ON THE RADIO

The princess of keys, Regina Spektor, will tune her grand piano for a tour of Australia this April, promising to deliver sweet songs with even sweeter vocal melodies to crowds around this wide brown land. Responsible for tracks such as Fidelity and On The Radio, Spektor is no stranger to Australia, having previously sold out national tours, making tickets to her gigs a precious commodity.

Following the release of her fifth album Far, Spektor will hit the road for a tour that will see her stop off in Perth on Wednesday, April 21, at the Riverside Theatre. Tickets go on sale at 8am on Tuesday, March 16, through Ticketek.

GET YOUR BEATS ON

Want the perfect winter warmer? Well, put Friday, June 11, in your diary – for the biggest DJ line up you can expect to see in a club this year is coming to Perth. Markus Schulz is no stranger to Perth. While his meteoric rise in popularity here in Australia has been one thing, his parallel ascent overseas has been entirely another. Also joining the spin-a-thon is Gareth Emery - this young gun reached the top ten of the DJ Mag Top 100 for the first time in 2009. As if that isn’t enough, another star on the rise, Roger Shah rounds out the internationals on a bill.

Welcome to Godskitchen’s ‘Special Winter Edition’ at Metro City on Friday, June 11. First release tickets go on-sale 9am Thursday, March 18, through ticketmaster.com.au and the usual outlets. This is a fully licensed, 18+ event and photo ID is required.

APRIL’S BUTLER

We’ve been waiting three years for the next John Butler Trio album, following the awesomeness of Grand National, and it looks like the wait is over. April Uprising is set to unleash on Friday, March 26, and will feature new trio members Nicky Bomba on drums/percussion and Byron Luiters on bass. We’ve already had a wee taste with last year’s single One Way Road, which took out the #1 spot on national airplay charts three times - not to mention being chosen as the lead track for the summer campaign of Channel 10’s new digital 24 hour sports channel, One.

Australian fans are in for a treat – April Uprising is available in a deluxe package, featuring an amazing six panel digi pack including a bonus poster and booklet, which is exclusive to Australian fans. There’s also a limited edition trucker hat on purchase of the CD while stocks last. Check out the making of the album at johnbutlertrio.com and set your alarms clocks for March 26.

PIVOT

O Soundtrack Our Art

Australian electro-pop leaders Pivot will perform at Beck’s Music Box as part of the Perth International Arts Festival on Thursday, February 18. BOB GORDON speaks with Dave Miller.

There’s nothing like being an ‘international band – jostling around the European continent or zipping off to the States for a show or two.

However there’s also nothing like returning home for a spot of summer relaxation and silly seasoning and Pivot’s Dave Miller has been doing exactly that of late here in Perth.

“I’ve kind of been living like a bit of a gypsy for the last 18 months, to be honest,” he says. “I haven’t really had much of a home. It’s good to be in one city for longer than a month. I worked out that I hadn’t been in a city longer than six weeks or two months for about 18 months now. So it’s nice to put some roots down for a month or two.”

The first ever Australian band to be signed to the acclaimed Warp label, Pivot have been making inroads in the UK and Europe in recent years, but made their maiden US voyage last September. Things went well.

“It was cool,” Miller considers. “We played our first shows as part of the Warp 20 anniversary shows. We played a big gig with !!! and Battles, all those guys and that was fun to play in front of loads of people. We played in Boston and DC, a few gigs over a week. We got a good reaction from people who were there and even more exciting was the fact that people who didn’t know about us were quite excited as well. That’s always a good vibe, when people who’ve never heard of you come up to you and say, ‘that was amazing!’. And Americans are quite vocal in either their love or dislike of you… so it was nice to get some love (laughs).”

Pivot appeared on last year’s Warp 20 compilation, offering a cover of Grizzly Bear’s song (who are, per chance, in Perth this week) Colorado. The Warp 20 shows proved handy in the context stakes given that there’s a hard rock band from Carolina with the same name.

“I think there’s a couple of Pivots floating around,” Miller laughs. “But… no. From what I gather those other bands are quite small town and haven’t played outside their own city.

“But that’s the thing with the internet, everyone can have a webpage and everyone can have a MySpace and everyone’s got equal footing. The democracy of the internet!”

The Warp 20 experience also afforded Miller and co of the opportunity to meet David Byrne (Pivot often perform a version of his song, I Zimbra). Turns out 2009 was quite the year for that kind of thing…

“In the past six months we’ve met David Byrne and Brian Eno at shows and of the people we’d like to me musically they’d be in our top three or four,” Miller enthuses. “I don’t know… you meet your heroes and even better they’re really cool guys. It makes it even better.

“We met Gary Numan as well in March when we played with him over east. Of my musical heroes that I’ve met they’ve all been pretty nice guys. My thoughts about the music haven’t changed at all; it’s just… great music/great guys (laughs).

“It hasn’t happened the other way yet. Like I haven’t met anyone that I’ve been put off by and I don’t want that to happen.”

Pivot are well into the completion period of their third album, the follow up to the acclaimed O Soundtrack My Heart release of 2008.            “We’ve recorded lots, actually,” says Miller. “We put it all together in September-October and realised that we needed a few more songs that were a bit calmer and a bit more minimal, because we put it all together and all the songs were quite full on. It’s a real live record and we needed some calmer moments… and those calmer moments are being recorded over the next few weeks (laughs).

“We’ve played a couple of songs while on tour in Europe and America last tour but we’ll be playing a lot more in the coming shows. The album should be out by mid this year.”

Is there a title yet?

“No… that’s probably the biggest missing piece of the puzzles (laughs).”

It’s no surprise, really, that the initial taste of Pivot’s new album would be full on, given the results of 18 months of constant gigging. Audience feedback, it seems, also played a part.

“We’ve played loads of gigs in the past 18 months together and you hear people say, ‘we like the album but the live set is so much better!’ I’ve tried to take that as a compliment every time (laughs), but I guess we did try to capture more of a lve feeling, of three guys in the studio playing together, rather than a studio experiment. We wanted to try and capture that impromptu-ness that we have I our shows. It just felt natural to do it that way.”

It would seem that the time to do the more laidback stuff would be when you’re relaxing a bit at home…

“Yeah, I guess,” Miller laughs. “We played all the songs and felt it could get, not so much tiring, but tiring on the ears in that there was so much to hear and so much going on all the time. And we want our albums to be able to be played over and over again, without getting tiring. So we felt it needed a bit more space.”

For Miller the prospect of a hometown show is always a pleasure, especially as this one is part of the Perth International Arts Festival. It’s a nice touch of local iconography…

“It feels good and I hope it does for everyone in February,” he concludes. “It seems that you’ve had to have played overseas to get to a point where you get a gig like that, but regardless it’s great.”

EDWARD SHARPE

& THE MAGNETIC ZEROS

Alter-Ego Is Not A Dirty Word

Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros will perform at the West Coast Blues N’ Roots festival on Sunday, March 28, at Fremantle Reserve.

He’s the leader of the band and in that sense, he’s well equipped for multi-tasking.

Good thing too, for as Alex Ebert’s (AKA Edward Sharpe) mobile phone rings for his interview with X-Press Magazine, it appears that he’s got his hands full.

“I’m sorry, he says, a little distractedly. “I just bought this giant organ and I’m pushing it into the entrance of a warehouse in downtown LA. I missed the delivery guys and they just left it here, out the front. I didn’t intend on having to do both these things at the same time, but the place is closing now.”

Well, we won’t keep you too long…

“No, no, no,” he exclaims good-naturedly. “Please, please, please… by all means, keep me!”

These days there’s agreeable chaos in the way Ebert’s life and music collide, it seems to happen in a much happier fashion to how they once did. Soon to hit Australia on the back of their debut album, Up From Below, the visit has been prefaced by the ensemble’s impressive showing in Triple J’s 2009 Hottest 100, coming in at #15 for the single, Home. That bands can release songs and have them burn brightly on the other side of the globe may be something some acts at a certain level may take for granted. Not, however, Ebert and company…

“In small ways I guess you can, but definitely not in the major senses, or whatever you’d call it, you can’t take that for granted,” he ponders deep and wide. “I feel overwhelmed with appreciation and joy about that whole thing. I really do.”

Released in July, 2009, Up From Below, has an intriguing history, largely because its creation happened following the disintegration of Ebert’s long-time power pop outfit, Ima Robot.   Feeling disenfranchised from his once beloved band, in the aftermath of a break-up and a stint in rehab, Ebert met Jade Castrinos, who became something of a muse for his new music, the music of one Edward Sharpe. With like-minded friends and musicians they recorded the album and toured the US in a school bus.

It really does sound like the antidote to all that happened before…

“It’s not like it was against the music of Ima Robot or… it was just who I was, where I was at and the ways that I had been displayed during the processes for Ima Robot,” Ebert considers. “This was in some way informed by those somewhat intense and negative experiences that had to do with myself being a part of a big machine like Virgin Records and writing music for people like A&Rs and radio in mind. And it’s not that I don’t want to be on the radio, but I don’t want to write songs to intentionally be on the radio. So, in that sense, this whole thing was informed by all of that.”

Given the rollercoaster pre-history of his new band, one wonders what Ebert’s feelings were just as the album was about to be released to the public?

“There was a little bit of a holding-my-breath thing,” he confides, “just hoping that it relayed what we were feeling; that it wouldn’t get lost in translation. I guess that was the basic feeling, but also a feeling of trust in each other - that we did our best. That was about it, then it was just seeing how it would go.”

It’s gone quite well, clearly, but with it has come a lot of questions about the notion of this ‘Edward Sharpe’. Apparently it was a childhood alter-ego of Ebert’s but it’s certainly become much more.

“The best way I can describe it is that it was an avenue back to myself,” he offers. “Or forward for myself, I should say. So it was really an avenue but now it’s more like an open field. It has a feeling as though it’s like a course, with all these guiding tracks, within the music.

“I get a lot of questions about, ‘who is Edward Sharpe? What’s the persona? How is he different from you?’. For me it’s like, ‘oh Jesus, I have no idea what the difference is between me and Edward Sharpe!’. I think that I took on another name because I was bemused about who I had become. I felt very disjointed from the name of who I was and I just sort of adopted another name to just sort of be truer to myself, you know what I mean?
“That’s all it was, just a playful kind of thing. And I definitely tried to change the name plenty of times, but no one wanted to go back, everybody wanted to keep Edward (laughs). And The Magnetic Zeros is a sort of an enchanting cosmic thing that has a lot of hidden meanings for me, actually. The way I operate is that’ll I’ll often throw things straight out there and then figure out what it all means later.”
For some strange, unknown reason, a chorus of elevator-styled flute music comes piping down the line just as Ebert is asked about what he’s looking forward to most about coming to Australia. He giggles at the absurdity of it, but seems to revel in it at all at once.

“I just want there to be open hearts,” he says, as the pan pipes sound. “And I mean us coming with open hearts, not the audience; they can do whatever they want (laughs). Hopefully we’ll be coming there just ready to have fun and play around.”

Mmm… unexplained elevator-styled flute music.

_ BOB GORDON

PHOENIX

Miami Horror

Belvoir Amphitheatre

Saturday, March 6, 2010

It’s a long, dark drive through the lonely roads leading up to Perth’s wine country, but the moment your car rolls into Belvoir’s dusty parking paddock, all sleepiness falls away and your excitement levels start to match that of those unloading from the party buses.

Unfortunately, a good forty minute wait in line meant that this reviewer missed Miami Horror (not a massive disappointment considering their underwhelming set at Southbound earlier this year) scrambling over the hill just in time to catch the last few bars of Sometimes.

Pre-buying double rounds of drinks was a good move: climbing back up those tiers is a real work out for the thighs, though the crowd was fairly polite.

After waiting for what seemed like forever, finally a banner of their album artwork rolled down and the shadows of Phoenix appeared on the stage. Hidden behind plumes of smoke, the band played the opening guitar riff of Lisztomania, prompting nothing short of hysteria from the amphitheatre’s masses, who shouted at the top of their voices from the song’s first note: “So sentimental, not sentimental no!”. The strobe lights came out in force next - Long Distance Call easily saw the momentum of Phoenix’s strong opening maintained. A lush pink glow, and more smoke, accompanied a heartfelt Lasso, before Phoenix slid into Run, Run, Run, from 2004’s Alphabetical, recalling their talents at lo-fi soul, despite the more indie-guitar heavy stuff of late.
It was at this point that lead singer/French sex god Thomas Mars asked for the house lights to be turned on ‘we wanna see you all!’, before proceeding to tell us that the band was so happy to finally make it to Perth and that they’d really wanted to come for so long. Usually bands say stuff like this to butter you up, but there was something about the emotion in Mars’ voice, coupled with the band’s enthusiasm (not to mention the absolute awe of seeing such a huge crowd, under a starry sky with giant eucalypts casting shadows over the stage) that made you believe that Phoenix were just as amazed to be out in the middle of nowhere in one of the world’s most isolated cities, as we were to have them here.

Mars continued to lay on the charm through Fences and Girlfriend, walking crookedly all over the stage, wrapping himself up in his microphone lead and saying things like ‘we wanna see you get your dance on!’. The longer Love Like A Sunset turned the spotlight on the guitarists, however, who teased out everything wonderful about the seven-minute long, predominantly instrumental album highlight – the build positively shimmered live. Some It’s Never Been Like That loving followed, via Napoleon Says and Consolation Prizes, Phoenix remaining tight and captivating throughout.

Many think Funky Squaredance is one of Phoenix’s most out of character pieces, but who cares: the great synth, vocoder action, and vibrant guitar solos of Squaredance made for a speccy closing number.

Thunderous applause brought the French lads back onstage for a beautiful Everything Is Everything, a slow version with just vocals and guitar, then a cover of Air’s Playground Love, before amping everyone up from their lullaby-like state for If I Ever Feel Better. This track proved the perfect precursor for 1901 (what else?), arguably the biggest hit off last year’s Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix - and the soundtrack for young lovers everywhere ever since.

Madness ensued – Mars leapt into the front row and pretty much submitted himself to female rape, with girls tearing at his shirt and trying to kiss him, although he remained good humoured throughout. The song was extended live, with Mars cutting the music and turning the mic over to the crowd to chant ‘falling, falling, falling, faaaallliiing’: it was everything a Phoenix fan could want, and more.

An impeccable confluence of time, place and performance made Saturday night’s Phoenix concert truly special. It was one of those gigs where afterwards, you find yourself thinking ‘Boy, anyone who missed out on that one is a total sucker!’.  

_DANIELLE MARSLAND

THE TOPP

TWINS:

UNTOUCHABLE

GIRLS

Toppermost Of The Poppermost

Directed by Leanne Pooley
Starring Jools & Lynda Topp

Think Barry Humphries and then think Kath & Kim. New Zealand’s Topp Twins have shades of the former’s multi-character (and true life) longevity and a bit of the latter’s way of poking fun at archetypes but not pointing too much of a finger.

But in all fairness, such cultural references do not do them justice, as anyone who would have seen their Perth Festival appearance a few years back would agree. Jools and Lynda Topp are two country girls who joined the army as teens then fled the other way after basic training. Naturally open and gregarious they were born to entertain and did so via busking in New Zealand’s capital cities. Eventually the streets couldn’t contain them and they toured constantly while making a name for themselves on Kiwi television. They became household names with their brand of country/cabaret/lesbian/protest entertainment and have remained so ever since.

The Topp Twins have in the last 28 years campaigned for gay rights, nuclear disarmament and against apartheid (memorably being part of the pitch invasion during the Springboks’ 1981 Rugby tour of New Zealand). Their political and social conscience could easily have alienated much of the more conservative sectors of their audience, but it is testament to the Topps’ genuine sense of entertainment and good cheer that they have become national treasures in their home country.

That following has extended to the US, Canada and Australia as well, but it is fitting that director Pooley structures this film around an intimate Topps performance, at home in front of close friends, whereupon the stories, songs and guest performers can segue back and forth through their history, character creations and impact on New Zealand society in a more documentary-style form.

Through their own interviews and the comments by others about them it is clear that Jools and Lynda Topp, despite the esteem with which they are held, are incredibly down to earth and the scenes at their respective properties show that they are still country girls at heart. Though they both have partners, the bond between the twins is quite beautiful, something touched on when Jools’ battle with breast cancer is tackled. At no part in the film do the pair talk of the hardship of making it in the business, and at this point where they endure one of life’s greatest hardships the focus is what they mean to each other.

The Topp Twins are an act that can make you think about the world and laugh at the same time. Happily, so is their film.

_ BOB GORDON

The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls screens exclusively at Joondalup Pines from Monday-Sunday, March 15–21, as part of the Lotterywest Festival Films season.

PETER GABRIEL

Scratch My Back

Realworld / Virgin Records

You can almost imagine the phone call: “Hello, is Neil Young there? Neil, hi it’s Peter Gabriel – I had a couple of hit records in the ’70s and ’80s. Yeah, Genesis, WOMAD, The Elders – that’s right. Anyhow, you see… I’ve got an idea: you record one of my songs and I’ll record one of yours. You’re in? Great!”

And so came Scratch My Back – Gabriel’s ode to songwriting. He’s chosen his favourite songs; amongst them Mirrorball (Elbow), Flume (Bon Iver), My Body Is Cage (Arcade Fire) – 12 songs in all. And it’s a cracker. If anyone knows how to redress a classic it’s Gabriel. Expect the second album soon, where each artist featured here covers one of Gabriel’s songs. Let’s hope Radiohead get Sledgehammer!

_JULIAN TOMPKIN