A fantastic conversation with Mike Nagel about writing, authors, music, swimming, quitting drinking, and much more. Mike's books Duplex and CulDeSac are hilarious little masterpieces, check 'em out

https://www.michaelscottnagel.com/

https://autofocusbooks.com/store/p/duplex-mike-nagel

https://www.instagram.com/mike__nagel/

https://x.com/misternagel

https://bsky.app/profile/misternagel.bsky.social

Chatting to Jessamyn Violet about writing, music, the difficulties of making art these days, therapy, and her ace new book Venice Peach

https://jessamynviolet.com/

https://www.instagram.com/jessamynviolet/?hl=en

https://bsky.app/profile/jessamynviolet.bsky.social

https://shop.maudlinhouse.net/#venice-peach

Talking to Dan Tremaglio about dreaming, writing, his Mount Rushmore of authors, and his excellent new book The Only Wolf Is Time

https://www.dantremaglio.com/

https://www.instagram.com/dantremaglio/?hl=en

https://www.saggingmeniscus.com/catalog/the_only_wolf_is_time/

Talking to Brian Alan Ellis about KISS, KISS, more 80s hard rock, KISS, his writing, House Of Vlad Press, and more KISS. Check out his latest collection, The Errors Tour. I have never laughed harder at a book

https://houseofvladpress.com/brian-alan-ellis

https://www.instagram.com/depressedwriterasshole/

https://x.com/brianalanellis

An excellent conversation with Kyle Seibel about writing, performing, perseverance, and his killer new story collection Hey You Assholes

https://www.instagram.com/kylerseibel/

https://x.com/kylerseibel

https://bsky.app/profile/kylerseibel.bsky.social

https://www.clashbooks.com/new-products-2/kyle-seibel-hey-you-assholes-preorder

Great conversation with The Church frontman about his many projects, what he wants from music, and new album The Road To Tibooburra

https://www.instagram.com/stvklby/

https://www.thechurchband.com/

I had a freakin' blast chatting with the Powerhouse of ROCK that is Conan Neutron. We covered just about everything in this marathon session, and his latest Conan Neutron & The Secret Friends record, The Way Of The Neutron, is great, one of the best records I've heard this year

https://neutronfriends.bandcamp.com/album/the-way-of-the-neutron

https://www.instagram.com/conanneutron/?hl=en

https://www.neutronfriends.com/

https://x.com/conanneutron?lang=en

https://bsky.app/profile/neutron.bsky.social

https://lnk.bio/neutron

A real pleasure to finally chat to Tim Lane, author of Your Silent Face and Phil's Siren Song. Talking books, music, Joy Division of course, the brilliant 80s bands that soundtrack his novels, and much more

https://www.yoursilentface.com/

https://www.instagram.com/inlovewithplaid/

https://augstone.substack.com/p/the-counterforce-no-41-books

A fun chat with filmmaker Bobby Miller about his debut novel, Situation Nowhere, in which a new energy drink is causing folks to explode. Talking books, film, comics, and more

https://www.bobbymillertime.com/

https://thebobbymiller.com/situationnowhere

https://bsky.app/profile/bobbymillertime.com

https://augstone.substack.com/

A pleasure to chat with Goolkasian, Heather Morgan, & Adam Wade about the first Replaced By Robots mini-album. A psychobilly/surf-rock cheerleader freak-out heralds three killer new wave tunes. Plus Goolkasian tells a good Cars-related Elevator Drops story. And much more...

https://replacedbyrobots.hearnow.com/the-experiment

https://replacedbyrobots3d.bandcamp.com/album/the-experiment-2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF_oA01satw

https://augstone.substack.com/

I had a great conversation with Ali Smith about music, writing, photography, punk ideals, rock n roll adventures, and her excellent memoir The Ballad Of Speedball Baby

https://www.alismith.com/

https://www.youtube.com/@mommaloveAli

https://www.instagram.com/mommaloveali/

https://www.instagram.com/speedballbaby/

FB: Ali Smith Photo

https://augstone.substack.com/p/the-counterforce-no-56-ali-smith

Psyched to chat with one of my favorite pop stars, TheBabeGabe (BLACKSTARKIDS), about her new solo career and first single and video, PSA. Honored that this is her first solo interview

https://www.instagram.com/ughthatsgabe

https://x.com/_TheBabeGabe

https://bsky.app/profile/thebabegabe.bsky.social

https://thebabegabe.bandcamp.com/album/psa-single

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_vjpYHxQxM

https://augstone.substack.com/

Hopefully one of your new favourite bands, Chemtrails are great rock n roll, with good lyrics and an infectious glammy stomp to boot. A fun conversation with Mia and Laura from the band

https://adoseofchemtrails.bandcamp.com/

https://www.instagram.com/chemtrails_band/

https://pnkslm.com/pages/chemtrails

https://augstone.substack.com/

Talking John Frusciante, Kurt Vonnegut, music, writing, and of course his new book Horse Girl Fever with Kevin Maloney

https://kevinmaloney.net/

https://x.com/kevinrmaloney

https://www.instagram.com/kevinrmaloney

https://www.clashbooks.com/new-products-2/kevin-maloney-horse-girl-fever-preorder

https://twodollarradio.com/products/maloney-kevin

https://augstone.substack.com/

Always a blast to chat with Lily & Alex from Fightmilk. No Souvenirs is one of the best albums of 2024

https://fightmilkisaband.bandcamp.com/album/no-souvenirs

https://x.com/fightmilkband

https://www.instagram.com/fightmilkisaband

https://bsky.app/profile/fightmilkband.bsky.social

Excellent read from their label boss Giles Richards https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/nov/27/i-set-up-my-own-indie-label-from-brexits-brutality-to-the-joy-of-diy-music-heres-what-i-learned

Aug Stone chats to Kimaya Diggs about her lovely songs and the challenges of making music these days

https://www.kimayadiggs.com/

https://kimayadiggs.substack.com/

https://kimayadiggs.bandcamp.com/

https://www.instagram.com/kimayadiggs/

https://augstone.substack.com/

Aug Stone chats to one of his favourite authors, Steve Aylett, about his dazzling and hilarious new book, The Book Lovers

https://www.steveaylett.com/

https://augstone.substack.com/p/the-counterforce-no-51-bauhaus

Aug Stone talks to the man behind Glass Records, David Barker, who has brought much excellent music into the world by the likes of David J, The Jacobites, The Pastels, The Jazz Butcher, Spacemen 3, The Perfect Disaster, and even a mini-LP by The Replacements

https://glassmodern.bandcamp.com/album/glass-remade-remodelled

https://glassmodern.bandcamp.com/

https://glassredux.bandcamp.com/

https://glassminiature.bandcamp.com/

Aug Stone chats to one of his favourite songwriters, Mikey Georgeon, about Mikey's recent The Middle People album, his adventures in Athens & Georgia (the OG ones), the art of making moments, and much more

https://mikeygeorgeson.com/

https://themiddlepeople.bandcamp.com/album/revenge-of-the-killjoys

https://www.alldonebykindness.com/

https://www.instagram.com/mikeygeorgeson/

https://augstone.substack.com/

Aug Stone chats with author John Patrick Higgins about David Coverdale, P.G. Wodehouse, The Smiths, and of course his new novel, Fine 

https://johnpatrickhiggins.blogspot.com/

https://www.saggingmeniscus.com/catalog/fine/

IG: https://www.instagram.com/johnpatrickhiggins/

Twitter: https://x.com/JohnnyMuggins

Aug's Substack: https://augstone.substack.com/

Aug Stone chats with Lou Mathews & Jim Gavin about the funniest books they know, Lou’s new novel Shaky Town on Jim’s new publishing imprint Tiger Van Books, Los Angeles, Thomas Pynchon, Lodge 49, and a whole lot more 

https://www.tigervanbooks.com/shaky-town 

https://bookshop.org/books/shaky-town/9781735303802 

https://twitter.com/tigervanbooks 

​

Aug Stone talks to Mikey Georgeson about his new record Simply The Best, dressing up, trusting the creative emergent process, felt intensities, fortuitous ice cream vans and other cosmic coincidences, David Bowie, & much more  

https://www.mrmikey.net/ 

http://mikeygeorgeson.com/ 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/mistersolo 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mikeygeorgeson/ 

Aug Stone chats to Rachel Love about her first ever solo album Picture In Mind, getting the Ramones’ autographs, ping pong, Dolly Mixture, and much more  

https://rachellove.bandcamp.com/ 

https://www.instagram.com/racheldollymixture/ 

​

Aug Stone chats to Lana Bastašić, the 2020 European Union Prize for Literature winner, about her debut novel Catch The Rabbit, visiting the places James Joyce lived, the works of Vladimir Nabokov, Yuz Aleshkovsky, Aglaja Veteranyi, Magda Szabó, Per Petterson and many other authors, tips for writing, Bosnian curse words, and much more 

https://lanabastasic.com/ 

https://restlessbooks.org/lana-bastasic 

Aug Stone talks to Møtrik’s Erik Golts & Dave Fulton about their new record MØØN: The Cosmic Electrics of MØTRIK, Krautrock and other cosmic grooves, ‘circus music’, and a whole lot more 

Pre-Order the album - hthttps://pocp.co/motrik

https://motrik.bandcamp.com/ 

https://www.facebook.com/motrikband 

https://www.instagram.com/motrikband/ 

https://www.jealousbutcher.com/ 

​

Aug Stone talks to Philip Jeays about his excellent new album Blossoms & Bicycles, Jacques Brel, David Bowie, the importance of songs meaning things and much more.  

https://philipjeays.bandcamp.com/ 

https://www.jeays.com/ 

https://www.facebook.com/PhilipJeays 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwwoi3AFPh_QAvBzpYMB8rA 

Aug Stone talks to author and comedian Mike Carlon about Van Halen, 80s pop culture, his new book The Ruin Of Souls, and much more  

Mike’s site - mikecarlon.com  

Uncorking A Story podcast - MikeCarlon.com/podcast  

All socials: @uncorkingastory  

​

Aug Stone talks to prolific psychedelic popster Anton Barbeau about his new album Oh The Joys We Live For and a whole lotta pop music  

http://www.antonbarbeau.com/ 

Twitter: @antonbarbeau 

https://bigstirrecords.com/anton-barbeau 

Aug Stone talks to author John Higgs about his excellent new book, William Blake Vs The World. There’s A LOT of talk about Blake. And a bit about Iron Maiden too.

https://johnhiggs.com/ 

https://uk.bookshop.org/books/william-blake-vs-the-world/9781474614351 

https://twitter.com/johnhiggs/ 

Aug Stone talks to Ari Neufeld & Dominic Appleton of the London dream pop/space rock band Breathless about the 30th anniversary reissue of their Between Happiness And Heartache 

http://www.tenorvossa.co.uk/pages/Breathless.html 

Aug Stone talks to Belgian artist Brecht Evens about his excellent new book The City Of Belgium, his ideas about color and composition, endless discos, a ‘very spectacular, amusing & exciting bout of psychosis’ in Tokyo eight years ago, his next 500 page book, and much more 

http://www.brechtevens.com/ 

https://www.instagram.com/evens.brecht/ 

https://drawnandquarterly.com/city-belgium 

Aug Stone talks to Amelia Fletcher & Rob Pursey of The Catenary Wires about writing letters to The Cure, doing a gig with Vaginal Davis in LA, starting a record label in this day and age, their new album Birling Gap with its songs of modern paranoia, coming to recognize change, frozen relationships, the state of England, 80s discos, and much more 

http://catenarywiresband.com/ 

https://catenarywires.bandcamp.com/album/birling-gap 

https://twitter.com/catenarywires 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unxfeREtlb4 

Aug Stone goes through the new Fightmilk album, ‘Contender’ with Lily & Alex via Dollywood and other theme parks, ‘maritime narratives’,  New Order lyrics, favourite Pulp albums, loveable otters, and much more  

https://fightmilkisaband.bandcamp.com/album/contender 

Twitter: @fightmilkband 

​

Aug Stone chats with writer Reggie Chamberlain-King and Swan River Press publisher Brian Showers about early 20th century Irish clergyman, linguist, writer, & early radio broadcaster Conall Cearnach, Swan River’s recently published collection of Cearnach’s work ‘The Fatal Move & Other Stories’, the Irish discovery of America, and much more 

Swan River Press site - http://www.swanriverpress.ie/ 

Buy ‘The Fatal Move’ - http://swanriverpress.ie/title_fatal.html 

Buy ‘Uncertainties Vol. 5’ - http://swanriverpress.ie/title_uncertainties5.html 

Twitter: @SwanRiverPress 

​

Aug Stone goes over the long and interesting career of The Real Tuesday Weld with Stephen Coates as he brings things to a close with a trio of final albums  

https://therealtuesdayweld.com/home 

https://www.facebook.com/therealtuesdayweld 

https://twitter.com/realtuesdayweld 

https://www.instagram.com/realtuesdayweld/ 

Aug Stone talks to Andrew Shaw of The Silent Academy about the nature of memory, Star Wars, Eastern philosophy, his new book coordinates, and much more 

https://www.silentacademy.com/ 

Twitter: @silentacademy 

IG: @thesilentacademy 

Aug Stone talks to Ben Siddall from The Lodger about their comeback after a decade, new album Cul-De-Sac Of Love, the song ‘Different Drum’, many many rock and pop bands, and much more 

@thelodgerband 

https://www.facebook.com/thelodgerband 

https://www.instagram.com/thelodgerband/ 

https://album.link/i/1552769015 

Aug Stone chats to author Peter Bebergal about his new book Appendix N: The Eldritch Roots Of Dungeons & Dragons, his own D&D games, psychogeography, music, and a whole lot more 

Twitter: @peterbebergal 

IG: @peter_bebergal 

http://strangeattractor.co.uk/shoppe/appendix-n/ 

​

Aug Stone talks to Norwegian guitarist Hedvig Mollestad about her killer new album Ding Dong. You’re Dead, motherhood & her ‘Maternity Beat’ project, Black Sabbath, a Two Ronnies sketch, and much more 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HedvigMollestadTrio/ 

Twitter: @HedvigMollestad  

Instagram: @HedvigMollestadTrio 

Buy the album: https://boomkat.com/products/ding-dong-you-re-dead 

Aug Stone talks to author Steve Aylett about his new comic Hyperthick, the legacy of Lint, why he finds hens so hilarious, seeing ideas as shapes, treating the reader with intelligence and respect, Trickster archetypes, stand-up comedy, and much more 

https://www.steveaylett.com/ 

Twitter: @steveaylett 

Aug Stone talks to graphic designer, comics artist, and author Rian Hughes about his mammoth new book XX, punk rock, unique London nightclubs, book cover vs album sleeve design, and much more  

Twitter: @rianhughes 

https://www.devicefonts.co.uk/ 

https://celestialmechanic.bandcamp.com/ 

Aug Stone talks to The Jangling Man himself, Martin Newell, about his upcoming reissue of The Off White Album, the new record he’s just recorded, writing a libretto for Rip Van Winkle, his thoughts on The Kinks, Slade, and White Reaper, the cluelessness of ‘the music biz’, and much more  

Twitter: @Cleaners_Venus1 

https://thecleanersfromvenus.bandcamp.com/ 

https://capturedtracks.com/artist/martin-newell/ 

Young Southpaw talks to musician and raconteur Mark Reeder about his film B Movie: Lust & Sound in West-Berlin 1979-1989, putting on Joy Division’s only Berlin gig, illegal punk rock shows behind the Wall in East Germany, and much more 

https://mfsberlin.com/ 

https://markreeder.bandcamp.com/ 

Twitter: @markreedermfs 

IG: @ markreeder.mfs 

https://www.youngsouthpaw.com/ 

Young Southpaw: You were Factory Record’s man in Berlin? 

Mark Reeder: Well, I knew Joy Division, I knew Ian Curtis even before he was in a band. Rob Gretton, who became their manager, was a DJ at one of the clubs in Manchester. I used to work at a record shop and I’d supply these DJs with all their records, make suggestions and stuff. And when Joy Division actually made their first single, they came into the shop and asked me if I’d put it in the shop and sell it, which I did, of course. An Ideal For Living. So I knew the people who were involved, and I knew Tony Wilson as well. He’d come in every Saturday evening and ask me to put some records aside, any cool ones. So I got really involved with them. And when I moved to Germany, the first thing Rob Gretton said was ‘can I send you some records and you can send them to the radio stations and maybe we’ll get some airplay? You never know, we might get a gig.’ And no one was remotely interested (laughs) in this miserable band from Manchester. They didn’t care. We didn’t get any reaction at all.  

YS: And you put on their one show in Berlin. What was that like? 

LISTEN TO THE EPISODE TO FIND OUT  

Young Southpaw talks to Dutch artist, Hanco Kolk, about his new Meccano book, Billy Wilder films, his soundtrack choices to suit his different working methods, and much more 

https://hancokolk.com/ 

https://www.instagram.com/hancokolk/ 

https://www.youngsouthpaw.com/ 

Hanco Kolk: When I’m sketching, it’s different than when I’m inking. When I’m sketching I need to clear my head. There’s this little voice in my head that says ‘you’re never gonna be there. You’ve fooled the public for 30 years but now it’s over.’ So I have to have real loud music, just to put those ideas out of my head. But when I’m inking it’s just nice lines so different music, soundtracks mostly. I love Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone soundtracks. It has to be a bit theatrical, it has to be big. But when I’m sketching it could be hardcore rap, or metal, or anything. Anything that keeps my blood going.  

Young Southpaw: What have you been listening to recently? 

HK: A Dutch artist called Spinvis, who is a bit arty but his production is fantastic, his songs are great, and I really love his music. Sometimes you have music that you feel under your skin, like ‘oh yeah, this feels good’. This is that kind of music. He’s also a friend. We met when I was doing artwork for him. Apparently he always wanted to be a comic artist and I always wanted to make music so we live each other’s dreams. What I liked about him first time we met was I was working on artwork for a song of his that is really melancholic, a deep and poetic song, and he came in and took his guitar and made a carnival version of it. Someone who takes himself not too seriously, I love that. That’s how we became friends. Sometimes I draw live onstage with him and the band.  

Young Southpaw chats to Aussie indie pop legend Mark Monnone about dressing up as KISS, the Lost & Lonesome Recording Co.’s incredible output, getting cassettes from the rubbish tip, his favourite albums of all-time, The Lucksmiths, and much more 

@MonnoneAlone 

https://lostandlonesome.bandcamp.com/ 

Mark Monnone: When I met the guys in The Lucksmiths in high school, I really clicked with them. Even though musically it was probably a little bit different than what I was listening to. But it was getting together with people who were quite, I guess, organized and really keen to rehearse and just write songs as much as possible. Up until that point I was basically playing covers and trying to write a few of my own songs, but when I met Marty Donald in high school, he just had notebooks upon notebooks full of lyrics. And I was captivated by that whole aspect. I didn’t realize that people were actually dedicating all their free time to sitting around writing songs. So that was a turning point. 

Young Southpaw: What stuff were you listening to then? 

MM: Oh man, just like your mixed grab bag of teenage boy stuff. Jimi Hendrix, The Ramones, Rolling Stones, basically bands with great back catalogues that you could dive into. I was really into Creedence. The Kinks. A lot of 60s stuff. Whereas Marty was listening to more 80s indie pop stuff. A lot of The Smiths and Lloyd Cole. So that was interesting, being opened up to a different world of music as well.  

YS: Do you remember the first song you ever wrote? 

MM: Uh yeah (laughs). Ok so, when I was in about Year 7 or Year 8, through my sister again, I started listening to Midnight Oil. I’m not sure how much you know about Midnight Oil in the States but...  So when I was about 13, 14, I sort of fancied myself as a bit of a political activist (laughs) and I got really into what Midnight Oil was espousing - land rights for indigenous people and nuclear disarmament, things like that so...I didn’t really understand the mechanics of it all, I just had this real surface level passion to fight the power. And I started writing a fair few horrible (laughs) sort of anthems. They were pretty terrible. I mean I’m sort of embarrassed to even tell you that much. I think the lowest point, and my friends bring this up occasionally, was one song that was called ‘Butcher Baker Uranium Miner’ (laughs) and it was just really horrific.  

https://www.youngsouthpaw.com/

Young Southpaw talks to Peter Coviello about his upcoming book ‘Vineland Reread’ and the wonderful - very funny and very prescient - world of Thomas Pynchon’s novels 

Twitter: @pcoviell 

Buy the book - https://cup.columbia.edu/book/vineland-reread/9780231185219 

Peter Coviello: As you know, there’s a certain kind of dude who would, like, push Pynchon on you, you know? As a dude who knew a lot and had a lot of information and things like that. And those were not always my dudes. So I was sort of wary. You know what I mean? There’s a certain quality of a very dude-ish delectation around Pynchon that was not really my thing. And so you’re heard of him because you’re in school and you’re reading things, but then after graduation a clutch of my friends had moved to Chicago, I’d moved away and I came back and I got to see them. That was a tremendous joy in the way of being 23, and seeing your friends that you haven’t seen for years, so you’re drunk all the time and you’re just very happy to see each other. And what I realized with this set of friends - John, Laura, and Enrique - is that they’d all been reading this one book. And that book was ‘Vineland’. They were just delighted by it in the way like the way that you’d be delighted by a record. They just wanted to talk about it, and they wanted to fight about like what track was coolest, and I was like ‘alright’. So the first Pynchon I read was ‘Vineland’, which was shattering to me not because I understood it or anything, I just thought it was so funny. There hadn’t been a book I’d read where I had laughed so hard and so self-endangeringly, I thought I was going to rupture something internal. After that I read ‘The Crying Of Lot 49’, which, of course, is smaller and easier to digest and funny. And then I went back to ‘Vineland’. And then it lifted off from there. But ‘Vineland’ was really my first immersive experience. And it was with a handful of other people and that was a way to stay close to them. It was totally like how you fight about a record when it came out. And this was 1994, we had lots of records to fight about, 23 years old as we were. 

Young Southpaw chats with writer Jeremy Allen about his excellent upcoming Serge Gainsbourg biography, Relax Baby Be Cool. We talk about his meetings with Jane Birkin, Anna Karina, and Mick Harvey, amongst others, for his research. There was so much to cover it us took 38 minutes to get to ‘Je T’aime...’ 

https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Jeremy-Allen/Relax-Baby-Be-Cool--The-Artistry-And-Audacity-Of-Serge-Gainsbourg/25438425 

twitter.com/jeres 

instragram.com/jeremiad 

Jeremy Allen: He was so musically voracious, and acquisitive. He stole from everywhere. And for me, it’s probably that point, from writing about Serge, that I really got into jazz, and I’ve been getting into reggae more. It’s almost like Serge is the touchpoint and I’ve gone further into some of the stuff that he got into, that I probably should have got into before, really. Everything he did really, he kind of stole from black music and Frenchified it. Jazz, to begin with. Then he goes through his rock n roll period, he gets quite into the yé-yé writing, and he does it in a quite cynical way, actually. I guess the only time when he’s sort of listening to white music is when he’s copying swinging Carnaby Street, which is coming from America anyway, coming from rock n roll and rhythm & blues and all that sort of thing. Also, he made an album called Percussions where he ripped off a load of drum beats from Olatunji, this famous Nigerian drummer. It was very naughty because he didn’t credit him or tell him, but he built songs around his rhythms. And then he does reggae... So he did this throughout his career, stealing from black music. And from classical music - Chopin, Ravel, Dvořák...  

It was very meta, very Dada-ist. I don’t think many people had done that in music at that time. If you listen to a song like ‘Contact’ by Brigitte Bardot - just listen to that song! - it was made in 1968 and it’s like techno thirty years too early. It’s incredible, it blows my mind! You just think ‘wow’, he’s looping, and he’s playing with musique concrète. He was working with Colombier at the time, who had been working with Pierre Schaeffer, I think, so maybe that was where that influence came in. Serge was brilliant at finding people to work with. That’s a real gift. Bowie had it, Madonna for a while, though maybe not so much in recent years. But it’s a real talent in itself to find the right people to work with. But Serge also made all this great music, all this varied music, and right at the center of it was him so he knew what he was doing.  

Young Southpaw chats to comedian and Whose Line Is It Anyway? star Greg Proops about late 70s concert adventures, life in London, Glasgow audiences, AC/DC, James Bond, and much more 

https://www.gregproops.com/ 

https://twitter.com/gregproops 

https://www.instagram.com/proopdog/ 

https://www.youngsouthpaw.com/

Greg Proops: I saw AC/DC in 1978. My cousin Donny and I drove down to San José. They weren’t headlining, if you can believe this. It was Ronnie Montrose. Ronnie Montrose with Gamma, this was after he was in Montrose with Sammy Hagar. AC/DC was the middle act, and that’s who we went to see. We dressed up at my house and I still have pictures of us, Polaroids. I found them again in my garage during the beginning of the containment, cause I was going through everything. We’re being total idiots in the pictures and I’m wearing like a tweed jacket and a long scarf, and Donny’s got a ruffled shirt on. So on the way down we’re smoking weed and Donny goes ‘let’s just pretend to be English the whole time and see if we can fool those motorheads’. And I’m like ‘I’ll do it’. So we get there, we put on these cod English accents, and everybody’s talking to us and asking us about England. And we’re just lying, right? (adopts British accent) ‘oh yeah, Brighton, yeah, it’s great’. So that was 45 minutes in line of just pretending. And because we looked so fruitopian, everybody was like ‘ok’.  

So AC/DC comes on and they were just sensational. They’re one of the best rock outfits. The first time I saw The Clash, The Ramones, and AC/DC were the most straight ahead fury. And really good. Bon had no shirt, the tightest jeans in the world, tennis shoes. Angus came out with the schoolboy uniform, the whole thing, with the bag and everything. And of course that’s shed, one by one by one. And there was no chanting ‘Angus’ in those days but we knew who he was. And the part of the show that blew everyone’s minds was, one, their attack. Phil, Malcolm, and Cliff in the back, then Bon up front with Angus as satellite. And they came at you. Angus never stopped banging his head. At a certain point you’re like ‘you must have brain damage’. So then Angus and Bon disappear from the stage and it’s just the three of them banging away. And everyone’s like ‘huh? what has happened?’ Cut to - great commotion towards the front of the stage. He had a sneaky cordless guitar with a radio transmitter, which was like unbelievably high tech in those days. This is the 70s. And Bon is carrying Angus on his shoulders like a child, and Angus is furiously headbanging, screaming away a solo, and he comes right through the crowd. Like the circus, like vaudeville. And people were just like (screams) ‘YES!’  It was the most awesome thing. Better than pyrotechnics. There were no flash pots, nothing. They were a straight, stripped down band with crappy lighting. And it was really exciting. Cause they’re rock n roll. And then Ronnie Montrose came on and we split. To show our contempt for him never being able to follow how awesome AC/DC were.  

So cut to the 90s, I’m drunk and I’m in England. I come home late and we’ve just gotten cable. They didn’t get cable until the 90s in England. So now we’ve got all these channels, and there was one channel that just showed old shows. And I’m kinda high, I’ve come home from a gig, I turn on the TV and it’s AC/DC from 1978, at a U.K. university. And as I watch, I realize I saw this set. It was very exciting.  

..... 

Greg Proops: When I was seven, I had to go to Sunday School that year for some reason. My mother got a notion that it would be real important for me to get some churchin’. They bought me a little navy blue suit, with a white shirt and this clip-on tie. I’d wear it to church with dress shoes. And then when church was over in the afternoon, I’d go ‘can I keep the suit on? I just need to wear it for the rest of the day.’ Then I’d get my Star Trek tracer gun and (sings James Bond theme), all around the apartment building, in the pool, just shooting other kids with the tracer gun. But when you have the suit on, my small mind equated James Bond, Sean Connery, the suit, the gun, it was what you could aspire to be as a seven-year-old. A friend of my dad’s bought me the James Bond kit, this attaché that opened up, a knife came out one end, then there was a radio that turned into a machine gun, and a camera that turned into a Luger. That was pretty hot stuff.  

Young Southpaw: What’s your favourite Bond theme? 

GP: I’m partial to ‘Thunderball’, only because it’s not popular and no one ever plays it. The words are kinda weird, but I love how Tom Jones sings it. I think the two best are Shirley Bassey ones - ‘Goldfinger’ and ‘Diamonds Are Forever’. ‘Diamonds Are Forever’ is a classy little song. I was glad they brought her back a bunch of times, that was great. The other one I really love is ‘License To Kill’. Because it has nothing to do with Bond at all, it’s just so awesome that they got Gladys Knight to do it..... There’s a curry on Dean Street in London that we always ate at, right around the corner from Whose Line’s executive offices. It was cheap and shitty, and we’d just guzzle beer because it was open late, the only places you could get beer late in the those days. I think the only record they had was the album of ‘License To Kill’. Cause every 15-20 minutes you heard ‘License To Kill’. And the first time we went there, my English friend Paul pointed out to me that on every single chorus Gladys Knight goes ‘I’ve got a license to kilt’. So have a listen, cause I’m pretty sure she does.  

Young Southpaw chats to Henry Kaiser about his phenomenal new record A Love Supreme Electric, Coltrane & Miles, Thomas Pynchon, guitars on Antarctica, and much more 

https://henrykaiser.bandcamp.com/ 

https://cuneiformrecords.bandcamp.com/album/a-love-supreme-electric-a-love-supreme-and-meditations 

https://www.youtube.com/c/CuneiformRecords/videos 

https://www.youngsouthpaw.com/

Henry Kaiser: I really got into music in high school. I think it was the San Francisco music scene, the kind of live gigs we could go to. We could go and see all kinds of great Indian music at the Ali Akbar College Of Music, go to all-night concerts of Indian music. We’d go to The Avalon, Winterland, and The Fillmore and see amazing things. Amazing bills that Bill Graham would book, where he’d put on B.B. King, Charles Lloyd, and Love, something like that. So I just got to see a lot of music, there was underground radio, there was non-commercial radio. I heard 20th century classical music, experimental music. And I fell in love with enjoying music as a consumer in high school. I didn’t start playing guitar until I got to college. Got a guitar in 1971. November 1st. Then I became a producer instead of just a consumer, slowly. 

Young Southpaw: Was there something in particular that made you want to pick up a guitar? 

HK: Three experiences that happened in the same week made me want to pick up a guitar. I heard an album called Topography Of The Lungs with Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, and Hann Bennink, and I could identify - like Derek Bailey was talking directly to me with his guitar. And I went to a really great John Fahey concert, in a high school auditorium where he played for three hours, played his whole repertoire. And then right after that, I went to a Captain Beefheart concert at Tufts University in Massachusetts. Fred MacDowell was opening. This was before The Spotlight Kid was released, and they played that material. And Elliot Ingber, ‘Winged Ell Fingerling’, guitarist who has also been in The Mothers with Frank Zappa, played the best, most exciting, moving guitar solo I’d ever heard in my life on an instrumental called ‘Alice In Blunderland’. And I went out and bought a guitar the next day. And I still have that guitar. It’s a black telecaster. Actually, I just made a video show about my first three guitars that went up on Thanksgiving. It’s at the Cuneiform Records YouTube page. It’s called ‘A Thanksgiving For Guitars’.  

Young Southpaw chats with sunshine pop maestro Louis Philippe about his new record ‘Thunderclouds’, his backing band The Night Mail, the legendary él and Humbug record labels, and much more, with LP offering great insight into his creating such wonderful music.  

https://louisphilippe1.bandcamp.com/ 

http://www.louisphilippe.co.uk/ 

@PhilippeAuclair 

Young Southpaw: Your press release calls the album ‘the autumnal side of sunshine pop’. Which is a great phrase.  

Louis Philippe: It’s not mine (laughs). Or maybe it was, I can’t remember. 'Autumnal' was actually a good word, I think, to choose for the record.  

YS: I know I associate certain bands and albums with certain seasons. Do you find that yourself?  

LP: Yep. If you say ‘autumnal’, The Clientele are very much a band that I associate with that season. With the spring, I would associate like Roger Nichols & The Small Circle of Friends, which is something which is a little bit niche but there you go. The Meters would be summery. Because obviously you would go for The Beach Boys for summer, yeah, but not all of the Beach Boys are summer, some of the Beach Boys are actually winter. Some of the more experimental stuff. But yes, I associate music with seasons. I wouldn’t go straight into thinking ‘oh yes, of course, this is a January record. This is a March record’. But yes. It’s not forcing to associate a record or a type of music with a time of the year. Not at all. And autumn for some reason seems to be more evocative than other seasons, when it comes to music. I think it’s because in pop there’s always a solar, a sunshine element. But most great pop - I’m not saying my record is great, it is great, but that’s not what I’m saying - there’s an element of melancholy and nostalgia. This is like the leaves turning, and the days shortening, and a different kind of warmth. So yes, I suppose that autumn really fits in very well with my idea of pop.  

YS: Evokes twilight as well. 

LP: Yep. Actually there’s even a song on the record which is about twilight. The song ‘The Mighty Owl’, which is the owl of Minerva, which only comes out when it gets dark.   

(listen to the end to hear ‘The Mighty Owl’)  

Young Southpaw talks to American ‘English eccentric’ Anton Barbeau about ABBA, memories of lost songs, the bird lifestyle, meeting Graham Chapman, and so much more. 

Listen to new record ‘Manbird’ at https://antonbarbeau.bandcamp.com/album/manbird 

http://www.antonbarbeau.com/ 

https://antonbarbeau.bandcamp.com/ 

@antonbarbeau 

Young Southpaw: What made you fall in love with music as a kid, do you remember?  

Anton Barbeau: Well, yeah, back to The Beatles. My parents had five or six Beatles records, plus John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ when I was growing up. I was born in ’67, about a month before ‘Sgt. Pepper’ came out, so I’m sure I was hearing Beatles before I was even born, and I’m sure I heard ‘Sgt. Pepper’ when it was first out, even though I was only a wee baby. But yeah, The Beatles. My earliest memory is crawling around through my parents collection, trying to find the one that had ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’. That was my favourite song, from age zero.  

YS: You get compared to Robyn Hitchcock, Julian Cope, and XTC a lot. Are you fans of those guys? 

AB: Oh, I am, very much so. Huge influences. It’s funny cause I’ve sort of found ways of connecting, if not directly to the artists, to those who have worked with them. So that’s been a funny little part of my career story in the past few years. I had a band in England called Three Minute Tease, which included Andy Metcalfe and Morris Windsor who were in The Egyptians and in Soft Boys. And I’ve also worked with Kimberley Rew. We did a gig once, Three Minute Tease, Andy, Morris, and myself, with Matthew Seligman, who we lost earlier this year to COVID. He sat in with us as well. So that world, the Robyn Hitchcock world, is definitely something I’ve dipped more than a few toes into. Robyn’s a huge influence as a songwriter. Maybe not so much anymore, because I went through the period of, when upon discovering his music it made perfect sense to me. It was sort of the idealized version of what I wish, of what I was trying to do, or something like that. So I aspired to that. These days, like I said, it’s ABBA and Fleetwood Mac. But Robyn Hitchcock’s a big influence. And XTC of course. I did end up working with Colin Moulding, on a couple things. That was wonderful. I supported Julian Cope on dates on his 2011 and 2012 tours and that was amazing! That’s a dream come true.  

Young Southpaw talks to Amelia Fletcher & Rob Pursey of Heavenly, Swansea Sound, The Catenary Wires (and many more bands) about Spinal Tap, mix tape mishaps, wearing togas, and much more.  

https://swanseasound.bandcamp.com/releases

https://thecatenarywires.bandcamp.com/

https://www.instagram.com/heavenlyindie/

Young Southpaw: I was going to introduce you and list your bands but there’s like an infinite amount and they just seem to keep proliferating. So what ones are currently active? 

Rob Pursey: The main one is The Catenary Wires which is the two of us, recently joined by Andy Lewis who plays bass, Fay Hallam who plays keyboard, and Ian Button who plays drums. And all of those people have other musical lives as well, a lot of them more celebrated than ours. We’ve done two LPs and we’re just about to do a third one, nearly finished recording it. And then there’s Swansea Sound. This is a band that emerged during lockdown. What happened was I’d written some songs that were too fast and sort of punky really for The Catenary Wires, cause The Catenary Wires is a fairly melancholy outfit (Amelia laughs) 

Amelia Fletcher: We’re very melancholy.  

RP: And also I sing in The Catenary Wires and because my voice is low, I make any song sound melancholy even if it is fast. So we got in touch with Hue, who was Amelia’s friend more than mine because she sang in The Pooh Sticks back in the day, and Hue was the singer in The Pooh Sticks. And I thought he might wanna try singing it. And he did. He recorded the singing on his phone in a cupboard and sent it back to us and it sounded great. So we mixed the songs on the basis of that. And then put the first single out a few weeks ago. And there’s more in the pipeline. 

AF: There’s also one called European Sun, which is our friend Steve. Who writes great songs and didn’t know how to record them so we effectively arranged and recorded them for him. And then there’s Nancy Gaffield & The Drift.  

RP: It’s just The Drift. At the moment it’s got Nancy Gaffield with it but it won’t always.  

AF: Nancy Gaffield is a poet, and we basically do semi-improvised stuff, influenced by the rainy Kentish countryside in the background.  

Young Southpaw has his first repeat guest with The Black Watch’s John Andrew Fredrick. Always a good time with the elegantly loquacious Mr. Fredrick, talking about Nabokov, tennis, the new Black Watch album ‘Fromthing Somethat’, the possibility that Rachel Cusk, Epiphone Guitars, The Ocean Blue, & Congress are all listening to this episode together, and much much more 

https://theblackwatch.bandcamp.com/ 

https://www.facebook.com/theblackwatchmusic 

Young Southpaw: Speaking of secret messages and Nabokov, I re-read ‘The Vane Sisters’ last night.  

John Andrew Fredrick: Yeah, that’s a powerful one. That’s the kind of short story along the lines of a number of others of his, like ‘Spring In Fialta’ for instance, or other things, any given Chekov story, or lots of Katherine Mansfield, that you could read throughout your life and many, many times and find so much to be bewildered by and in awe of and in the presence of just wondrousness as well. Did you love it once again? I’m sure 

YS: Oh yeah, and you notice little things more every time. And it’s about those little things, just finding the wonder in the ‘glass-blown minutiae’, the line that he ascribes to Cynthia Vale. 

JAF: Yeah, it’s one of my favourites of his, and one that I think ‘okay, let me brace myself’ when I sit down to read it. Cause Nabokov’s on my top shelf. If you look up there (points to bookcase) you can see at the very top that he’s there. And Henry James and Proust right below him. Yes, absolutely. And he talked very sincerely, as sincere as he could be with interviewers, about the ways in which he wrote to amuse himself. And somebody with such a towering brain, I daresay he would have to invent a certain amount of games for his delight, thinking solely, as he remarked many a time in Strong Opinions that he really writes with nobody but himself, an ideal reader, in mind. That’s not to say that it’s all solipsistic, although he’s been accused of that. I think that he’s not alone. Robert Smith has said many a time about Cure songs that when he wants to hear a great song, without hubris he’d say ‘I write one’. And I can really relate to that because I do write both songs and stories in order to please myself. And I do the same thing when I paint something, to have something that I really want to look at or I’ll toss it.  

Young Southpaw gets the scoop on one of his favourite new bands, High On Stress. Chatting with singer/guitarist Nick Leet about The Replacements, Prince, seeing Def Leppard at a mall, High On Stress’ fantastic new album Hold Me In, and a whole lot more  

Young Southpaw: What’s your favourite Replacements tune? 

Nick Leet: Oh jeez, it’s all the hard-hitting questions today! It changes by the day for sure but I’ll cheat a little and name a few. Obviously ‘Alex Chilton’ is great, ‘Left Of The Dial’ is great, ‘Valentine’ is great. They’re one of those bands like - I’m a big Prince fan, obviously, but you know he’s got these different eras and different sounds - and The Replacements...were a sloppy rock n roll band, but they kinda had their different eras as well along the way. And if you’re asking me early, we’re sayin’ ‘Takin’ A Ride’. Kinda that middle period, I’d have to go with ‘Unsatisfied’ or ‘Bastards Of Young’. And then as you get a little later, it’s probably the Chilton and the Valentine, and then ‘Achin’ To Be’ and all of that so...Definitely period-wise would be my answer.  

YS: That’s a really good way to go about it. Let’s not leave it out, what’s your favourite song off All Shook Down?  

NL: (thinks) Probably go with ‘Merry Go Round’. How about you? 

YS: I can see that. That’s a strong second to ‘When It Began’. That song is just a perfect autumn tune to me. Whenever I hear that, I’m 17 and it’s fall out, just that perfect weather.  

NL: It’s funny, the band has played shows with Slim Dunlap and he joined us onstage and we backed him at some of his solo shows. But it started, he’d seen - we were already friends - but he had noticed we were playing ‘Valentine’, a cover on YouTube from some show we were playing. We did that and we did ‘Bent Out Of Shape’. And he called me up and he was telling me how great ‘Valentine’ was, and how we did such a good job. He goes ‘you do it in a different key than we normally did it but doesn’t matter, cause Paul would change the key on me right before we’d go on stage anyway so it all works out’. And I’m like ‘that’s hilarious.’ So I’m like ‘did you see ‘Bent Out Of Shape’?’ cause that’s kinda the Slim era. And he goes ‘eh, I never liked that song’ (laughs) 

Young Southpaw talks to Suede bassist Mat Osman about James Bond, Kraftwerk, Los Angeles, Swedish LARPers, where he’d take Liza Minnelli for dinner, and his excellent debut novel, The Ruins 

Twitter: @matosman

IG: @matdosman

Buy The Ruins at https://repeaterbooks.com/product/the-ruins/

Young Southpaw: When did the title, The Ruins, come to you? 

Mat Osman: Titles are really, really hard, to be honest. You want something that gives an angle on the book, without explaining the book. I have these discussions with Brett (Anderson) a lot about album covers and titles and stuff. They need to be a kind of way of looking at it. So there’s lots of, you know, the people in the book are kind of ruined, and it’s a lot about the city, about London, the ruins of London being built up, and all those kinds of things. But at the end of the day, it sounded good, it cropped up in the book, and it looked good on a poster. This is one of the reasons we’re called Suede, and not something longer. It was always like if you call yourself something small, you look bigger on the poster, and it always looks like you’re higher up the bill. If you’re called something like The Teardrop Explodes, you’re always on this line in the middle so... I mean X is the best band name of all-time. It’s just there. 

YS: You can’t get smaller than that 

MO: Exactly. Well, I suppose you could be just like a comma or something 

YS: Yeah, punctuation seems to be creeping in 

MO: Yeah, you don’t want punctuation in the band title, do you? That’s really too much. That’s when you know it’s gone too far. Who had a song about an Oxford comma? It was Vampire Weekend, wasn’t it? That’s too geeky even for me. There are certain things that are not the purview of rock n roll music. And I think the correct use of a comma would fall into the things that you could write a book about, but please not a song.  

YS: I guess that’s the new punk rock 

MO: (laughs) Punctuation is the new punk rock 

Young Southpaw talks to author John Higgs about Aleister Crowley, Robert Anton Wilson, William Blake, the possibility of a supernatural James Bond film, Iron Maiden, and a whole lot more 

johnhiggs.com 

@johnhiggs 

John Higgs: Illuminatus! is a very important book, and it is a very powerful book. And it has had a sort of strange reality-warping impact on a lot of people at a lot of points. I always recommend people read Robert Anton Wilson and I always sort of say try Cosmic Trigger first. But at some point, people always want to go back to Illuminatus! It seems especially relevant now. In a lot of Bob’s stuff, he talks about a place he calls Chapel Perilous. Chapel Perilous is the place where basically all your maps have run out, and you’re lost, and you don’t understand what’s going on around you, and you don’t know the way forward. And it’s very much like now. For a lot of people. We’re living in Chapel Perilous. And that’s what makes him so useful. Because he talks about the way he found his way out of this sort of state. He says there’s really only two ways out of Chapel Perilous. One is agnosticism. And the other is paranoia. And if you go down the paranoid route, you stay there and you’re trapped, stuck in Chapel Perilous forever. But if you accept that it’s okay that you don’t know everything, and you don’t have to be certain, you don’t have to be the guy who’s right all along...if you can just humble yourself a little...then you can just slide out of that. Which is probably about the most useful advice anyone can give at this particular point. Now we have social media and we have all the sort of ‘wars of the certain’ in the online debates, for want of a better word. People have to be correct, and have this psychological sort of need to be correct and have their viewpoints confirmed. And you just drop all that, and let all that just slide away. That’s the only way out of this.   

Young Southpaw talks to Carla Easton about her fantastic new record ‘Weirdo’, her love of Taylor Swift, ‘pop’ not being a dirty word, and much more 

https://www.carlajennifereaston.com/

https://twitter.com/CarlaJEaston

https://carlajeaston.bandcamp.com/

Young Southpaw: What have you been listening to the past couple of years while making this record? 

Carla Easton: I was really into Lily Allen’s album ‘No Shame’, which I got around April last year after reading her biography. I loved the textures on that and how it was very much a pop record but dealing with like complex lyrics. So I felt like I could really relate to that. And then Sigrid, I went to see her at Usher Hall in Edinburgh last year. I was blown away and quite excited about how pop music can sort of you know - it used to feel like if you said you were pop, it was quite a dirty word to say, whereas it feels like there’s a new generation come through that are saying ‘embrace it’. And I’ve never believed that ‘pop’s a bad word, you know. So I was quite influenced by them. Also just like my record collection, you know, I’ve got a lot of New Order in it, and kind of a mix of pure pop and indie pop. But mostly it was just getting into vintage drum beats, really, and writing around that. Which I found really good, developing a new sound that way.  

YS: What’s your favourite New Order record?  

CE: I’m definitely a singles person, in terms of lots of bands I like. And with New Order for me it’s ‘Your Silent Face’. I think I’ll forever spend my life trying to replicate that synth sound at the start of it.  

... 

CE: I’ve certainly enjoyed new releases that have come out this year. I loved Lady Gaga’s record and Taylor Swift dropping an unexpected album. It’s definitely kept me going, having new music in my life.  

YS: I saw one of your posts where you were debating which version of the Taylor Swift album to buy 

CE: Yeah, I know! I was like ‘ah! what one will I get?!’. And then I settled on one version and I’m glad I picked that. I’m glad that the option to decide was only a week long because about a week after I was like ‘awwww! I shoulda bought that one as well’ (laughs) 

Whitney Matheson chats to Young Southpaw about comics, pop music, her many various writing projects, the great American rock bands, what her make up would be if she ever joined KISS, and much more 

https://www.patreon.com/whitneymatheson 

http://www.whitneymatheson.com/ 

Young Southpaw: The Ramones, I don’t know if I would consider them a ‘rock’ band...it’s a tough call on that one. 

Whitney Matheson: Why wouldn’t you? Cause you’re saying punk? They were a rock band 

YS: Punk. But they also wrote great pop tunes. I don’t know if I would consider them rock n roll. I mean I’m willing to accept that as an answer but I’m not sure I would say it myself. Obviously I love them 

WM: I mean, I don’t know, I say leather jackets, tight pants, songs about sniffing glue is pretty rock n roll. 

YS: That’s a very good point. 

WM: But it's true. My daughter when she was very little, like 2 or 3 loved The Ramones. Cause those songs are so, it’s like three chords, so melodic, easy to sing to, ya know.  

YS: That’s awesome. What else does she like? 

WM: Well, when she was little it was like Ramones, Beatles, Blondie. She still likes Blondie. Right now she’s in a big Prince phase. Which is great. She’s seven years old. I played her When Doves Cry, and for whatever reason, something clicked in her and she just wanted to hear everything. And I’m so relieved that it’s not crap that she’s into. But she has seen...ya know stuff kids don’t get, it goes over their heads, and she’s seen some of the videos and she was like “Mom! The women in these Prince videos, they wear bathing suits so they can dance better”. And I’m like “yeah, that’s it, that’s true. It’s so they can dance better.” Yeah, you can have good moves in a bathing suit.  

YS: When Doves Cry used to scare me when I was little. I remember thinking it was odd. It was much darker than what else was going on on the radio.  

WM: Oh yeah, it’s dark. But she likes it. She likes it so much that I figured out the chords on the banjo so we could sing it.  

Young Southpaw chats to Kevin Crace and gets the skinny on his legendary label, Humbug Records. Ignored in their native country, the label was nevertheless home to some of the finest eccentric British songwriters - Captain Sensible, Martin Newell, Simon Turner, Colin Lloyd Tucker, TV Smith... Some excellent records were made, along with homemade jam, early xmas parties, and the conviction/label motto that “two dozen people can’t be wrong”. 

https://www.discogs.com/label/29069-Humbug-2 

Kevin Crace: I wanted to create my own label and a label that was sort of themed, sort of stylized label. I was really listening to people like él Records. That’s really where I was coming from at that time. Me and my friends were some of the few people sitting around in London listening to él, listening to XTC, listening to this sort of esoteric pop music. And really I felt the world really needed that at that time. And I nicked a couple of the él artists, and was quite pleased to do so. Louis Philippe came and joined me and I did some work with Simon Turner, The King Of Luxembourg. I loved él. There were probably very few people who were ever listening to it, if I’m being honest, it was so specialized. It didn’t represent anything else that was going on in the music world at that time, but it just really worked for me, it was so beautiful. And as much as I’d come from a punk background, and an electronic background, and an indie background, I really like things like The Ink Spots. I love some of those old classic bands that had just been totally forgotten at that stage. So when 1992 came around, I started to look at acts to sign for Humbug Records and I found that there was this whole amazing selection of great, great British singer-songwriters that were homeless. They weren’t able to make money, they weren’t able to get signed, and they certainly weren’t able to get any recognition in the media for how great they were. So to some extent, there was an endless list of people that I could have signed as an independent at that stage.  

So I started off, the first signing was Captain Sensible. I love The Damned. For me, they were my childhood band. They were the punks, not the Pistols, they were the real punks. And Captain had split with The Damned at that time, he’d been apart from them for a number of years, he was creating this wonderful, wonderful pop music. Just simply brilliant. That it was almost impossible to get anybody to listen to. That was always the problem. With Captain, with Humbug, with all of these, it was a very difficult time to get the media to support you. Because at that time there wasn’t really the respect shown to the great British artists.  

Young Southpaw talks to The Church’s Steve Kilbey about his new solo album 11 Women, the songwriting genius of Kilbey, Bolan, Dylan, Lou Reed, Lennon, McCartney, and the magic & mystery of songs themselves 

https://www.instagram.com/stvklby/

http://thetimebeing.com/

https://twitter.com/stevekilbey

Steve Kilbey: That’s what I want to do with songs, truly break through to that sort of hypnogogic state, where all the music and the words, everything, it’s just a flow of thoughts, that aren’t completely random. If you go too random, then you get meaninglessness. You don’t want that. You don’t want people to go ‘there’s no meaning in this’. You’ve gotta have this, it’s a very subtle thing and only the really great songwriters understand that. These subtle threads that keep you interested in a song, even though it seems on the surface, superficially it seems like there’s no thread. There is some kind of internal thread that the listener will grasp, and it will make you feel good that you’re sort of in on it. People write to me and go ‘your songs make me feel like I’m in on something’. And that’s cause you’re sort of grokking it, ya know?  

Young Southpaw: Yeah. ‘Sheba Chiba’ reminded me of like a Bolan rhyme as well.  

SK: Oh yeah, of course. Marc Bolan and David Bowie and Bob Dylan and The Beatles are never far from any of my songs. I played 11 Women to a girl who came round the other day and she said ‘wow, it’s really Marc Bolan’ and I go ‘yeah, of course it is’. But hopefully the good part of Marc Bolan and not the bad part. In my opinion, Bolan went really badly off the rails, and is a spectacular example of what not to do. He was really writing these wonderfully ambiguous songs and then he became really famous and it all went to his head and he started just making up nonsense. Instead of having this ambiguous dreamlike hypnogogic stuff, he was just making up nursery rhymes and nonsense. The last album I ever bought of his, there was a line ‘Uncle Bimbo drank up the sea of Galilee, and like a fool he promised it all to me’. And when I heard that line I went, ‘you’ve lost it, Marc. I don’t wanna hear that anymore.’ And there was David Bowie putting out Aladdin Sane, and I’m like ‘well, it really hurts me to do this, but David Bowie’s now my main man. Sorry, Marc.’ And I felt like Bolan had lost it. 

Later on, I read he was heavily into cocaine and heavily into drinking a lot of red wine and snorting a lot of coke, and he lost his mojo. Where the cocaine worked for Bowie. But for Bolan it didn’t, it just sort of made him egotistical, and he thought ‘oh, I can just do anything’. And you can never! You can’t! No one - not John Lennon, not Bolan, not me, no one - can just do anything.  

Young Southpaw talks to Martin Atkins (Pigface, PiL, Brian Brain, Killing Joke, Damage Manual, etc.) about his punk rock ethos, entrepreneurial skills, books and zoom talks, as well as Public Image Limited on American Bandstand, Commercial Zone, GG Allin, the ‘Paul McCartney clause’, and much more 

https://martinatkins.bigcartel.com/products 

https://twitter.com/marteeeen 

Martin Atkins: I’ve got four drawers of board tapes, alternative mixes...So if you’re a PiL fan, I’ve got both nights in Paris, it was released as Paris Au Printemps, that was my first show. And I’ve got both nights’ board tapes. It was actually my suggestion that we release it as a live album. I’ve got both nights in Tokyo. We released one night.  

[Commercial Zone] is only Keith Levene’s album in that he stole the tapes. I talk about this in one of my presentations - while we were in New York, there were 17 rolls of two-inch tape. So this is me applying - I have my Master’s Degree now, big deal, but it changes the way I look at things - so instead of just going ‘we recorded a bunch of material, it was crazy’, well how much material did we record? Okay, so I go and look at my cassette archive, there’s 17 rolls of two-inch tape. How much music fits on a roll? 32 minutes. Oh my god. So now I have a spreadsheet with all of the songs, all of the versions. There are some songs on Commercial Zone that Keith isn’t even on, that he didn’t know existed until he took the tapes.  

I don’t think it’s any secret that Keith had a drug problem. Like a really serious drug problem. A really serious problem with serious drugs. We were all using speed and drinking a lot, but he was levels above. There were times...you know John [Lydon] is a magical, charismatic individual. And his charisma protected PiL. There could be 10,000 people in a room and John could stare everybody down, more effectively than security punching people. And we were protected by that. It also allowed for Keith to be not always there at shows. He’d take a two song break. And we’d just do an instrumental version, or John would just sing over bass and drums. And people would be like ‘wow, PiL, it’s crazy’. Instead of ‘hold on a minute, where’s the guitarist? I like this song.’ But we got away with it. I think less and less, but we did get away with it.  

When we booked ten shows in Japan, the walls started to close in on this version of the band. There are very strict drug laws in Japan. You can’t have a Vicks inhaler. They’re illegal because they’re a stimulant. Never mind heroin. And then Paul McCartney and his band, Wings, he got off a plane with like a kilo of weed. He was in jail for 11 days. I mean, the world went mad. He was fined a million dollars, and then let go. But what happened was every Japanese promoter then retroactively inserted something called ‘the Paul McCartney clause’.... 

Young Southpaw talks to The Silent Academy founder Andrew Shaw about his new metaphysical mixtape in book form questions, Bill Drummond, suspending your brain, Pigs & Zen, and much more. Van Halen too, obviously... 

https://www.silentacademy.com/product/questions-book/ 

Young Southpaw: At the end of the intro you write that your hope is that ‘in accessing intuitive awareness, we are free to act with the full force of our nature, to create some things and to smash some things - completely.’  

Andrew Shaw: Yeah 

YS: Which reminded me of The Damned song ‘Smash It Up’. And then the first question you pose - ‘does light from the stars create loneliness’ - reminded me of that Lush song ‘Light From A Dead Star’. So in what ways is this book a mixtape? 

AS: Aw, man. Again, like the Van Halen...absolutely. It is a mixtape, isn’t it? I mean is anything not a mixtape? When you really think about it...(laughs) 

YS: But yeah I like the idea that this is a compilation, well in the truest sense it’s a compilation like a mixtape is a compilation, but it also has resonances and is your form of communication 

AS: And you pass it to a girl to impress her 

YS: Obviously 

AS: Or an object of your affection, yeah. I mean why else would we do these things? I think a mixtape’s a pretty nice analogy. It’s a grab bag of ideas and observations from everywhere and then scramble them up and hope there’s some continuity that makes sense to anybody that spends time with it. Yeah. Something interesting along the way.  

YS: I like that a lot. Yeah. I miss mixtapes, man. Luckily we have your book now.  

AS: Oh yeah, I really miss mixtapes. The Spotify playlist doesn’t really cut it, does it?  

YS: It really doesn’t. I mean, having two sides that you would structure accordingly.  

AS: Right. And sticking the pencil in the middle to correct it.  

YS: Funnily enough, that came up on the last episode of ETC. Something about pencils. I think the cassette was really the highest point of technology we needed. I don’t need everything going on these days. But to be able to listen to music in your car, I’m glad we got there.  

AS: Yeah. And the unspooling. Just even the word ‘unspool’.  

Young Southpaw chats to magician and comedian Paul Kilmer, aka Magical Paul aka Jurassic Paul, about songs about cards, being offered large amounts of dairy products while performing, his positive philosophy of comedy, and dinosaurs, of course. 

Paul Kilmer: In the early 90s my dad was a construction worker and a mechanic so he exposed us to all those late 70’s/early 80’s “metal” bands, hair bands were very popular, RATT, Whitesnake, other animals, Van Halen, Led Zeppelin, Poison. And my dad was interesting because he did like those but he also exposed us inadvertently to John Denver, and my grandfather exposed me to guys like Buddy Holly and Elvis and Johnny Cash. And Johnny Cash has got albums galore. So yeah, I grew up with Van Halen. I like Jump. I like Panama. Recently RATT has made a comeback cause they had one of their songs in a commercial and I was like ‘I really like Round & Round as a song, I’m glad they made that into a commercial’. I like Van Halen -  

Young Southpaw: It’s the Year of the Rat. So hopefully they will make a huge comeback. I wanted to ask you, as a fan of card tricks, do you like songs that mention cards like AC/DC’s The Jack or Stacey Q’s Two Of Hearts? I mean if you were doing a card trick for AC/DC, you would expect their card to be the jack. And for Motorhead, it’d obviously be the Ace of Spades.  

PK: Cause there are other songs, like Magic Man...Two Of Hearts, actually a lot of really good magicians do non-talking sets to that song, or Magic Man. They definitely have their place in magic. Cause specifically they reference specific cards. But I wanna say my favourite is Ace Of Spades by Motorhead. Because like I said those are the songs that just kind of pop into your life. I guess my favourite song of all-time would have to be one of those songs that I didn’t know the name of and tried to track down which was Wall Of Voodoo’s Mexican Radio. It always plays between 2:34-2:50 in the morning on some radio station that you’re driving from one location to another, and you’re not paying attention and you miss the name.  

Young Southpaw talks to phenomenal Norwegian guitarist Hedvig Mollestad about her new record Ekhidna, opening for John McLaughlin while six months pregnant and having just had appendix surgery, snakes, Eddie Van Halen, Alex Lifeson, and much more.

https://soundcloud.com/hedvigmollestadtrio

Hedvig Mollestad: How do you feel about John McLaughlin’s way through music, his career, where he started and where he is now

Young Southpaw: I listened to that new record he put out a couple months ago, I enjoyed it. My favourite stuff of John McLaughlin’s are those Miles Albums, those electric Miles albums. A Tribute To Jack Johnson, I could listen to that forever. Just wonderful playing. And of course Bitches Brew and Live/Evil and all those. That for me is my favourite type of music.

HM: Live/Evil and Bitches Brew to me also is just, that’s just the defining what you have to try to avoid, because you can never be close to how good those records are. So if you play that kind of music it’s really hard to avoid those references. It’s really really really hard because you can never be that good. And still it’s so fun when you get into that kind of place with musicians. Absolutely.

Something I found fascinating with John McLaughlin because he is just a machine, like his technique, talking about fast but he has his own way of playing fast. It’s very accentuated, in a very pentatonic-based position. But suddenly it’s not. And I’ve been thinking, because the Mahavishnu records has this thing that is something that I’m still listening to when I listen to them, that is the guitar sound. It’s wrenching, and it’s roaring, and it’s in your - it’s almost inside your face, because it’s so close. To me, that is one of the things that I really cherish.

......

HM: The Antilone riff is very jumpy

YS: It’s like a frantic boogie. And the opening, my first thought was AC/DC’s ‘Thunderstruck’.  

HM: Yeah. I love AC/DC, really love them. Yes, that is a great reference, and also the Black Sabbath opening. The rain and the thunder. That’s fantastic, I love that reference. Putting on a jazz record in 2020 and saying ‘ah, I hear AC/DC in this jazz-rock’, that is a goal achieved. Thank you so much.

Young Southpaw chats to David Ryder Prangley about his debut solo album Black Magic & True Love, KISS & their solo albums, Shampoo & swatches, Twin Peaks, and Prangley’s Great Van Halen Smiths Theory, leading Southpaw to conjecture post-interview ‘what if Johnny Marr had joined KISS?’

https://davidryderprangley1.bandcamp.com/

Young Southpaw: What’s your favourite of the KISS solo records?

David Ryder Prangley: I think they’re actually all amazing. Some KISS fans judge them by how much they sound like regular KISS records. Which to me is obviously not the point of them, they don’t really sound like KISS records. Gene Simmons’ album is just incredible, with all those guest artists on it, and the orchestration, and the fact that all the songs kinda sound a bit like The Beatles. I think they’re great. And even Peter Criss’ solo album, which people were just like ‘it’s kinda like an easy listening album’, but there’s some great songs on that and he’s got a fantastic voice. I like them all for different reasons. I think Paul Stanley’s solo album is incredibly exciting. And the guitar sound on it is just phenomenal. Then you got Ace’s album which is...he doesn’t go around the obvious pop songwriting route, he goes down the real almost like Black Sabbath - here’s a riff and here it is for five minutes (laughs). And I love that. And the kind of weird...on his album he was using the early Roland guitar synth and it’s just totally out of tune. You listen to it and you’re like ‘it’s completely out of tune’, but it’s still on there.

And I love all that stuff. It’s really exciting. When I was a kid, they were the first band that I got into, that I discovered myself, cause I was really into Marvel comics. You’d see the adverts, and it didn’t even say it was a band. It would just go KISS...nothing (laughs). And it was like ‘what is this? are these some superheroes or what?’ And at the time I was just really into music and Marvel comics and Star Wars, and then KISS come along and they’re like the perfect blend of science fiction and rock n’ roll.

Young Southpaw chats to Matt & Mauro from the UK ‘Ronettes Punk’ band The Speedways about their new album Radio Sounds, what Eddie Van Halen being in KISS would’ve been like, Billy Ocean/ABBA covers albums, Hanoi Rocks, and much more.

Check them out at https://thespeedways.bandcamp.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pg/JustAnotherRegularSummer

Young Southpaw: That’s all my questions. Anything else you wanna add?

Mauro: There wasn’t much Van Halen in this chat.

Matt: No, there wasn’t much Van Halen.

YS: Happy to talk about Van Halen. What’s your favourite Van Halen album?

Matt: The first one. Cause when I first started playing guitar I loved Eddie Van Halen but I could never play that kind of stuff. But I can play ‘Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love’, with the phaser pedal on it, I can just about get through that. And ‘Runnin’ With The Devil’ I can play that as well. ‘Unchained’, that’s on Fair Warning?

YS: Greatest rock song of all time, in my opinion.

Matt: I can play that as well.

YS: On the 1982 tour they opened with ‘Unchained’ and went into ‘Romeo Delight’ and I think that’s all you ever need ever. [NOTE: It’s actually the other way around, but THE POINT STILL STANDS!] Two of the greatest rock n’ roll songs. And then they always had that third song would be a drum solo, as if two songs were really too taxing to be on stage for and the three of them needed a break.

Mauro: Immediately, yeah

Matt: I only saw them one time, with Sammy, obviously. At the Birmingham NEC in the UK. I just wanted to see Eddie play, really. I remember being down the front and when he played ‘Eruption’ and everything, that was what I wanted to see. I just wanted to see him play the guitar, just watch him play. Just astonishing, he’s so good.

YS: I saw them on the last reunion tour and it seemed like his guitar solo was even faster. Like, you woudn’t think that was even possible.

Matt: Yeah, fantastic. Such a great band.

Mauro: I’d probably have pick II acutally. I’m one of the Van Halen II club, I reckon. ‘Light Up The Sky’, ‘D.O.A.’, those ones...

YS: Oh yeah. ‘Somebody Get Me A Doctor’.

Mauro: Yeah. It’s all great. ‘Dance The Night Away’ of course. That’s the closest Van Halen get to power pop, you could argue.  

Young Southpaw: You’re a big Rush fan, right?

Bo Butler: This is true.

YS: What do you think Tommy P (Thomas Pynchon) makes of Rush?

BB: That’s a really good question. Almost impossible to answer. But...my guess is, we talked about Inherent Vice, there’s a lot of songs mentioned in Inherent Vice, and my guess is that those songs are what Thomas Pynchon listens to, for the most part. Or at least of those genres. There’s some crossover, in a weird way. Their drummer, Neil Peart, his dad listened to a lot of Sinatra and those kind of things, and you see some of that come up in Inherent Vice, but I don’t know that Thomas Pynchon has ever listened to Rush. But I think since I like Thomas Pynchon and I like Rush, I think Thomas Pynchon would also like Rush.

YS: Like the transitive property. Though we all know how him and mathematics works, I can’t guarantee it.

BB: I think it works the same way.

YS: And Neil Peart you mentioned, he was a big reader. I was thinking like what if ‘Tom Sawyer’ was originally called ‘Tom Pynchon’? Scans the same. And ‘catch the mystery’ would certainly apply.

BB: That is true. Honestly, I think the whole thing would still apply. But...it would be hard to sing. “Today’s Thomas Pynchon, mean mean pride...”, it just doesn’t work.

YS: Yeah. That’s probably why they changed it, ya know?

BB: Yeah, probably. Just went with a different character.

YS: Cause Tom Sawyer has never really made sense to me in that song either. ‘Modern-day warrior’.

BB: Me either. I’ll be honest.

YS: Now are you holding out hope that Pynchon will write a Rush biography one day?”

Young Southpaw talks to the musician and comedian Nick Grunerud about Bauhaus leading the way to the future of hide-and-seek music festivals, a new calendar where you never know what month is coming next, Toledo, Ohio’s role in nocturnal fitness, and much more

https://nickgrunerud.bandcamp.com/

https://nickgrunerud.wordpress.com/blog/

Young Southpaw talks to The Black Watch main man, John Andrew Fredrick, about their ace new record 'Brilliant Failures', their fantastically named previous albums 'Led Zeppelin Five' and 'Magic Johnson', shoegazing & tennis, time travel (he's not into it), and much more

https://www.facebook.com/theblackwatchmusic/

https://theblackwatch.bandcamp.com/

Young Southpaw talks to Boston comedian Rob Crean about his new record, 'Sadly Sackerton', his comedy nights and their relation to Roman mythology, The Replacements, and more

@robcrean  

Buy the record at https://deadandmellow.com/rob-crean

Young Southpaw offers a unique career retrospective of The Indelicates, speaking with Simon & Julia about time travel, spectral presences, Ohio, Paul Nicholas, and much more

 Their info: www.theindelicates.com

FB/Twitter/IG: @theindelicates   

 David Devant & His Spirit Wife frontman discusses their magical new record, futuristic Victorian bathtubs & cosmic eggs, and how it might have gone if  William Blake had been in the Manic Street Preachers

FOLLOW:

Facebook: @youngsouthpaw

Instagram: @youngsouthpawetc

Twitter: @youngsouthpawaf

www.youngsouthpaw.com

Make-up tips, séances, and hidden occult meanings with Jo and Simon of the brilliant London post-punk four-piece

The acclaimed comics writer of Die! and The Wicked + Divine regales Southpaw regarding the time he DM’d a role playing game where all the campaigners played members of the fictional band Skirmish

Southpaw speaks with the renowned comedian, author, and axeman about the year of the RATT, the idea of an all-Dokken podcast, and various six-string shredders.

Southpaw chats to the Fightmilk frontwoman about her new solo project Captain Handsome, how Phil Collins and Boney M’s involvement in her knee surgery will affect her roller disco album, and who would win if Helen Fielding played Robert Smith in a game of Connect Four