Table of contents for March 2016 in Rolling Stone Australia

“I’m shocked and appalled that a reputable magazine would only give Scott Weiland a one-page tribute.” Beacon of Hope IT MEANT SO MUCH TO ME to see Troye Sivan on the cover of your latest issue. The manner in which he’s so open about his sexuality makes him a brilliant role model. That his music is so beautiful is the icing on the cake. In this age of questionable celebrity motives I’m so proud that one of our own is a beacon of hope for millions around the world. Keep up the good work. Jason Gray, Blair Athol, SA Tribute Fail SHAME ON YOU. SCOTT WEI- land was arguably one of the greatest vocalists to come out of the Nineties era. I’m shocked and appalled that a reputable music magazine…

“IF I GET EMOTIONAL, I APOLOGISE,” says Eagles of Death Metal front-man Jesse Hughes one recent afternoon. “It’s not in a bad way.” Hughes is still dealing with the aftermath of November 13th, when an Eagles concert in Paris became the site of one [Cont. on 14] of the worst terrorist attacks in recent history. Now, the veteran garage-rock band is facing the big question: What’s next? At least part of the answer has become clear: Get back on the road. Starting this month, Eagles of Death Metal, who had postponed all remaining concerts on their autumn tour after the Paris attacks, will hit Europe for 24 dates – what they’ve dubbed the Nos Amis Tour (French for “our friends”) in a nod to the group’s affection for France. The…

LAST YEAR WAS A ROUGH ONE FOR Rick Ross, who spent most of the summer and autumn of 2015 under house arrest at his Atlanta mansion due to a pending case involving the alleged assault and kidnapping of a former groundskeeper. “I had a few stumbles, most definitely,” the rap superstar tells ROLLING STONE. “Fortunately, it wasn’t the worst home to be confined in, you dig? But it wasn’t a vacation.” To avoid going stir-crazy, he spent much of that time writing songs for his eighth studio album, Black Market, which is full of rich production, multilayered boasts and, at times, a more reflective tone than usual. “I love the uptempo club music that’s going on right now, but I wanted to step away from that sound,” he says. “I…

Glenn Frey, Eagles guitarist and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, passed away last month. He was 67. “It is with the heaviest of hearts that we announce the passing of our comrade, Eagles founder, Glenn Frey, in New York City on Monday, January 18th, 2016. Glenn fought a courageous battle for the past several weeks but, sadly, succumbed to complications from Rheumatoid Arthritis, Acute Ulcerative Colitis and Pneumonia,” the Eagles wrote in a statement. The Detroit-born Frey performed with groups in the Motor City area before he relocated to Los Angeles in the late Sixties, eventually living in an apartment with J.D. Souther, his partner in the short-lived Long-branch Pennywhistle, and singer-songwriter Jackson Browne. It was Souther who encouraged Linda Ronstadt, his girlfriend at the time, to hire…

“You canny bastard,” longtime producer Tony Visconti told Bowie. “You’re writing a farewell album.” WHEN THE PAIN HIT, DAVID BOWIE WAS singing a song called “Reality”. It was just another concert on a tour that had stretched on a little too long, bringing him to a stiflingly hot arena stage in Prague, on a late-June evening in 2004. “Reality”, the title track to his album of the previous year, was about facing mortality and putting illusions aside, and at age 57, he had been busy doing just that. He was sober, and had finally quit smoking. He was taking medication to lower his cholesterol, working out with a trainer. That night, as usual, he looked agelessly, extraterrestrially great: lean, with longish blond hair spilling onto his unlined forehead, a f…

GOOD CHARLOTTE The Madden brothers were the first concert for Luke Hemmings of 5SOS, and now he’s writing with them. “There’s no guidebook for how to be a pop band playing arenas,” he says. “The best we have is talking to them.” ALL TIME LOW In the band’s early days (which were, OK, four years ago), Clifford made a ritual of watching this pop-emo band’s film Straight to DVD. “They started as a Blink-182 cover band – we found Blink by backtracking,” he says. SUM 41 Michael Clifford has called this L.A. band’s “In Too Deep” the perfect pop-punk song. Adds Hemmings, “We took a lot from them onstage – jumping in the air, playing half-time.” GOLDFINGER As a kid, Hemmings listened to “Superman” – the classic cut by these…

December 25, 1954, or April 4, 1957 Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán is born (the offi cial date is contested) in La Tuna, Sinaloa. His father was “officially” a cattle rancher, but according to Malcolm Beith’s biography, The Last Narco, locals say he was actually a gomero, or opium farmer. Late 1970s El Chapo begins running drugs from the Sierra to major Mexican cities and to the border. He develops a reputation for effi ciency and ruthlessness. Early 1980s El Chapo is introduced to the Sinaloa cartel’s leader, Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo (a.k.a. El Padrino), the godfather of the modern Mexican drug trade. 1989 El Padrino’s cartel is divided among the capos, making it more self-suffi cient and less visible to law enforcement. El Chapo and “El Mayo” Zambada take over…

Animal Collective Painting With Domino Ever had trouble wrapping your head around Animal Collective? Try thinking of them as a bunch of aliens trying to interpret the music of earth. It’s how Noah Lennox imagines the band he formed with David Portner, Brian Weitz and Josh Dibb in 1999 – and it makes sense when you hear the way they boil down layers of sonic detritus into something we humans understand as pop. So when they say they’re making an album that’s “punchy”, “minimal” and inspired by the Ramones, you really have to imagine how an alien house band would interpret such things. Perhaps they’d project dinosaur flicks onto the studio wall and set up a kiddie pool for inspiration. Perhaps they’d bury two distinct musical voices – the iconic…

The last record I bought “I have a tantrum on a daily basis!” Last week I bought Whitechapel’s Our Endless War. I’ve been going back to my metal and hardcore roots just a little bit lately. The last book I read I just started Elvis Costello’s autobiography, which is really cool. I didn’t know most of that history. I like more and more [of his songs] as I get older. I now worship his discography – all of it. So much of it is just so weird and different. He’s just such a unique artist. The last song I couldn’t get out of my head Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood”. That thing has been in my head for four months [laughs]. I wake up with that shit, go to bed with…

“I’m serious about this. I’m not fucking around.” GIDEON BENSEN MIGHT BE BEST known as 20 per cent of the Preatures, but this year the guitarist and singer is out to prove he’s capable of steering a musical ship on his own. “I’m serious about this,” he says on the eve of the release of his debut EP, Cold Cold Heart. “I’m not fucking around.” Bensen called on some of Australian music’s best-regarded young talent, including vocalists Megan Washington and Montaigne and fellow Preatures guitarist Jack Moffitt, to help him record the strange, funky material that comprises his first solo release. In late 2015, he sent the rowdy, horn-led “All New Low” to radio as an indication of just how far removed the EP’s songs are from those he writes…

“I just have a sense that there’s something greater out there,” says Carter. THE FIRST THING VISITORS NO- tice upon entering the sun-drenched four-storey Santa Monica offi ce of X-Files creator Chris Carter is the artwork on the walls. Massive, imposing canvases and decorated surfboards loom overhead, each emblazoned with a unique phrase: BULLSHIT AIN’T FERTILIZER. ROTTEN ON THE INSIDE. GOD’S GIFT TO WOMEN. Ask Carter what those phrases mean, and he will tell you that they are about bad experiences he’s had – with sociopathic people, with the destructive force of nature, with 40 acres of farmland he bought. And so this golden temple of creativity is secretly a shrine to the dark side. This is the world of Chris Carter. “I guess I’m looking for relevance again,” he…

AS THE ALLMAN BROTHERS BAND LEARNED, THERE WAS more to Natalie Cole than sweet ballads. At a benefit in 2011, she joined the band for three songs – including, at her request, “Whipping Post”. “We were like, ‘That’s odd – but cool’,” recalls guitarist Warren Haynes. “She said, ‘I’m a rocker at heart’ – and she killed it.” Cole, who died of heart failure on December 31st at 65, was first known as the daughter of Nat “King” Cole, who died when she was 15. In college, she worked toward a pre-med degree, but eventually followed in her father’s footsteps, earning a Grammy for Best New Artist with her first single, 1975’s “This Will Be”. Her impressive, young-Aretha pipes led to more hits, including “Sophisticated Lady” and a cover of…

Ratings are supervised by the editors of ROLLING STONE. Sia This Is Acting Monkey Puzzle/RCA The past decade-plus of pop music has been dominated by behind-the-scenes songwriting maestros like Max Martin and Ryan Tedder, but only one of them – 40-year-old Australian Sia Furler – has become a solo star in her own right. Sia had a career as an electronica-leaning artist in the early 2000s, before finding her voice as a Top 40 master blaster, writing smashes for Beyoncé, Rihanna and more. She saved her most intense fire for her own breakout solo hit, 2014’s “Chandelier” – a diabolically catchy depiction of alcoholism that was also so real it could scare Jim Beam off booze. Sia’s songs update the grandiose Eighties lite-rock ballad tradition of Diane Warren and Phil…

2016’s Festival Fools There are no better party-starters than Mac DeMarco and Weird Al Yankovic, and both proved to be inspired choices to ring in the new year at Falls. DeMarco even proved to be a fan of Australia’s sun-smart headware. BEST NEW YEAR’S EVER! Gang Of Youths frontman Dave Le’aupepe rides the crowd at the Byron Bay leg of the Falls Festival. FELINE FINE Not content to purr her way through judging talent shows, Delta Goodrem has kicked off her stint in the Aussie version of Cats. THE PRODUCERS Mick Jagger and executive producer Terence Winter attend the New York premiere of Vinyl. PATTI READS Performing her classic Horses at a recent show, we can only assume Patti Smith needed to jog her memory of the lyrics. Flaming Lips…

Twenty-nine years since their formation, De La Soul are going independent. The New York-based hip-hop trio will self-release their eighth studio album, And the Anonymous Nobody – their first in over a decade – on April 29th. It follows a successful Kickstarter campaign they launched in early-2015, which saw them surpass their modest $110,000 target in just nine hours, eventually raising over $600,000. “To see the money pot grow and grow, it was really humbling – and shocking!” says founding member Kelvin Mercer, better known as Posdnuos, who insists that despite the increased budget they “definitely stuck to what we were doing”. What they were doing was far removed from the soul sample-based format of their early work. Instead they called on tour buddies, the Rhythm All Stars, instructing the…

Twin Peaks Last Aired: 1991 Current Status: In production What We Know: Twenty-five years after it became the freshest, weirdest thing on TV, David Lynch’s noirish crime series is returning for a run on Showtime. Lynch is directing every episode, and several characters – including FBI agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) – are back. Sadly, the actress who played Log Lady died last year. Star Trek Last Aired: 2005 (Star Trek: Enterprise) Current Status: Set to air in early 2017 What We Know: In the tradition of next-gen Star Trek series like Deep Space Nine, this one will feature new characters exploring new worlds. Boldly airing where no series has aired before (it will be the first new show for CBS’s streaming network), it’s exec-produced by Alex Kurtzman, who co-wrote…

‘THOSE WERE FANTASTIC crowds,” says Gillian Welch of her 2004 tour of Australia with musical companion Dave Rawlings. “I felt like I would’ve felt right at home in any of the [audience members’] record collections. We’ve been really excited to come back – I’m not just saying that!” “That was an amazing tour [in 2004], and an amazing experience for us,” agrees Rawlings, just minutes after walking off stage in Buffalo, New York, touring behind Nashville Obsolete, his latest release with Welch under the Dave Rawlings Machine banner. In the intervening 11 years, the world’s appetite for all things alt. country-Americana has only intensified. And few artists working in the genre have elicited such enduring admiration as Welch and Rawlings: the Woodland Studios bosses building a devoted following with their…

STEVIE WRIGHT WAS A HARD ACT TO FOLLOW. Look no further than 2005’s WaveAid benefit concert, where it took Bernard Fanning, Phil Jamieson and Jet’s Chris Cester, aka the Wrights, to re-create Wright’s “Evie (Parts 1, 2 & 3)”, perhaps the greatest rock song ever recorded in this country. Yet during Wright’s best-known performance of “Evie”, during 1979’s Sydney Opera House Concert of the Decade, he even found time to throw a backflip mid-song, dazzling the 150,000-plus crowd. This was hardly out of character for livewire Wright, who died on December 27th after a lengthy struggle with poor health. He was 68. Though born in Scotland, Stevie Wright’s life took shape in Sydney’s Villawood Migrant Hostel. There he met Harry Vanda, George Young, Dick Diamonde and Gordon ‘Snowy’ Fleet; the…

“I had my own karaoke rig at my house and people would come over and sing.” The First Song I Learned To Play The Church “One Day”, 1983 “I got a guitar when I was 16, and I learned a whole album, Seance, by the Church. I could play every song, especially ‘One Day’. That was a turning point, when you can play an actual song. The first song I learned on drums? I became a drummer at 22 and the first songs I learned [were by] the band I had just joined, called the Furies. I had never played the drums, and I joined the band and had to learn their record.” The Song That Changed My Life Elton John “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”, 1973 “I was…

DEATH HAD BEEN ON DAVID Bowie’s mind in recent years. In “The Stars (Are Out Tonight),” from his surprise 2013 release, The Next Day, he could see it above and below: “Stars are never sleeping/Dead ones and the living/We live closer to the Earth/Never to the heavens.” Most memorably, he spoke about it in lyrics from his new album, Blackstar, released just two days before his end. In the spellbinding “Lazarus,” Bowie sang, “Look up here, I’m in heaven/I’ve got scars that can’t be seen/I’ve got drama, can’t be stolen/Everybody knows me now/Look up here, man, I’m in danger/I’ve got nothing left to lose.” It was the least fanciful verse he’d ever written. For us, though, death didn’t seem to become David Bowie. At age 69, he was, to be…

“He was so vivid, so luminous. The sky is darker without him.” I’VE PLAYED AT BEING A ROCK & roll star, but I’m really not one. David Bowie is my idea of a rock star. Right now, I’m in Myanmar, a little cut off from the reaction to David’s passing, but I can assure you the sky is a lot darker here without the Starman. The first time I saw him perform was on Top of the Pops in 1972, singing “Star-man”. He was so vivid. So luminous. So fluorescent. We had one of the first colour TVs on our street, and David Bowie was the reason to have a colour TV. I’ve said he was our Elvis Presley. There are so many similarities: the masculine-feminine duality, the mastery of…

“The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from custom.” —Montaigne IT’S SEPTEMBER 28TH, 2015. MY HEAD IS swimming, labelling TracPhones (burners), one per contact, one per day, destroy, burn, buy, balancing levels of encryption, mirroring through Blackphones, anonymous e-mail addresses, unsent messages accessed in draft form. It’s a clandestine horror show for the single most technologically illiterate man left standing. At 55 years old, I’ve never learned to use a laptop. Do they still make laptops? No fucking idea! It’s 4:00 in the afternoon. Another gorgeous fall day in New York City. The streets are abuzz with the lights and sirens of diplomatic movement, heads of state, U.N. offi cials, Secret Service details, the NYPD. It’s the week of the U.N. General Assembly. Pope…

The Jezabels Synthia MGM The Jezabels have always dreamed boldly, and beautifully. Their early EPs were colossal New Wave rock screams into a canyon abyss; the production by Lachlan Mitchell on She’s So Hard (2009) and Dark Storm (2010) not so much widescreen as a 360 degree high definition vision. Prisoner, their AMP winning debut album, was another definitive step into their world, but they faltered badly with 2014 follow-up The Brink, an underdone record relying on repeated ideas. Those who became disenchanted with The Brink will be pleased with Synthia, which is a strong return to form. It’s a dark, even menacing, record at times – when Hayley Mary murmurs “whisper in my ear and tell me all the things you want to do” on the crackling “Smile”, it’s…

Henry Wagons After What I Did Last Night… ABC Making a rekkid in Nashville with real live Americans seems to be on every Aussie troubadour’s bucket list these days. Henry Wagons’ turn naturally fuels his musical passions and his booming and crooning cartoon country persona in equal measure. His first solo journey is a prodigal cowboy’s progress from the hungover scoundrel in the curiously disjointed “Cold Burger, Cold Fries” to the clip-clop homecoming of “Melbourne”. The jangling riff and crushed dignity of “Weak Link” comprise the best-realised scene of the scattershot screenplay. Character-building trials by alcohol include the honky tonk dilemma of “Head Or Heart”, the raucous Eastern European stopover “Cowboy In Krakow”, and the grunting chain gang slap of “King Hit”: not a comment on a current social scourge,…

RÜFÜS Bloom Sweat It Out The Sydney trio that are RÜFÜS – vocalist and guitarist Tyrone Lindqvist, keyboardist Jon George and drummer James Hunt – have some perennial concerns. As with their first album, Atlas, their second outing is largely about dreams, the sun, night turning into morning – standard ecstasy-fuelled themes. “Can you feel the sunshine, make it brighter, make it brighter for me, when that sun comes shining on me,” Lindqvist sings on “Brighter”, essentially an update of Atlas’ “Sundream”. And in spite of their efforts to shake up their sound – “Brighter” with house keys and soulful female vocals, “Like an Animal” with pina colada-ready riffs, “Say a Prayer for Me” with a ticking metronomic beat – a lot of these tracks are none too distinguishable from…

Bloc Party Hymns Create Control/BMG When original members, drummer Matt Tong and bassist Gordon Moakes, left Bloc Party in 2013 and 2015 respectively, few would have besmirched the UK indieflagbearers for calling time. Across four albums their tumultuous legacy as one of the most exciting groups of the ’00s was assured. But now Hymns – the band’s fifth record, and first with new bassist Justin Harris of Menomena (but not new drummer Louise Bartle, who joined the band after its completion), is an uneven and ultimately dull stab at resurrection. Inspired by his parents’ religious songbooks, Hymns finds Kele Okereke musing on concepts of devotion and communion, while Russell Lissack has found the pedal that makes his guitar sound like an organ. The result is an unmoored set of eccentric…

Steve Jobs Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen Directed by Danny Boyle IF YOU’RE GOING TO INTER- pret on film the searching mind of an indisputable genius, it helps not to make too many dumbass moves. On that basis, score a triumph for Steve Jobs, written, directed and acted to perfection, and so fresh and startling in conception and execution that it leaves you awed. Michael Fassbender rips through the role of the volcanic Apple co-founder and CEO who sucked at personal interaction but soared at transmogrifying personal computing and everything digital from music, animation (Pixar) and publishing to those iPhones we wear like a second skin. Fassbender’s Jobs is a tornado of roaring ferocity and repressed feeling. He’s also charming and seductively funny, which makes him dangerous if you…