever to get thrown out by Ozzy Osbourne for being too badass (Ozzy himself once bit the head off a live bat on stage), and, yes, has got some kind of weird-ass goatee. Joining him are bass player Martin Seij, a Dutch metalhead, and former Wailers drummer Winston Scholsberg.

What would Jimi be doing if he were alive today?

Niki: At this point, he’d probably be doing jazz fusion of some sort. He was going in that direction; he was already jamming with Miles Davis and a rap group back then, a group called Lost Poets. Jimi would have been at the forefront of rap.

The new album has been described as pioneering what became Earth, Wind and Fire’s sound.

Niki: Toward the end of Jimi’s career, he wanted to experiment a lot but his manager didn’t want that at all; he wanted the original experience. The last thing he wanted the world to see was Jimi as a black man. He wanted the world to see Jimi as a white rock star with a good tan, and the blacker Jimi became the more it upset him.

How much of a political force was Jimi?

Winston: The way he used his music, the way he spoke about the war, the way Machine Gun talked about the injustice of the war – that was the most political statement he made. If you listen to Machine Gun, you understand how deeply concerned he was with what was happening.

The song Machine Gun has been described by musicologist Andy Aledort as ‘the premier example of Hendrix’s unparalleled genius as a rock guitarist.’

Niki: I was a drummer when I first heard the Band of Gypsys album. I’ll never forget the first time I heard Machine Gun. It completely changed the way I looked at guitar – and I wasn’t even a guitarist then. I didn’t start playing guitar until I was 27, which is strange because Jimi died at 27. When I heard the sound of his guitar crying and wailing, just like a mother or father watching their child being shot down… On top of that, he made the guitar actually sound like a machine gun and bombs dropping. I never thought such emotion and visualisation could come out of any instrument. There’s no way you can listen to Machine Gun and not feel every ounce of the pain of war. It’s probably the best song that’s ever been recorded in the history of music.

You’ve said before the only way to play like Jimi is to let the guitar play you.

Martin: If you let the instrument play for you, instead of struggling with the notes to make the song sound like it sounds; if you let the music flow through you and let the guitar do its thing, that’s when it becomes like Jimi.

Niki: Most people, especially guitarists, believe that playing like Jimi is putting on the record and learning it note for note. Any moron can do that; it doesn’t take any talent. If you want to play like Jimi, first of all you have to be in touch with nature then you have to be in touch with your emotions. Jimi played in colours and he played completely from his emotions. He was very shy so he expressed all of his feelings through his guitar: his love, his anger, his hopes, his dreams.

Curtis Knight, who was close to Hendrix, has described you as the best guitarist he’s ever played with since Jimi. That’s one hell of a compliment.   

Niki: I really love Jimi Hendrix, but didn’t play him at first. I had a band in 1982 called Vendetta. A dream come true for most guitar players would have been being produced by Eddie Kramer, who produced Hendrix. Kramer came to me and said ‘I want to produce you.’ And I said no. I chose Max Norman to produce the album, because I didn’t want the stigma of being Jimi Hendrix. Everybody was comparing me to him anyway. I should tell you about how I met Curtis Knight. He used to manage Pure Hell, the first black punk rock band. I was the resident Dr Fix-it sort of guitarist at Planet Studios. I came in one day to play and Curtis was sitting on the couch. He looks at me and says: ‘Yeah, you look like you can play.’

That’s how he gauged your musical ability: ‘You look the part!’?

Niki: [laughs] So he says ‘Come listen to this!’ and he took me into the studio and played a track. I then played it and he goes: ‘OK, you’re my guitar player now.’ We mostly just did studio stuff, and he owned a limousine service. I finally talked him into doing a couple of gigs down in South Carolina and we were on stage, playing, and there was a guy in the front row who was weeping and sobbing to the point where it was disturbing. I told someone to bring him back stage and he’s on his knees, sobbing. He thought Curtis Knight was dead and I was dead because he was a big Vendetta and M-80 fan, and I hadn’t been on the scene in a while. He couldn’t believe he was seeing two of his biggest idols on the same stage and they were alive.

You’ve rubbed some extraordinary shoulders: Joan Jett, Patti Smith, The Ramones. Who stands out?

Winston: [laughs] That’s a good question. Answer that, brother! Come on!

Niki: Since you’re a punk vocalist, I have a great story for you. Do you know The Dead Boys? OK, so me and The Dead Boys’ lead singer Stiv Bators were best friends. He was an absolute intellectual; we’d sit in a coffee shop and discuss politics for hours. The drummer, whose nickname was Beaver, he was a normal guy but he really wanted to be a punk. The Dead Boys were down near Avenue A, Avenue B – we call it Alphabet City. At that point in New York, Alphabet City made Beirut look like Beverly Hills. The only people there were Hells Angels and drug dealers; it was serious. Anyway, the drummer decided to earn his punk badge by going into Alphabet City and throwing some racial slurs at the Puerto Ricans there. He ended up getting stabbed 32 times. That’s a hell of a way to earn your punk badge.

And what was it like in M-80 working with Don Costa, the only man ever to get kicked out of Ozzy Osborne’s band for being too much of a badass?

Niki: Oh, Jesus. OK, I’m going to tell you about the most famous M-80 gig ever. We were at The Troubador in LA, going to the gig, and Don Costa says: ‘Look, I can’t go in the limo with you. I’m going in my own limo.’ Alright, whatever. So we arrive at the gig and Don Costa is wrapped up like The Mummy; he was taped up head to toe, there was nothing but his eyes showing, and he had smeared cat shit all over himself.

Oh no.

Niki: Oh yes! [laughs] And the drummer sat down and played in an LA jail cell. He literally went to the LA County Jail, where they were replacing the cells, and reconstructed a complete jail cell as our stage set. He had to go into the cell to get on the drums and when he went in he took one of Costa’s extra bass guitars, which I thought was his own. Here we go: we start the concert, and of course there’s this girl on her boyfriend’s shoulders and she starts flashing the band with her big tits. Costa leans over and starts sucking them while he’s playing, which the boyfriend didn’t take too kindly to. So he puts the girl down and starts to swing at Costa. Costa then goes to the back of the stage and comes back out with a pickaxe and starts swinging it at the guy. So now we don’t have a bass player any more because he’s too busy swinging a pickaxe at this guy he’s fighting with. I’m saying to myself OK, I’m the lead singer and the guitar player; I’ll carry the show until he quits this. All of a sudden the drums stop. Sam opens up the case for what I thought was a spare bass guitar and it’s a 12-gauge shotgun…

No! 

Niki: …and he starts blowing holes in the ceiling of the club! Now I’m the only one left actually playing music here, and at that point I was only wearing a chamois – I’m part native American – and so you’ve got this guy in a loin cloth playing guitar; one guy blowing holes in the ceiling, and another guy swinging a pickaxe. That was M-80. Costa was certifiably insane. This wasn’t an act. You know why he got kicked out by Ozzy?

Something to do with a cheese-grater…

Niki: Worse. He used to bring live bunnies on stage and gut them. And he had a cheese-grater on the back of his guitar, which would grate his stomach while he was playing until there was blood everywhere.

And you thought forming a band with this guy would be a good idea why?

[laughter]

Winston: Yeah, Niki. Why?! Thank you for asking that question, Phoenix. We’ve been waiting for him to answer that for years.

Niki: He was the best bass player ever. I just got a fan mail the other day asking if he was still alive and someone told me they think he’s dead, because no one’s heard from his since. Last time I saw him was at The Rainbow, where he showed up in women’s lingerie, motorcycle boots and smoking a cigar.

So how does one go from shotguns, pickaxes and cheese-graters to recording the soundtrack for The Personals, a documentary about the sex lives of the elderly in New York? Just how kinky ARE old people in Manhattan?

[Laughter]

Niki: Every time I land at JFK, my phone starts ringing. People just know I’m in town. This time, it was Planet Studios. I go down there and am just shooting the shit when this guy comes running down the stairs with complete panic on his face. ‘I need a drummer! I need a drummer!’ Everyone pointed at me. It was Miles Davis’ road manager; we hadn’t seen each other in ten years. Miles used to have a recording studio next to mine and would come in and watch me play. Anyway, this guy was recording the soundtrack for a documentary but his drummer hadn’t shown up. So we played through it for about 45 minutes and then I took off the headphones and said OK, I’m ready to do it. And the guy says: ‘No, you’re done. Don’t touch it.’ They had four days to do it; I did it in 45 minutes, first take – and holy shit, it won an Oscar! You know what my wife said to me? ‘That’s good. What are you going to cook for dinner?’

So your Oscar-winning experience will forever be wedded to the visual of old people having sex?    

[More laughter, none of it Niki’s]

Niki: No! Let me tell you something: I have never to this day seen the damned film…
WHO: Play Like Jimi
WHAT: Hendrix resurrected
WHERE: Memphis Bar, St. 118 (Nov 30) & Sharky Bar, St. 130 (Dec 1)
WHEN: 8pm November 30 (Memphis) & December 1 (Sharky’s)
WHY: See ‘What’

 

Wild things

As erections go, it’s a hard one to miss – if you’ll pardon the appalling pun. Longer than a human forearm and twice the girth, this monstrous appendage looms from between two wrinkled thighs like an anaconda with advanced rigor mortis. Could this be animal speak for ‘happy’? “That’s getting into anthropomorphism but he’s got his donger out, so that’s a good thing…” Dr Wayne McCallum grins as Kiri positions himself over a mound of sand, splays all four legs and then squashes it flat, ears flapping. “That elephant’s got two trunks!” McCallum roars with laughter. “Yeah, he’s happy.”

It was not always so. Eighteen months ago, an emaciated sack of grey skin and bones appeared on the front page of a local newspaper beneath the headline ‘The zoo of horrors’. Teuk Chhou Zoo, just outside Kampot, was then the private menagerie of one Nhim Vanda, a four-star general and vice president of the National Committee for Disaster Management. He had built the zoo with Hun Sen’s blessing in 1999, along with another at Prey Veng. A government website described it as ‘a wonderful place to spend a fun-filled afternoon with your family’.

The reality was rather less wonderful. Cramped, filthy cages; untreated injuries; no clean water; scant evidence of food: the list of transgressions was long. Orang-utans starved of any shelter hung listlessly from the bars of a tiny cage. Eagles nursed damaged wings in enclosures too small for them to stretch. “It is so hard for me to find food and clean water to provide to the animals because in one day I get money from tourists totalling about 20,000 riel (US$5) to 100,000 riel, but I pay much more than that for food,” His Excellency said at the time. “[Wildlife NGOs] should be proud of me and encourage me because I like my animals more than my own son.” The Cambodian authorities chose to say nothing at all.

Today, that same elephant – once on the cusp of starvation – is all but unrecognisable. Seila, the female who shares Kiri’s newly expanded enclosure, is bouncing up and down on a bright blue bin. The plastic crumples like paper beneath her feet. Kiri flaps her ears, moves on to the next bin, and repeats the process. You’d be hard-pressed to describe her as mammoth, but her frame is infinitely less skeletal than in the now-infamous photo from March last year.

“The good news is we’ve stabilised a bad zoo,” says McCallum, part of the team responsible for the extreme makeover now unfolding within the walls of Teuk Chhou. “The elephants are the perfect symbol of the transition, given how emaciated they were. The fact is a lot of the animals were dying. We had a gibbon who looked like he’d come from a death camp.”

Stabilisation first arrived in the form of Rory and Melita Hunter, the Australian husband-and-wife team who transformed Song Saa into Cambodia’s first luxury island resort. Working closely with the zoo’s owner, the pair enlisted Wildlife Alliance director Nick Marx, who brings with him more than 30 years’ experience in animal welfare. Next came the Elephant Asia Rescue and Survival foundation’s Louise Rogerson, who – with the help of two Hong Kong donors – has completely transformed the “ellie enclosure”.

“The enclosure took three months; it’s a huge change,” she says in a soft Mancunian accent. “Their pool was smelly and dirty; there were frogs and filth and rubbish in it. We cleaned all that out and now they play in it every day. Kiri’s favourite toy is the tyre: he throws it around everywhere. They’re so much happier. The main worry with these animals in captivity is food: they weren’t getting enough. They were getting about two wheelbarrows of grass a day, but they need up to 10% of their bodyweight, which is about 200kg a day. They’re still small for their age because of malnutrition.” Little is known of the elephants’ history, as with most of the animals here, she notes (many are believed to have been given to the original owner as gifts).

Mankind has been keeping wild beasts in captivity for thousands of years, often with tragic results. During the dedication of Ancient Rome’s Colosseum by Emperor Titus, according to historian WEH Lecky, as many as 5,000 animals perished in a single day. People have, on occasion, fared little better: in 1906, the Bronx Zoo in New York displayed Congolese pygmy Ota Benga in a cage with chimpanzees and then an orang-utan by way of demonstrating the ‘missing link’. But with the arrival of the 20th century came the ‘modern zoo’. Far from the living museums of their ‘arks in parks’ forebears, they exist not only to document how wildlife and habitats are declining, but to find ways to halt that decline.

Footprints is Song Saa’s new privately funded philanthropic arm. Directed by McCallum, an affable nature-loving New Zealander who moved here in 2003, its aim is to transform ‘the zoo of horrors’ into a state-of-the-art wildlife and environmental education centre via a five-year, $250,000 master plan. “We want it to be a journey, rather than just a menagerie. It’s both a journey into the zoo and a journey into its transformation into a wildlife education park. The way you interact with the exhibits will be part of the educational process.”

‘Interacting with the exhibits’, on one of Teuk Chhou’s Paws and Claws Wildlife Encounters, means anything from shovelling elephant poo to bottle-feeding a full-grown tiger, which is about as easy as it sounds. Following the keeper’s instructions to the letter, I rest the tip of a giant syringe filled with lactose-free milk on one of the bars of a tigress’ enclosure. The gently growling big cat seizes it with her incisors and neatly nips it off, nearly swallowing the syringe in the process. Milk for the male, Meanchey, gets inadvertently squirted straight up his nostrils.

Allowing curious folk to get up close and personal with some of Teuk Chhou’s 134 animals, which span 43 species, is one way Footprints hopes to cover the $8,000 monthly food bill. For $25, you can spend half a day getting to know some of Teuk Chhou’s most colourful characters. For $45, you can experience a full day in the life of a zoopkeeper by bathing elephants, ‘blissing out’ a colourful hornbill; making toys for the animals; coming face to face with big cats, preparing food and the aforementioned shovelling of elephant poo, among many other just-as-aromatic strains. Proceeds are ploughed straight back into feeding the animals and building better enclosures.

“What we’re trying to do is look at it as an overall experience, not just for the visitors, but also for the animals,” says Rory Hunter, the Sydney-born property developer who, along with his wife Melita, owns Song Saa. “We’re doing it on a habitat basis. There’ll be a journey through tree-lined forest, where you have an elevated view over Kampot; then the park will be divided into wetland, jungle, and forest habitats. The landscape will be relevant not only to the animals in here, but also to the local wildlife. At least 50% of our animals are native to Cambodia – not just the big well-known species, but also lesser-known species, like civets, which people don’t realise are native. In 20 years’ time, they probably won’t exist in the wild.”

WHO: Wild things
WHAT: The new Teuk Chhou Zoo
WHERE: Thmei district, Kampot province
WHEN: Now
WHY: Help transform ‘the zoo of horrors’ into a park of hope

 

Renaissance woman

Amanda Bloom fuses the beauty of musical antiquity with the raw power of modern rock

Sir Isaac Asimov, Albert Einstein and Voltaire rank among history’s most notable freethinkers – progressive, intelligent souls who believe opinions should be formed not on the basis of tradition or dogma, but logic and reason. Among the most venerated wisdom that has poured forth from such lips over the centuries are the words of someone who is neither science fiction author, nor Enlightenment philosopher, nor theoretical physicist.

You could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. Amanda Bloom – a willowy, porcelain-skinned wisp with a penchant for vintage clothing – is an elegant, Australian singer and composer who began studying piano at the age of three, wrote her first sonata aged six, and debuted at the Sydney Opera House at just 17. On her first album, The History of Things to Come, a song by the name of Rosetta – so called in honour of the Rosetta Stone, which famously unlocked the secrets of Ancient Egypt – contains the line: ‘An idea does not gain truth as it gains followers.’ When the album was released in 2010, the lyrics were immediately seized upon by freethinkers the world over. They’ve since been immortalised on everything from websites and radio shows to t-shirts and at least one tattoo.

These ten words lie at the core of what Bloom, deeply touched by baroque and world music, describes on the album liner notes as “An epic and astounding fusion of fantasy, circus, classical, and piano-driven alternative rock.” Strings, oboes, harpsichords, cellos and timpanis layer in orchestral splendour amid off-beat rhythms, stunning harmonies, and still more stirring words. “Imagine an 18th century tea party with Tori Amos, Cirque du Soleil, Yann Tiersen and Muse” is how she defines her own otherwise almost indefinable style.

The Advisor caught Bloom – whose first mission in Cambodia was to write a female empowerment anthem for German development agency GIZ, and who’s now recording her second album at former head of Sony International Chris Craker’s Karma Sound Studios – to talk Greek gods, rationalism, and facing the void.

How does it feel to see your own lyrics become a cult t-shirt?

The song Magdalene started becoming very popular online throughout these atheistic, freethinking communities across the States – people who were very anti-Bush. This was 2007. Online, I became known as this pin-up hero for rationalism. ‘Oh, she’s the ultimate blah, blah, blah.’ A line from Rosetta – ‘An idea does not gain truth as it gains followers’ – started spreading around the net as one of the best freethinking quotes of all time. Suddenly I’m, like, up there with Einstein. It was so cool. I’d always said the best thing would be to be quoted, so this was one of my great dreams. All these companies were making t-shirts of it. Meanwhile, in reality, I’m just shopping on eBay, getting pissed, really unhappy. Of course, online means nothing.

That first album was a tough one. 

I became obsessed. I had this sound in my head: it was music I wanted to hear but couldn’t find anywhere, so I thought: ‘Why not write it?’ I became fascinated by the idea of locking myself away from the world, just to see what there is when I try to strip everything away – just being in a bare room with my piano; trying to get back to the bare bones of music composition. I was writing for other pop groups when I was 20, 21 and at the time I thought ‘I’m not pretty enough to be the artist myself.’ I was massively introspective and obsessed with thinking. You know when you’re young, you’re so affected by things and I was so angered by a lot of other girls in my age group; they seemed so vacuous. I kept a diary and was reading a lot of philosophy; studying this, studying that. I thought: ‘Why is the music that’s out there so empty?’ I don’t know why I sound so serious, because I’m not that serious any more. That’s the funny thing: in my youth, the youth of others just annoyed me. Especially being a young girl in the music industry, there was this push towards pop and singing about crap; nothing. Rosetta is a song that was inspired by the Rosetta Stone. It’s a metaphor for truth and was based on the idea of what the world would be like if we could only tell the truth, especially the media. Then Magdalene is a song about religious hypocrisy and extremism in all different forms. That album, the ideas were very ambitious and huge. At the time, that’s where my mindset was at.

I love this album, but I’m so happy it’s in my past because it was the result of so many – I don’t know if you should be writing this; I’m not sure I want anyone to know this stuff, it’s very intimate. It’s kind of the Oscar Wilde Picture of Dorian Gray thing: creating something of incredible beauty, but then the reality is actually crumbling. By the time I’d finished it, I was broken inside because I’d given my everything to that album. Years and years of this idea of perfection and the idea of this music, and then I’d lost everything; fallen away from my friends, my family, my relationship at the time. I’d sacrificed so much for my music. By the time I’d finished, I realised that’s not the right way to be living – it’s not healthy. I’d rather be a good person than a great artist. I needed to get that balance again.

Then I went to the Middle East and finished some vocals there. That was at a time I realised I was living for my art, not living for myself, but I’ve always believed great art is the result of great living: you should never give up living well. It’s like Salvador Dali: he was brilliant, obviously, but you read his personal diaries and he’s such a narcissist; so self-obsessed. You think: ‘Fuck your art. I don’t care about your art any more. You’ve ruined it.’

Never read anything about your favourite artists. You’ll never think of them the same way again.

[Laughs] On that note, I’ll leave you. So, you love my album, hey? Awesome! See you later – I’m outta here… No? OK. Coming here was like a complete rebirth. It’s been this incredible blank canvas on which I can start painting my second album. The people here are incredible; so inspiring. They’ve all got such an incredible story; they have so much courage and they’re so brave. And I’ve had such great opportunities here. In Australia, there was talk of distributing the first album and playing live, but I really just wrote this album for myself, as a personal challenge.

The title track, The History of Things to Come, is about the fact that we all have responsibility for the things to come; this is history that we’re making now on a personal level. It’s a journey that comes from the idea that to become a full person, we must first break in half and then decide which halves you want to put together. You must break into a thousand pieces and then put those pieces back together yourself, from a position of knowledge and confidence in your own identity. What you’re born into – the school you go to, the people you know – a lot of that is chosen for you. It’s important as an adult to completely break apart and then put yourself back together again; to question everything and get back to absolutely nothing at all, and then to face that void, because we all fear the void so much and worry that we won’t be able to handle having nothing, or being nothing for a while. But that’s a beautiful place to be: nothing. From that, you can hand select what you want of yourself. So that song was about breaking apart and then rebuilding yourself. The irony is that through writing it, I did it – I completely broke apart. That song almost destroyed me and it became a meta-documentation of the journey it took to complete it. It was very intense. The song took three years to write. I programmed every note on the piano and developed RSI in my right hand.

Has recording the second album been a more positive experience? 

So positive, I can’t even begin to convey to you. All these songs, I wrote them with no judgement of myself. I just let them exist, let them breathe. I wasn’t trying to make them the best thing ever; I was just trying to be honest, which was so freeing because if you’re honest, there’s no right or wrong. As an artist, you always feel that your first instinct isn’t good enough; surely, you can keep perfecting it. But then it becomes inauthentic. What’s beautiful is the spontaneity of art: it’s more of an accurate insight into you. Also, this time, it would be nice for it to be successful, but I know now what the first album did to me psychologically. You know what? I just want to enjoy the process and do it for the sake of the music. I hope that comes across in how it sounds.

Tell us about the essence of this new album.

The working title is Atlas, after the god who was expelled from Greece and, the story has it, carried the weight of the world on his shoulders. But while that was incredibly painful and he suffered for it, he was also able to have an insight into the natural laws and truths of the universe, and he was able to learn about the world that way.

The songs were written in different parts of the world: there’s a song I wrote in Paris, called Marionette, about a wooden doll controlled by everyone else. There’s a song called Pictures of Indochine, which I wrote about moving from Sydney to Cambodia. Whenever I live in a developing country, it’s like I absorb the general attitude of the nation. I feel as though I’m developing as well. There’s a song called Eyes of Galena, which is about India: rebirth, starting again, having the power at any time of your life to wipe clean your own past and give yourself permission to start again. Give yourself permission to reform your own idea of yourself, and not believe in your past insecurities.

And Schumann Etudes, which is a nine-minute journey a friend described as ‘very Tim Burton’, I was even working on that on my laptop while we were in the car on our way to the studio. It’s a song about being creatively blocked, and meeting someone – this incredible gay guy Ezra Axelrod, a performer, in London – it’s about the walks we used to take together and him hearing me play a Schumann etude, which completely opened me up again. He used to say to me: ‘Just tell the truth. Just write songs as if you’re telling a friend a story.’ And so I did: I wrote the song in that style, so it’s quite a meta-song. There are more world aspects to this album, but it’ll be a lot less layered: a bit more naked, raw. The song from India will have the sitar on it; in Pictures of Indochine, I really want to use the Khmer xylophone, and Marionette has accordion.

Has being in Cambodia changed you?

I came here without the intention of writing music. I’ve always known deep down that the best things in life happen without you trying to make them happen: best moments, best friendships, best everything. Always. Don’t chase shadows. I came here and started teaching at a kindergarten, and I think it was being around kids and getting back to basics – in Sydney I was quite down – I’ve got back to living in the moment and really loving every second of the day. It was here that I realised the last album was written in the hope it would fulfil me, whereas this next album is a result of being fulfilled. I’ve already arrived and the songs are catching up with me. I’ve taken the pressure off. With the first, I was so hard on myself; it was an experiment in my own potential. Now I’m looking up and looking ahead and it’s working. It’s back to this philosophy of choosing what you want in your life, in a way. I don’t know. Now I’m drunk. Turn that thing off!

Already? Cheap date.

I know. I’m such a lightweight. Let’s talk about vintage clothes…

If you insist. Where did the love of vintage come from?

Vintage is my procrastination. The irony is that now I’m selling vintage clothes professionally, I procrastinate by doing my music. ‘Maybe I’ll just write a new song instead of tagging these items.’ I’ve even tried to trick myself and it does work! But you know what’s good now? I wear the vintage while playing the gig, so it’s perfect. It’s the same obsession with music: timelessness. It’s an obsession with classical music, with renaissance, with baroque. It’s this looking back to look forward thing. But also, so much of the newly designed stuff out there is junk. The clothes don’t work with the body, they work against it. Vintage is so romantic – and it’s often a lot cheaper.

So, if you had a time machine…  

[Laughs] I’d go back to before this wine and I wouldn’t order it!

WHO: Amanda Bloom
WHAT: An epic and astounding fusion of fantasy, circus, classical, and piano-driven alternative rock
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd.
WHEN: 8pm October 11
WHY: See WHAT

 

Get funky for monkeys

In 1979, while filming an episode of Life on Earth with the BBC’s Natural History Unit, a young David Attenborough – today the world’s most famous natural history film-maker – came face-to-face with what were then the world’s most famous macaques. On a tiny offshore island in Japan, the naturalist – sporting rolled-up denims – delivered his piece de camera barefoot as dozens of these Old World primates swarmed his ankles. The troop had become famous for what he described as “making some remarkable changes in their behaviour”.

“For a long time, people thought that the way creatures like these feed was largely instinctive. But then in 1952, scientists visited this island and in order to entice them out into the open so that they could observe them more clearly, they started offering them sweet potatoes…” [At this point in the clip, one particularly bold macaque swipes a sweet potato from the presenter’s hand, trots across the beach to a shallow pool, dips the potato into the water and gives it a vigorous scrub.]

“After about a year, a young female called Emo began to take her roots down to a pool and wash off the sand and mud before eating them. Within a few weeks, her close friends and family – including her mother – were copying her. The habit spread and, eight years later, almost all the monkeys on the island habitually washed their sweet potatoes. Then a new variation arose. Instead of using fresh water, the monkeys took the roots down to the sea and washed them there – even when they were clean already. Perhaps they simply liked salt on their potatoes.”

It would not be the last time macaques, second only to humans in terms of geographical distribution, made the international headlines. Last year, award-winning photographer David Slater left his camera unattended at a national park in Indonesia. Before long, an inquisitive rare crested black macaque – mesmerised by her reflection in the lens – had seized the camera and somehow shot a splendid self-portrait, complete with goofy grin.

Macaques’ closeness to us, hinted at in such hijinks, has made possible extraordinary medical advances, including the development of rabies and polio vaccines, and drugs to manage HIV/Aids. With populations in Cambodia under continued threat from illegal hunting, Innov8 International is throwing a party tonight to raise funds for a new macaque enclosure at Phnom Tamao Wildlife Rescue Sanctuary, managed by Wildlife Alliance. Break out your best animal prints and get wild to the sound of Afrikana’s conga drums and DJ Wez T. Tickets for the event – sponsored by Smart Mobile, Total, Excell and Asian Tigers Mobility – cost $10 and include a welcome drink and canapés, and there are raffle prizes aplenty. Get yours at The Dollhouse, Jasmine Boutique, Mad Monkey Restaurant or Ebony Tree.

WHO: Animal lovers
WHAT: Rumble in the Jungle fundraiser
WHERE: Ebony Tree, St. 178
WHEN: 6:30pm October 4
WHY: Give orphaned macaques a safe place to go

 

Ghoulies & ghosties

Things that go ‘bump’ in the night, to which the Western tradition of Halloween is today largely dedicated, have long been part of Southeast Asian folklore. Notable among the region’s most frightful spectres is the Arp, a disembodied female head who floats around at night scaring the bejesus out of nocturnal types with her glistening fangs and glowing, bloody entrails.

Legend has it she’s the ghost of a Khmer princess defeated in battle and later burnt at the stake after the Siamese aristocrat to whom she’d been promised caught her in the arms of her lover (a lower-ranking lover, at that). In desperation, a Khmer sorceress cast a powerful spell to protect the princess, but by the time the magic took effect only her head and intestines had escaped the flames. Today, this grisly apparition – all that remains of her royal highness – is believed to roam the Southeast Asian countryside under cover of darkness, sating its infernal appetite for flesh by preying on everything from pigs to pregnant women.

Twentieth-century ethnographer Phraya Anuman Rajadhon was the first scholar in Thailand to study regional beliefs in the paranormal. He notes that the Arp’s taste for the blood of the unborn is believed by many folk in rural areas to be the cause of diseases affecting women during pregnancy. To protect mothers-to-be, relatives place thorny branches around the home until after the child is delivered to snag the Arp’s dangling viscera. Once the newborn has been safely ushered into this world, they then bury the placenta as far away as possible in as deep a hole as possible in order to thwart attacks by the bloodthirsty spirit.

Such grisliness was made famous in the first Cambodian film produced following the fall of the Khmer Rouge: Konm Eak Madia Arp (‘My Mother is Arp’) became a cult hit almost overnight when it was released in 1980 following years of cultural suppression by the doomed Marxist regime. But the arb is not alone in Cambodia’s annals of horror. In the Buddhist Institute of Cambodia’s Collection of Old Khmer Tales, which hark back to the dark days of animism, stories serve to instruct not on the virtues of being good, but as a warning against the perils of evil.

“Like the Germanic tales originally collected by the Grimm brothers, these Khmer folktales are not sweet, gentle stories designed to whisk children away into a land of dreams and wonder, but rather stark warnings as to the very real perils and pitfalls of the world in which they live,” notes khmerbuddhistrelief.org, on which several such tales have been translated into English. “Concocted at a time when wild animals still posed a mortal threat in daily life, the stories can be violent, cruel and unmerciful. Intellect almost always triumphs over brute strength, but not always in the interest of justice. Clever schemes may be devised for the sake of self-preservation or revenge, or simply used to manipulate and exploit the ignorant and naive for no other end than amusement. Such are the harsh realities of the world for which these tales give the listener fair warning.”

As you don ghoulish garb to celebrate the pagan rituals of October 31, consider yourself duly warned. But as Spike Milligan famously said: “Things that go ‘bump’ in the night should not really give one a fright. It’s the hole in each ear that lets in the fear; that, and the absence of light!”

HALLOWEEN HIGHLIGHTS:

SAT 27

Drawn of the dead

Spooky face painting, remote control car races and live art demos by Global Art. 3pm at the Garden Terrace, Himawari Hotel, #313 Sisowath Quay.

Occult viewing

Italian director/musician Antonio Nardone’s film Blood Red Karma tells the story of Marc, a young man who disappeared in Cambodia while researching mysterious ghost stories. The madness which slowly possesses Marc leads the audience into the dark side of Cambodian beliefs amid the horrors of the country’s recent past. 4pm at Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd.

Spooked

DJ Westly spins while you battle it out for costume prizes. 7pm at Okun Ja, St. 336.

Trick or treat?

Cuba’s most famous musical sons Warapo provide the soundtrack to a special Halloween dinner ‘with surprises’. 8pm at Latin Quarter, cnr St. 178 and 19.

Kinky witch

Don your scariest costume and rub shoulders with Kinky Witches with tunes by DJs Audi, N.me and Lefty. 9pm at Nova, #19 St. 214.

SUN 28

Sunday Bloody Sunday

Fancy dress, drinking games, live music and Halloween mayhem. 3pm at Sundance Saloon, #61 St. 178.

WED 31: High spirits

DJ Gang, a resident at Pontoon, takes the turntables for the FCC’s hip-hop-electro/dirty dutch Halloween night. 8:30pm at The FCC, Sisowath Quay.

NOV 2: Get your freak on     

Free shots for the most imaginative Halloween costumes at What’s Up Phnom Penh’s Halloween shindig, with tunes by Bassbender and BBoy Peanut. 8pm at The Eighty8, #96 St. 88.

 

My brother’s killer

‘On the afternoon of the 13th, we thought we could hear a boat engine at intervals throughout the afternoon but we couldn’t be sure. Suddenly, a boat came in closer. I was about to go up on deck when the boat opened fire and sent some shots over our mast.’ – Kerry Hamill’s journal, August 13 1978.

The end, when it finally came, was as unforeseeable as it was barbaric. Foxy Lady, a 28ft traditional Malaysian perahu bedar, was just a few months into what was meant to be the trip of a lifetime. From Darwin harbour on Australia’s rugged northern coast, the tiny yacht had nosed her way through the crystalline waters of the Pacific Ocean, past Timor and Flores, then on to Bali and Singapore, heading up the Straits of Malacca and around the tip of the Malaysian peninsula. On board, a trio of tanned young adventurers passed for captain and crew.

Kerry Hamill was 27 when he wrote his last journal entry from Foxy Lady in August 1978. The eldest son of a tight-knit New Zealand family, he – along with fellow travellers Stuart Glass, a Canadian, and John Dewhirst from England – would within weeks become one of only nine foreigners ever executed by the Khmer Rouge.

At the time, few people outside Cambodia knew of the atrocities being committed. Before Foxy Lady’s course was forever altered, Kerry had sent countless letters back home, regaling his family with breathless tales they’d read aloud by a blazing fire in the coastal wilds of Whakatane. Suddenly, the letters stopped. The silence was deafening. It would be a further 18 months before the Hamills finally discovered what awful fate had befallen their son.

“I remember my mum looking out to sea approaching Christmas time and saying ‘Kerry’s going to come over the horizon and surprise us with tales of his adventures,’” says his little brother Rob, today an Olympic and Trans-Atlantic rowing champion. Their parents, Esther and Miles, fretted about what to do; who to contact. Kerry’s father wrote letters of his own, bashing away furiously at an antiquated typewriter stuffed with carbon sheaves. The theorising began: pirates; maybe a shipwreck. Perhaps their son had just decided to go silent for a while.

Sixteen months later, the phone finally rang – only the voice at the other end wasn’t Kerry’s, but that of a neighbour: ‘Get the local paper.’ John, the second eldest, went to a nearby dairy. There it was, in bold type face on the front page: his brother’s torture and execution at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. A few months later, John – also 27 – walked to the edge of a cliff and jumped. Rob, then 14, sought solace in the numbing arms of alcohol.

Today, asked what he remembers of Kerry, Rob is silent for a moment. Eventually, slowly and deeply, he exhales. Each word is carefully weighed before being spoken. “He was outgoing; his own man. He wasn’t overly demonstrative. He was really calm and just a lovely guy. One of his acquaintances said he was ‘a gorgeous, beautiful man’ and that phrase has stuck with me forever. He was a very able, helpful, loving guy.” [His voice breaks] “I can’t say much more…”

More than 30 years have passed since Foxy Lady was blown off course in a storm, straying into waters controlled by Democratic Kampuchea’s out-of-control Marxist machine. Stuart was shot dead immediately; Kerry and John were taken for interrogation at S-21. John was executed weeks later; two months of torture followed for Kerry. At best, he was blindfolded, taken to a pre-dug trench, made to kneel down beside it, hit over the head with a metal bar, his throat slit, and then buried. At worst, he was dragged into the street and burned alive.

Not knowing why, or even how, has haunted Rob ever since. In 1997, rowing across the Atlantic Ocean with the late Phil Stubbs, his anguish loomed like a tidal wave. “I was grief stricken, even though it had been 20-plus years,” he says from his New Zealand home. “Whether it was through exhaustion, or sleep deprivation, or the connection with the ocean – Kerry had a strong connection with water – every day on the boat, when I was rowing or when I was in the cabin while my teammate was out rowing, he didn’t know but at some point every day I grieved for my brother. It was at that point that I knew I had to do something to pay tribute to his life and to what happened.”

They won the race by a full eight days, but more than a decade passed before the invitation to testify at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal finally came. “When the court case came up, I knew that was the time I was going to go to Cambodia, whether it was just to try to find out more about what happened, or just to honour him. Soon after that, I was contacted by a film producer called James Bellamy to see if I wanted to tell the whole story.”

Thirty-one years to the day that Kerry had first set foot on Cambodian soil, on 13 August 2009 Rob Hamill landed at Phnom Penh International Airport to confront his brother’s torturers. “It was incredibly poignant. The first day I arrived at the airport was very traumatic. When I came through customs I remember the first guy I saw looked like a commander in the Khmer Rouge, with the big hat and the medals. I don’t think I’d ever had my photograph taken at an airport before. They took my passport and then took my photo. I was horrified; really angry. I felt like I was going through the same process my brother had gone through 31 years prior at S-21.

“I got through that and calmed down a bit, then went to get my bags and my mind was going. I saw all these bags coming out on the carousel and they became metaphoric corpses. I went from anger to being quite emotional, suddenly feeling for all the lives that had been affected by the Khmer Rouge. It was a bizarre moment for me. I hadn’t prepared myself for that at all.”

Within the clinical white walls of the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia, Rob delivered one of the tribunal’s most incendiary testimonies. That time, he was better prepared. As S-21 prison chief Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch, took the stand, their eyes locked. “He challenged me: it was more than a feeling. The judges came in, we stood up and I looked across the courtroom and he was just staring at me. We stared at each other for about ten seconds. I felt that was quite a challenging thing to do, for someone who was supposedly remorseful and seeking forgiveness. It intrigued me. For me, trying to forgive, it didn’t bode well.”

Reading his victim impact statement out to the court, Rob said: “Duch, at times I have wanted to ‘smash’ you, to use your words, in the same way that you smashed so many others. At times I have imagined you shackled, starved, whipped and clubbed viciously. I have imagined your scrotum electrified, being forced to eat your own faeces, being nearly drowned and having your throat cut. I have wanted that to be your experience, your reality.”

Duch, who admitted overseeing the deaths of at least four of the nine foreigners, told the judges that he couldn’t remember Kerry. “My interpretation of that,” says Rob, “is that it’s a lot worse than I ever could have imagined, so he tried not to even go there because it wouldn’t have made him look any better. I haven’t read every word that was written or that he said in the court, but my general feeling is that there are parts of his testimony that are genuine and heart-felt and really remorseful; the problem is it’s been very inconsistent and contradictory.”

In February 2012, Duch’s 30-year sentence was extended to life imprisonment for his crimes during the murderous rule of the Khmer Rouge. But does Rob believe justice been served? “Having someone be brought to trial and shown up for who they are is important, but justice is bigger than that. It’s more of an overall bigger picture: getting people talking about the issue, about what happened; the trauma inflicted on all the families that were affected by this.”

It’s to this end that Rob agreed to the filming of Brother Number One, an award-winning documentary by Annie Goldson, James Bellamy and Peter Gilbert that follows his journey to the ECCC and is screening at Meta House this week. Along the way, he visits Tuol Sleng, where his brother was tortured; meets three S-21 survivors; and penetrates a Khmer Rouge stronghold to find the Navy officer in charge when Kerry’s yacht was attacked. It is, above all, the story of an innocent man brought to his knees and killed in the prime of his life, and the impact his death had on just one family.

“Here in New Zealand, having this film made and people being able to watch it, and creating this conversation afterwards. I know people have seen the film and have gone away for days, weeks, contemplating it and talking about the ramifications of what happened at that time – and hopefully learning from it. That’s what the court has helped facilitate: books being written; conversations overheard in a cafe. It’s infinite, and that’s where the court has played a bigger role than having one person brought up in front of the world. It’s created a dialogue and that’s incredibly powerful.

“Whether Case 003 goes ahead or not, there’s an opportunity now to start up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission – the South African version of seeking justice. Could something be created in Cambodia to say ‘We 100% guarantee no one else is going to be brought to trial, but you’re probably feeling a lot of guilt about what you did, so come forward, talk about it and let’s get it out there.’?”

As for reconciling his own loss, Rob – whose request for a meeting with Duch has twice been refused – is more circumspect, but says the process of confronting the past for Brother Number One has been “very, very positive”. “If I think deeply about it the emotion starts coming up, which suggests there are issues still there and reinforces that the process of grieving never ends. I still want to meet with Duch. I’d like to find out more about what he was thinking; why he was thinking the way he was thinking and why he did the things that he did; the motives behind it.” [His voice breaks] “I can’t say too much…”

 

Space, man

12th Planet, the don of US dubstep, on ancient aliens, chicken and wobble, and what to do when the world ends

EARTH TO COLLIDE WITH NIBIRU ON NOVEMBER 21, 2012! The headline – writ large in block capitals, lest readers underestimate just how swiftly the human race is to be snuffed out – first appeared on weeklyworldnews.com in June of this year. But before you go barricading yourself into an underground bunker/drinking yourself to death with Hershey’s chocolate syrup/seizing the pre-apocalypse chance to carve your ex-lovers up with a chainsaw, perhaps a little context is in order. Not only does the headline appear next to a story announcing the world will in fact end a full month earlier, the same site also declares that Mitt Romney is running for president of Facebook and Joe Biden has joined outlaw motorcycle club the Hell’s Angels.

 

Confused? You’re not alone. And neither, according to controversial Azerbaijani-born American author Zecharia Stitchin, are we – at least in the ‘human race descended from ancient aliens’ sense. For Nibiru, according to Stitchin, is a giant planet first identified by Babylonians that passes Earth every 3,600 years, allowing its ‘sentient inhabitants’ to drop in for the intergalactic equivalent of a quick cuppa. It was during one such fly-by that the occupants of this so-called 12th planet grew tired of plundering Earth for its raw materials and so genetically engineered us, homo sapiens, to do the heavy digging on their behalf.

Or so the legend goes, for the late author’s theories have been derided by almost every member of the world’s scientific community (as Brian Switek writes on Smithsonian.com, referring to the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens series, “I had a feeling that if I watched the show – which popularises far-fetched, evidence-free idiocy about how human history has been moulded by extraterrestrial visitors – my brain would jostle its way out of my skull and stalk the Earth in search of a kinder host. Or, at the very least, watching the show would kill about as many brain cells as a weekend bender in Las Vegas.”).

Still, the beliefs persist – so much so that the man credited with introducing dubstep to America, Los Angeles-based John Dadzie (due to play at Pontoon this week), actually named himself after Stitchin’s fictional object. 12th Planet, as this West Coast junglist is now known, counts ancient aliens among his inspirations and in January released an EP with the ominous-sounding title The End is Near! We invaded his inbox to talk hamburgers, boots-in-a-dryer dubstep and how to go out with a bang when – and if – the world finally ends.

Inspired by ancient alien stories, eh? Tell us about the first time you picked up a copy of Zecharia Sitchin’s first Earth Chronicles book, The 12th Planet.

Ha ha! I had the name 12th Planet before Ancient Aliens episode one aired. I originally received the book around 2003 from DMC champ DJ Craze’s wife, Ros. The book pretty much changed my life.

The head of the European Space Agency once told me he’s convinced life exists on other planets, even if it’s just microbial. Do you have a theory on the existence of extraterrestrial life? What might it look like? And what would you do if aliens tried to abduct you?

I feel there is life out there 100%. And if it does exist on a terrestrial planet like ours, then I would assume that they would have a similar make-up to human beings. I would even go as far to say that extraterrestrial life probably walks among us right now.

Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas has just made his intergalactic debut with a song of his broadcast from the Mars rover Curiosity. Any plans to send your music to Nibiru?

My music is a direct message from Nibiru.

The subtext of The End is Near! EP: if the eschatologists are right and 2012 really is the end-date of a 5,125-year-long cycle in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar, how would you go out with a bang? 

I’m not sure if the world will truly end on December 21, but I can tell you that I’ll be performing at the Piramides de Cholula in Mexico with Skrillex and Nadastrom. If the world ends that day, I’m glad I got to celebrate with a great group of individuals.

Skrillex: he’s your best mate. Tell us about the vibe between you two.

I love working and hanging out with Skril! He’s an awesome person and inspires me to be a better producer, person and performer at all times.

What are your memories of when your mum bought you your first radio cassette, which you once described as the best thing that ever happened to you?

I think my first cassette single was Young MC’s Bust a Move, or Kool Moe Dee’s I Go To Work. I remember being so happy I could play the songs whenever I wanted, without having to wait for them to come on MTV or the radio. It was a great day.

From drum ‘n’ bass to the equally bass-centric dubstep: what exactly is it about bass that reaches parts other frequencies can’t?

I think DNB and dubstep are pretty much cut from the same cloth. The over-emphasis on low frequencies gives you a sort of fight-or-flight response. For instance, when you hear a fighter jet fly over and all of a sudden you get this feeling in your stomach like ‘Prepare, something is about to happen.’ This is the same feeling you receive on the initial impact of a big dubstep/DNB drop.

You’ve said the biggest misconception about dubstep is that “it’s only made up of chicken and wobble”. I laughed out loud when I read that. Can you explain? Also, how is the sound evolving?

I was making a reference to a famous American dish called chicken and waffles. I should have used a different metaphor for this quote. Dubstep is like a hamburger: sure, meat and bread are its prime ingredients, but it’s what you add to the burger that makes it different. With that said, dubstep will always have the two main primary elements, bass and drums, but it’s what you add to it that makes the genre evolve. Korn, Asking Alexandria, and Hollywood Undead added heavy metal and all made revolutionary advances. James Blake, Usher and Bieber gave it a pop edge and now people who would have never listened to dubstep have an idea of what the music is. The list goes on and on, and will continue to grow, as long as people are up for a change of the taste of the hamburger they’re eating.

As the man who brought the British dubstep movement to the US, inspired by BBC Radio 1’s Mary Ann Hobbs, you’ve been hailed as ‘The don of American dubstep.’ Are you blushing right now?

I wouldn’t say that I brought the movement to the US, because there were guys pushing the music long before me. I gotta give it up to people like Joe Nice, Dave Q, Matty G and Juju for really laying down the initial groundwork. My partner in Smog, Drew Best, once told a magazine from LA that I was the “Johnny Appleseed of dubstep; sure there were apples before Johnny, but now there are orchards.”

You’ve said you’d love to work with Rage Against The Machine. What is it about them that gets you going?

RATM taught me to think outside of the box and to question authority. The Evil Empire inner CD had a picture of 50 books that I tried to read all throughout high school and my early adult life, to understand other perspectives on life. It helped me find books like The Anarchist Cookbook, Guerrilla Warfare, Art of War, Wretched of the Earth, and so on and so forth. So for me to work with them would be an incredible experience, because that band was one of my initial true inspirations to become a better man through music.

Reasons (Doctor P Remix) was named one of the ‘30 Greatest Dubstep Songs of All Time’ by Spin magazine. Did you have a hunch it was going to be that big?

At the time I commissioned the Doctor P remix of Reasons, I would have never imagined the magnitude that the remix would have. I was looking for a more dance-floor direction for the Smog EP and that’s why I went for my DNB chum Picto. He made it around the same time as Sweet Shop and Badman Sound, and all three kind of jumped to the top of the charts at the same time. I can’t believe that it is still in rotation to this day, and I am thankful to everyone for the support.

And finally, is there anything else you’d like to talk about that we’ve forgotten to ask?

This is my first time coming to Cambodia, so I have no idea of what to expect. I can’t wait to get to DJ out there and I would like to say thanks to everyone who might attend.*

*The Advisor accepts no responsibility for the gig being cancelled due to alien invasion.
WHO: 12th Planet
WHAT: The don of US dubstep
WHERE: Pontoon, St. 172
WHEN: 11pm September 14
WHY: The end is near!

 

Dead fantastic

He’s the lead singer of an apocalyptic American alt-rock band famous for destroying instruments on stage, but this soft-spoken second-gen hippy is more at home in his own fantastical Tolkienesque universe – complete with languages, maps and timelines – than he is embodying the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. When not committing unspeakable acts of violence against guitars, drum kits and the odd piano, Conrad Keely of the ominously titled … And You Shall Know Us By The Trail Of Dead is more often to be found wearing blue ballpoint pens to a nub bringing to life the extraordinary world he’s been constructing in his mind since childhood. This half-Thai half-Englishman, born-in-Britain and raised in Hawaii, was one of the founders, along with childhood pal, drummer, vocalist and guitarist Jason Reece, of the Trail of Dead – a band once described by Rolling Stone magazine’s Andrew Dansby as a “post-punk Voltron that just might be the most exciting unit working today.” The parallel universe Keely, also an accomplished artist, has conjured forth on paper knows no borders: characters, plots, all spill over from sketches and comics straight into his music. As Trail of Dead ready for the release of their eighth album, the material for which was recorded in Germany earlier this year, Keely is working on a graphic novel here in Phnom Penh before their tour of the UK, Germany and Taiwan kicks off in October. The Advisor caught him between local gigs (“When I’m playing here, with the Kampot Playboys or Amanda Bloom and Charlie Corrie, that’s when I get to play stuff that isn’t hard rock, the stuff that I write; things like Hank Snow, Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie – things I like to sing”) to talk Taoism, the new apocalypse, and what it was like knowing Kurt Cobain.

…And You Shall Know Us By The Trail Of Dead sprang from fittingly apocalyptic roots. 

My family moved to Seattle right before the big grunge explosion and it was there, at a college I ended up going to, where the Riot Girl movement started. I saw Nirvana when they were still a small, shitty band. Then I saw them as they got better and better – and then they blew up. In 1993, our lives in Olympia imploded. Not just our lives, but everyone’s lives. Things got really dark. When Kurt Cobain committed suicide, there was this real dark shadow around – everyone knew him and was friends with him. It was a really dark time. A lot of our friends got into drugs; people were dying of overdoses. Jason Reece and I had both had enough and we just said let’s get out of here. We hit on Austin, Texas because no one we knew lived there. We discovered this whole new music scene and latched onto it pretty quickly. Climate-wise it reminded me of Hawaii and even socially people were a lot more laidback and expressive. I felt really at home because people were boisterous and obnoxious in a fun way. That’s where …And You Shall Know Us By The Trail Of Dead started.

There’s a rumour about the name being inspired by a Mayan chant, but that isn’t entirely true, is it?

We’d seen this anime movie called Legend of the Overfiend. There was a scene with this army going through the land and leaving this trail of destruction and desolation, so that’s what I was thinking – the image I came up with while we were driving around coming up with names. I said: [adopts creepy nasal voice] ‘You will know us by the trail of dead.’

In that exact voice, I hope.

[Laughs] In that exact voice – and it made us laugh. I was thinking of Jason’s ex-band-mate, who’d started a band in Olympia called Behead The Prophet And The Lord Shall Live, so the idea of these long Doomsday-sounding band names was on our minds. But that was the name that made us laugh the most.

All these scriptural references: has religion played much of a part in your life?

My mum was raised Catholic, my dad was raised Muslim and my stepfather was involved in this New Age church back before they’d even coined the term ‘New Age’. They were interdenominational – they studied Hari Krishna, Buddhism, everything – and they tried to find fundamental truths in all of them. One of my favourite gospels, which I always go back to for inspiration, is the Gospel of Thomas and that’s been removed from the Bible. It was taken out as an apocryphal gospel during the Council of Nicaea. It’s fascinating: there’s no story in it, just parables, sayings. ‘Jesus said this. Jesus said that.’ In the Bible it says: ‘Give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s; give unto God that which is God’s,’ but in the Gospel of Thomas it says: ‘Give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s; give unto God that which is God’s; give unto me that which is mine.’ It’s a very interesting, cryptic twist. It makes you think: what is mine? That became a lyric on our last album, Tao of the Dead. I was raised thinking about spirituality over religion and my parents had a healthy distrust and disdain for organised religion, even though they believed in the idea of Christ and his teachings. So when Jason and I met, I opened him up to all these ideas and theological discussions – that teenaged questioning thing. Then when it came to the band, it was more like these ideas became symbols and themes around which to wrap concepts.

My lyrics have always been a platform for what I’m interested in and I’m genuinely fascinated by these things. We live not in an apocalyptic time, but we’re obviously leading up to something – some massive world event – that’s going to change the way global society has been moving this past 200 years since the Industrial Revolution. We’ve set this ball rolling and it’s impossible for us to stop. All of us know what’s wrong with society: there’s too many cars, there’s too many people, there’s too much pollution, we’re destroying the planet. We can say these things all we want, but the ball is rolling. Are you and I, right now, willing to give up television and the internet and electronics and move into the woods? No. None of us is going to do that. We’re a part of this snowball effect. We’re caught up in it, we’re moving along with it, and it’s just going to play itself out to its logical conclusion. To live in this time is fascinating and frightening at the same time. I address these things in our lyrics.

How much of a crossover is there between your music and your art?

There was a time at 17 or 18 when I was convinced that, because music was such a discipline for me, I couldn’t do art and I actually tried to give up. In that concerted attempt to stop, that was when it came to me that I had to do art: art was not a choice. It’s not a choice for people who have that drive. You have a pen in your hand and a piece of paper and it’s going to come out. So when I took all my stuff back from my agent and said I’m not doing art any more, it was kind of a big deal. It was a symbolic gesture: I wasn’t giving myself any other option but to do music. I think it was this raw passion that music brought out in me.

The picture that led to what I’m working on now is the cover of our sixth album, Century of Self: a boy looking at a skull in this room cluttered with things, which is basically inspired by what my mum’s house looks like. She has Buddhas and books and knick-knacks everywhere. That led to the question who is this boy and what’s he doing here? And that led to the storyline of the last album, which became the graphic novel for the comic, and then this album led to the novel I’m working on, Strange News From Another Planet.

The boy’s name is Adsel and he’s a savant who was found by this monastic sisterhood. Because he’s found to have special powers, they take him to this temple on an island and to get there, he goes onto this ship, The Festival Time, which was one of our songs and I made a graphic out of it. All of these characters are reflections of people I know, periods of my life, and based on my experiences of travelling and touring – even though it’s set in this science fiction fantasy parallel universe.

What would Sigmund Freud make of this universe you’ve created?

Freud? I don’t know. I started world-building when I was nine, shortly after I read The Hobbit for the first time. This world was something I grew up with. It became something that’s so real it’s like an alternate reality that I can go to when things here get too tedious. I did all the typical world-building things, like create languages and maps and timelines.

Art is my celebration of what I love visually, music of what I love to listen to, and writing is my celebration of the language that I love. English has such an amazing history and it’s such an unlikely success story. Patrick O’Brian, author of the Aubrey-Maturin ‘Master and Commander’ series, is definitely one of the masters of the English language and has been a sort of style guide for me. He breaks all the rules.

Are you breaking any rules with Trail of Dead?

In some ways we’re embracing old rules. I believe in the Western music tradition: I love JS Bach and Mozart. A lot of the rules we apply to our music are actually classical things. On this new album, I was really into the idea of musical motifs and there’s this one ascending riff that’s used in four or five different songs deliberately, this running motif that you hear through the album. There’s a few of those, just to create a sense that the album is one work, one piece – a mini symphony. In that sense, I like the old rules that got forgotten about in rock. Rock broke down so many walls. A lot of the kids that were raised with rock didn’t bother to learn those rules, but the pioneers of rock did. You’ve heard of Peaches? We’ve done a tour with her and she’s hilarious; awesome lady. She recently did the Jesus Christ Superstar musical. They did a show in Brooklyn, New York and it was just insane – and it pissed me off because I’d been wanting to do a Jesus Christ Superstar thing for so long. The opera tradition hasn’t died. People don’t necessarily call it opera any more, but the idea of music as narrative and music as high drama still exists.

There’s no shortage of high drama in the new album, if what you just played for me is anything to go by.

People who are familiar with our band and hear this album will say this is the most aggressive Trail of Dead record in a while. A lot of the aggression that I put into music is addressed to other kinds of music.

Hence the lyrics to Worlds Apart: ‘Look at these cunts on MTV / With their cars and cribs and rings and shit / Is that what being a celebrity means? / Look boys and girls here’s BBC / See corpses, rapes and amputees / What do you think now of the American Dream?’

Things that have always irritated me with music are the lack of convictions, an approach to music that doesn’t display great passion. Passion is what music inspired in me and something that I wanted to convey through music. When I saw Bikini Kill playing on stage – I’d see these local bands which are now legendary in reputation – this raw emotion and energy, inspiration, it was almost uncontrollable. I didn’t know what to do with it. It wasn’t the exact same thing I’d feel when I looked at a Warhol painting, you know? Looking at a Monet, I just didn’t feel like jumping up and down. There’s that visceral thing that music can do to you, especially when you’re at that age when your hormones are raging. It’s so physical, the effect of music. I’ve read a couple of books on the psychology of it and I know there’s something special about how vibrations work on the body. That’s what makes music have this ability, this capacity, to change the way people think, and spur these movements. It’s very powerful: it changes chemicals in the brain; it creates endorphins and does all these really weird things. I didn’t know that at the time, when I was young, but I knew that music created the most powerful passion in me.

 

WHO: Musical prophets
WHAT: Conrad Keely and friends
WHERE: Equinox, St. 278 (Aug 25), and The Willow, St. 21 (Aug 31)
WHEN: 9pm August 25 and 31
WHY: The beginning is nigh