Indice dei contenuti per January 2017 in Rolling Stone Australia

“I’m not ashamed to say Paul Solotaroff’s article about his son Luke moved me to tears.” Do the Evolution YOUR ILLUMINATING IN- terview with ‘Living Legend’ Deb Conway [RS 781] perfectly reflects the recent evolution of the music biz. For decades, hard-nosed record companies spent big money then expected mega-sales in return, summarily dropping artists who didn’t bring in the dollars. These days it’s homespun tours and flogging product from your car boot. Terrific stuff. Vince Pawson Surrey Hills, Vic Nice Nineties A BIG THUMBS UP FOR THE Nineties special edition. It must have been hard to pick a top 100 albums from a decade that produced so many classics. In a time when the lines between alternative and mainstream became blurred beyond recognition it was reassuring to see the…

ABOUT 36 HOURS after it was announced he would receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, Bob Dylan took the stage at the Desert Trip festival in Indio, California, and said nothing about it. He left it to the Rolling Stones, who played later that night, to speak to the fact that Dylan had just been awarded the literary world’s highest honour: “We have never shared the stage with a Nobel Prize winner before,” said Mick Jagger. Added Keith Richards, “I can’t think of anybody that deserved it better.” Dylan’s silence was typical for him – until recently he had only granted a single interview in the past four years – and for a while it extended to the Nobel Prize Committee itself. Indeed, it wasn’t until weeks after the announcement…

OF THE MANY REVELATIONS TO come from former Skid Row singer Sebastian Bach’s new book, 18 and Life on Skid Row (out December 19th), one of the most surprising is that clean-cut rockers Bon Jovi could hold their own next to the celebrated kings of debauchery, Pantera. Bach spent time on the road with both during his tenure as frontman with Skid Row, and recounts many of his touring tales throughout the book. “People might have an image of Bon Jovi as one thing and Pantera as the other, but I’ll tell you,” he laughs, “Bon Jovi could hang with Pantera any day of the week as far as partying goes.” Bach was, of course, no slouch himself on that front, but these days the 48-year-old says a “glass of…

Danny Brown feat. Kendrick Lamar “Really Doe” “This is a banger for sure,” says Diamond of the latest single off Brown’s Atrocity Exhibition. “The production reminds me of Nineties hip-hop. Kendrick is fire on the chorus.” Rihanna “Kiss It Better” Diamond has been spinning Canadian DJ Kaytranada’s dreamy remix of this Anti track, which D calls a perfect weekend party-starter: “It’s the best kind of pop music – super-catchy.” The Growlers “I’ll Be Around” “Julian Casablancas produced a great album for these guys,” Diamond says of the California “beach goth” group. “This sounds like an update on late-Seventies Rolling Stones.” The Slits “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” Diamond often plays this 1979 cover by London postpunkers the Slits, which he says “works so well in different modes: party action…

B ILLY THORPE, THE Easybeats, Daddy Cool, John Farnham. All household names, and all peers of the seldom-celebrated rock & soul artist Jeff St John. The singer, crippled with spina bifida from an early age, was widely celebrated as one of the best Aussie singers of the Sixties and Seventies. Early in his career, he would discard his ever-present crutches and perform sitting on a stool on the stage. Later, he would sing from his wheelchair, with a grizzled hippy style that could have easily inspired Tom Cruise’s look in Born on the Fourth of July. For numerous reasons, not just limited to his health problems, St John became a footnote in our nation’s rock history, but rock book publisher James Anfuso remained haunted by his early memory of seeing…

Clinton Heylin’s history of Bob Dylan’s transition from folk icon to electric radical begins with Dylan’s first plugged-in performance, at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25th, 1965, and ends just 10 months later at London’s Royal Albert Hall. This is well-worn territory, but Heylin, one of the world’s foremost Dylanologists, breathes new life into the story with the help of 18 recently unearthed soundboard recordings from Dylan’s 1966 tour with the Hawks. Heylin referenced local newspaper articles and conducted new interviews, vividly recounting moments like the night Dylan played Blonde on Blonde for the Beatles. At the tour’s final stop, a worn-down Dylan snipes at yet another folkie heckler, “You’re not going to see me anymore. And I’m not going to see you.”…

Otis Redding “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” Otis takes you into the world of a love gone cold and makes you feel every word he sings. This is my favourite performance of a song ever. Period. Aretha Franklin “Ain’t No Way” Aretha is the queen, and when you need it, lie flat on the floor and she will sing your pain. It’s pure, gorgeous R&B. Bonnie Raitt “I Can’t Make You Love Me” Get a box of tissues. Bonnie sings with such truth in her voice it will render you helpless. Lucinda Williams “Essence” When you have entered the most pitiful part of your heartbreak, wallow in the darkness with Lucinda. She knows how you feel. Todd Rundgren “Can We Still Be Friends?” When all the crying is done…

The Song I Listen To Before Going On Stage Radiohead “Bones”, 1995 “I don’t really. I don’t sit and vibe, as Eminem would say. [Laughs] I’m probably chatting and going over my first few lines. But I do put on an album for the audience, when the doors are open, so I can hear [that], and the one I’ve probably put on the most is The Bends by Radiohead. It’s so beautifully structured and complex that it really stands the test of time, and ‘Bones’ is an amazing track. The lyric ‘I used to fly like Peter Pan’, it brings a lump to my throat.” The Song I Want Played At My Funeral Willie Nelson “Always On My Mind”, 1982 “Why do I give a flying fuck what’s…

“I KINDA THOUGHT THAT [THE BEATLES’] ‘LOVE ME DO’ WAS A BUCKET OF PUS.” SWEETMUSIC FLOATS INTOTHEST Kilda morning from the open front door of the mansion on the hill. Beyond the lead-light foyer sits Joe Camilleri, teasing out Duke Ellington on his hand-painted sax. “I’ve played the song inside out but to find something that 5,000 saxophone players have never found…?” He shakes his head. After 50 years in showbiz, a looming jazz club date is yet another puzzle to crack. “I’m gonna do the Van Morrison I reckon: just play one note.” Didn’t you get thrown in the deep end at your very first gig, in 1964? Yeah, we were down here in Footscray and they used to have these blue light discos and [my friends] physically threw…

Gretta Ray is standing outside a classroom at Melbourne’s Princes Hill Secondary College, having just sat her VCE exam in Literature. It didn’t go as she’d hoped. “It was so bad,” she laughs. “We just got these really terrible extracts from the book to write on. But anyway,” she sighs, “it’s over.” Odds are Ray is the only artist in this issue who’s having to juggle interviews around her Year 12 commitments, although with only one exam left to sit, that will soon be a thing of the past. For most teens, their final year of school is challenge enough, but when Ray released her debut EP, Elsewhere, in February, such was the level of interest it had the potential to make things a whole lot more complicated. An executive…

Rostam Batmanglij spent his twenties building Vampire Weekend from a Columbia University dorm project into one of indie rock’s biggest bands. But by 2013, Batmanglij – who wrote, produced and played keyboards for the group – was looking to branch out. “A lot of people get a high from being onstage,” he says. “I get it from being in the studio.” Earlier this year, Batmanglij, 32, left the band in favour of a solo career and producing, putting his imaginative art-rock stamp on tracks by Solange and Frank Ocean. “The most exciting songs to me are the unlikely hits,” he says, “when you think, ‘I love this, but why is it on the radio?’” At his L.A. home studio, Batmanglij pushes acts to find a “deeper space”. When Ocean asked…

If you remember Bruce Hornsby only for his 1986 adult-contemporary hit “The Way It Is”, you would have been surprised by the scene at Wisconsin’s Eaux Claires festival in June. Backstage, several indie rockers treated Hornsby like royalty. Onstage, he sat in with Bon Iver and members of the National. Those are just some acts reclaiming Hornsby lately, finding inspiration in both his pop balladry and his more freewheeling later work: jazz, bluegrass and serving as the Dead’s touring pianist. “He gathers from the Grateful Dead, Keith Jarrett and Sam Cooke – he has it all,” says Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon. Ryan Adams drew on Horns-by’s bright Eighties folk sound for his new LP: “Without him, I wouldn’t have decided I can be myself without throwing so much against the…

Haley Bennett is on fire. Or, rather, her apartment is. “Shall we have a fire?” she asks when I arrive at her Tribeca loft on one of the first cool afternoons of autumn. Soon we’re ensconced on a sofa while Bennett, 28, talks about her youth, which included a tomboy childhood riding horses and flipping ATVs in Ohio while being a “social outcast” at school. At 18, and with only a few high school plays under her belt, Bennett persuaded her mum to take her to L.A. What followed was a decade of (mostly) steady work on (mostly) unsatisfying projects: “For a long time, I was like, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have done this.’ ” Ten years in, Bennett is having the breakout moment she wasn’t sure would ever come. We’re…

ATLANTA CHARACTER Earn (Donald Glover) DIAGNOSIS Depression. Glover (who has rapped about depression as his musical alter ego, Childish Gambino) plays a Princeton dropout trying to build a new life as a hip-hop manager. QUOTE “I just keep losing. I mean, some people just supposed to lose? For balance in the universe?” YOU’RE THE WORST CHARACTER Gretchen (Aya Cash) DIAGNOSIS Depression, exacerbated by hard drugs. Gretchen’s groundbreaking-for-TV journey into treatment involves meds and “talky-talky” with a therapist. QUOTE “A psychiatrist is like, ‘Here, take these pills, ho.’ A therapist is all ‘Oh, tell me your shit, I couldn’t make it as an actor.’ ” LADY DYNAMITE CHARACTER Maria (Maria Bamford) DIAGNOSIS Bipolar II disorder. Easily the bravest, bluntest depiction of mental illness on TV: Bamford plays herself as a comedian…

There’s a restaurant in Hong Kong called MR. POTATO HEAD that has by far the best Indonesian food I’ve ever had. In the back, they have this tiny dance room for about 30 people, with an amazing Seventies sound system and about 8,000 records. One night they asked me if I wanted to DJ with only their records, which was a bit terrifying, but turned out to be really rad. They’re trying to open one in L.A. It was one of the best places I saw on tour last year.…

It’s more about songs for the ages than tabloid raw meat. Miranda Lambert The Weight of These Wings RCA Miranda Lambert’s latest opens on a classic country image: a weekend hangover echoing the one in Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Mornin’ Coming Down”. But “Runnin’ Just in Case” is no brooding existential ramble. It’s a gravel-spitting exit from sorrow’s driveway, bad memories shrivelling in the rearview. And it sets the tone for the Nashville star’s most ambitious LP, a rangy two-disc set ditching country’s mainstream playbook for the sort of Great Album that rock acts used to crank out regularly back in the day. Rubberneckers have anticipated The Weight of These Wings since Lambert split from Blake Shelton, ending their four-year term as country’s First Couple (another thankless job). Sure, it’s a…

Bruno Mars 24K Magic Atlantic Bruno Mars wears a lot of hats on his third LP: giddy uptown-funk savant, bumping-and-grinding R&B time-traveller, Ashford and Simpson-esque quiet-storm balladeer. But the heart of 24K Magic recalls the New Jack Swing of Boyz II Men, Bell Biv DeVoe and Bobby Brown. Mars wanted Magic to recreate the nostalgic wonder of the school dances he attended in the Nineties – and his crowded productions, infectious attitude and soaring voice go well beyond “tribute” into the realm of “blockbuster reboot”. The chorus in “Calling All My Lovelies” – “I got Alesha waiting/Iesha waiting/All the –eeshas waiting on me” – is an adult epilogue to Another Bad Creation’s playground romanticism, and “Perm” is a future-shocked James Brown hip-hop hybrid. Yet while his funk game is strong…

“Ocean” Lou Reed 1972 One of Reed’s dreamiest later VU songs, reimagined for his solo debut with a gong and piano drama from prog-rock wizard Rick Wakeman of Yes. “Kill Your Sons” Sally Can’t Dance 1974 A semiautobiographical rant against suburban parents who sign off on electroshock therapy for their kid, with a cock-rock guitar solo speeding toward freedom. “The Bells” The Bells 1979 Reed enlists trumpeter Don Cherry on this nine-minute spiritual-jazz elegy for a man standing on a ledge, which at the time Reed surely was. “The Power of Positive Drinking” Growing Up in Public 1980 A darkly funny praise song to booze that’s also a cocky exercise in self-justification: “Some say liquor kills the cells in your head/And for that matter, so does…

“Togoto Brian May’s house and him make a cup of tea for you, that’s fucked up.” The last time I said, “Don’t you know who I am?” [Laughs] Never seriously. Maybe to my kids: “I’m your father, don’t you know who I am?!” But that would be the only time. The last time I got a tattoo I’ve been working on finishing my back. It’s Pharaoh’s Horses, like three horse heads, it symbolises change, and there’s a border of these snakes coming around, and then there’s these two opposing skulls on the top. It’s a full piece. Do I enjoy getting tattooed? I like every couple of months or years, changing yourself completely. But then you get in the chair and you’re like, why the fuck am I doing it?…

The Rolling Stones Some of the first commercial bootlegs documented their ’69 tour, including an Oakland soundboard. The band must release them by 2019, or they’ll be public domain. The Beatles The 1969 Let It Be sessions, with covers such as “That’ll Be the Day” and “Rainy Day Women #12 and 35”, will need to be officially released within three years. Led Zeppelin The first recorded Zeppelin show – featuring an early take of “Dazed and Confused” – was captured in December 1968 in Washington. They have 14 months to get it out. Bruce Springsteen His early band Steel Mill had a cult following, playing originals and covers. Many 1969-71 shows were taped; by 2019, he’ll need to make them public or lose the copyright. A.G.…

‘IF YOU LEAD WITH LOVE, you’ve won,” says Alicia Keys, who may well be the most serene human being in North America – she’s calling during breaks from the frantic process of shooting the finals of The Voice, but she sounds like she’s sitting in a warm bath. Credit motherhood, a meditation practice, deep engagement in philanthropy and an artistic rebirth: Keys is convinced her new album, last month’s risk-taking, raw, socially conscious Here, is a breakthrough, and she’s probably right. “It just cohesively speaks so clearly to where I am,” she says, “and where we are in the world. I’m gonna make better records, ’cause I’m just getting better, but this is the best I’ve made yet.” You were intent on all the pieces of your new album fitting…

DURING THE EIGHTIES, THE SMITHS were England’s most unlikely hit-makers, building an enormous cult following on the brilliant but shaky alliance between singer-lyricist Morrissey and guitar visionary Johnny Marr. The band’s 1987 breakup inaugurated decades of fighting between the two in the press and in court. In one moving moment in his new memoir, Set the Boy Free, Marr describes a 2008 meeting with Morrissey (their first in more than a decade) to discuss a possible Smiths reunion – a hopeful period that ended when Moz stopped returning Marr’s calls. “Things went back to how they were and how I expect they always will be,” Marr writes. The Smiths saga has been told before, in the 700-page bio A Light That Never Goes Out and in Morrissey’s own highly tendentious…

Stolichnaya Vodka $34.95 The classic Russian vodka is the perfect gift as it’s the basis for a plethora of cocktails. Heineken Lager $43.99 Who can resist a frosty can on Christmas day? And Heineken cans even come in Christmas colours (may just be a coincidence). Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Fire $43.95 Like your bourbon with a cinnamon bite? Try this warming variation on classic Jack. Flying Brick Cider $70.08 The perfect alternative to beer on a blazing hot Christmas day is a crisp, clean cider. Uppercut Deluxe Men’s Grooming Gift Sets $35-50 Even the man who has everything will inevitably need grooming products that don’t suck.…

FOR THE PAST TWO YEARS, THE Who have been on what they called their “last big tour”, performing some of their most wide-ranging sets in decades with a renewed energy. The tour has been especially reinvigorating for Pete Townshend, who for years had found playing live increasingly dull: “People would say, ‘Were you having fun onstage?’ I’d say, ‘Not really. It’s just what I do’,” he says. [Cont. on 33] Townshend’s attitude started changing during the final five weeks of the tour’s most recent leg, which included a set at Desert Trip in Indio, California, that for many fans was the highlight of the festival. Townshend has been encouraged by younger faces in the audience, and a new sense of effortlessness in his playing. “Maybe it’s because I can see the…

“Why do I give a flying fuck what’s played at my funeral?” “In September 2015, the Foo Fighters played two nights at the Milton Keynes Bowl,” recalls snapper Tony Woolliscroft. “There were all kinds of rumours about who was going to be special guests on both nights. I’d been in the band’s practice room for about 10 minutes, taking pictures as they warmed up, when in walked Roger Taylor from Queen, and he sat behind Taylor Hawkins’ drum kit. A quick discussion took place on what song to cover, and it was decided to play ‘Under Pressure’ by Queen and David Bowie. Two minutes later, John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin walked into the rehearsal space and went over to the keyboards, and the band launched into the song with…

Batmanglij isn’t the only outside visionary who’s busy reinventing the Top 40. In the past couple of years, indie-pop and avant-R&B songwriters have begun a left-field siege, collaborating with superstars from Beyoncé to Lady Gaga and pushing the mainstream in adventurous new directions. James Blake WHO U.K. electro-soul singer-composer WORKED WITH Beyoncé, Drake, Chance the Rapper SECRET WEAPON Sad-spaceman vocal beauty and wintry piano elegance CHECK OUT The introspective “Forward”, from Beyoncé’s Lemonade; written with Blake, and featuring his vocals, it’s one of the LP’s most haunting moments. Dev Hynes WHO Funk-pop auteur known as Blood Orange WORKED WITH Carly Rae Jepsen, Sky Ferreira, Solange SECRET WEAPON The Prince-ly funk-pop ambition that can be heard on his excellent 2016 LP, Freetown Sound CHECK OUT Jepsen’s Hynespenned “All That”, which…

Cheo Hodari Coker had an ambitious goal as showrunner of the Netflix series Luke Cage: the “Wu-Tang-ification of the Marvel universe”. “I wanted to use hip-hop in ways you’d never seen before in a TV show, but I’ve also been reading comics for 25 years,” says Coker, 45, who was a music journalist before transitioning to TV (and the last person to interview the Notorious B.I.G. before his death in 1997). “My pitch was Belly meets City of God as written by the staff of The Wire.” So far, it’s worked. Method Man has made a cameo, and episodes feature nods to Biggie and blaxploitation. With Luke Cage, he’s given us a superhero for the Black Lives Matter era. “You have a black man in a hoodie with bullets bouncing…

Hollywood, having recast Spider-Man with a third Peter Parker and shrunk down to minuscule heroes like Ant-Man, is running out of comic books to adapt – and studios are betting that the next big thing is video games. Some of the largest titles are being turned into movies, from Minecraft to Asteroids. “There’s a formidable fan base,” says Justin Kurzel, director of Assassin’s Creed, which opens next month with a reported $130 million budget, “and the concepts of some of these games are really cinematic.”…

A couple of years back, stand-up comic Brandon Wardell laid down two markers for success: befriending Drake and hooking up with Ariana Grande. Neither has come to pass, but Wardell, 24, who grew up as an itinerant Air Force brat, is feeling OK about being an “alt-famous” voice of a generation. On Twitter this year, he spawned a crazily popular absurdist meme, “Dicks Out for Harambe” – which random bros still shout at him. He stars in a Snapchat show for Comedy Central, gets paid for halfassed DJ sets, peppers his stand-up with hip-hop references, and consults for corporations as a millennial whisperer. But his relationship to his generation is complex: “I’m hyperinvolved in the culture but also hate everything about it,” says Wardell, who takes aim at peers’ performative…

In May, Mahmud Adeleye was living on one dollar a day in West Africa. A month later, he joined Steemit, a new social-media platform that rewards users with its own cryptocurrency. The more “upvotes” – likes, essentially – a post gets, the more it earns. By August, he had made the equivalent of $41,000 – plus another $18,000 after posting his story about this transformation. If that sounds too good to be true, I felt the same way. Then I posted just four sentences, along with an angry letter that Phil Collins once sent me about a concert review I had written. It received 463 upvotes, and made $10,452 in the site’s cryptocurrency, called Steem, which can be converted into bitcoin. “If you look at companies like Facebook, Twitter and…

A.B. Original Reclaim Australia Golden Era/Bad Apples Music A.B. Original sure don’t half step. Evident right there in the album title (a double entendre reference to an Australian hate group) and throughout their fist-raised debut, the duo – a cross-state amalgamation between Shepparton’s Briggs and Trials from Adelaide’s Funkoars – strangle the status quo with their socially conscious flip of Nineties West Coast gangster rap. Bookended by a baton-pass intro with indigenous leader Archie Roach and a soulful closing cameo from Gurrumul, A.B. Original share more than just aesthetics with the G-funk era, swaggering and smirking like a heyday Ice Cube, as they deliver plainspoken punchlines of both poignancy and humour, all antagonistically aimed to “hit you with that Andrew Bolt of lightning” – as Trials boasts on “2 Black…

The Rolling Stones Blue & Lonesome Universal This must be harder than it sounds. That’s the only answer to what took the Stones so long to slam out an album of vintage Chicago blues grinders in some concrete echo chamber out Twickenham way. However simple the three-days/no overdubs construction, it’s the weight of passion and experience – on both sides of the mixing desk – that makes it such an intense, soulful and joyous experience. The songs hail from sources whose lofty renown owes plenty to these very upstarts – Howlin’ Wolf, Jimmy Reed, Willie Dixon – as well as lesser known greats like Miles Grayson and Lermon Horton. Their “Everybody Knows About My Good Thing” is the high point of the swamp, with its stinging soloing by Eric Clapton…

MUST-HAVES “The first album by Reed’s Sixties band may be rock’s greatest debut LP ever.” The Velvet Underground & Nico 1967 The first album by Reed’s groundbreaking Sixties band may be rock’s greatest debut LP ever. Reed combined an interest in transgressive literature with skills honed as a low-rent hired-gun songwriter. With Welsh classical-music rebel John Cale, nascent German pop chanteuse Christa “Nico” Päffgen, suburban rock-guitar scholar Sterling Morrison and DIY drum stylist Moe Tucker, Reed delivered first-person junkie narratives (“Heroin”, “I’m Waiting for the Man”) and sadomasochistic psychodrama (“Venus in Furs”), transforming rock & roll from teenage dance-floor exhortations into a boundless vehicle for subterranean storytelling and avant-garde musical invention. “Produced” by Andy Warhol, the LP confounded the mainstream. But, in time, it proved no less influential than the…

Bruno Mars Slides Back Bruno Mars can’t wait to tour next year. It’s going to be wild, judging by his funky performance of “24K Magic” at MTV’s Europe Music Awards in the Netherlands, which also featured sets by Kings of Leon and the Weeknd. “When you start playing songs live, you make them better,” says Mars. “Then you’re like, ‘Damn, why didn’t I record that?’ ” Arcade Fire, Ready to Start! “Do you guys wanna be on a record?” Win Butler asked the crowd at New Orleans’ Voodoo Fest, before leading them in a na-na singalong, likely for the band’s fifth album. At a secret show the night before, the band tested out disco-leaning new songs for the LP, which is expected next year.…

1 GRAVES SITUATION When an artist fades from the wider public view after making the sort of impact PEZ did with 2008’s “The Festival Song”, it’s easy to call one-hit wonder – but there’s more to this story. “I came down with Graves’ disease,” the Melbourne MC explains. “It took me out of the game for longer than I would have liked,” he adds of the thyroid condition. “It was a big shock, and it took me a long time to get used to it – and to get over it. It was pretty confronting.” 2 TIME OUT Though the disease kept PEZ waylaid, he still kept his eye in. “It was strange watching the scene from the outside after being so wrapped up in it,” he offers, “but it…

Curtis Mayfield helped shape the African-American experience like few others – first during the civil rights era with the Impressions, then as a solo artist, with the blaxploitation landmark Superfly. Personally, though, he was a distant, mercurial figure who abused drugs and women and spent long periods cut off from the outside world. In Traveling Soul, Todd Mayfield, one of the singer’s 10 children, writes that his father’s erratic ways reflected his “divided nature as a Gemini”, a less-than-probing characterisation that fits a man almost no one could get close to. Todd follows his dad from dire poverty in Chicago to stardom, chronicling the fight for black empowerment that serves as a mirror to Curtis’ own journey from Sixties positivity to Seventies and Eighties malaise. The moving final chapters chronicle…

“I warn you to stay away from the USA for quite some time.” IDON’T THINK THERE WILL BE anything in 2016 that will match watching Donald Trump become the 45th President of the United States. I know you might not believe me but it’s true; all I could do was laugh. The sheer level of insanity that America has set out for itself has turned the country into a reality show the size of a nation. President-elect Trump’s victory by a considerable margin should be a heads up to the entire world that all the things that you might find objectionable about the USA, from the hegemonic overreach to the 24-7 bellicose posturing, will be not only more pronounced, but possibly the most visible aspects of not only the country’s…

“My Generation” (Version 3) Townshend’s sputtered delivery on this early acoustic demo was an attempt to sound like a man on amphetamines. “It gave Roger a chance to spit and shout from deep in his belly,” Townshend says. “The Girls I Could’ve Had” A previously unheard blues rocker about being shy around women. Townshend says it stayed in the can because Daltrey was such a successful ladies’ man. “A Legal Matter” The in-progress version of the first song Townshend recorded lead vocals on features surprisingly countryish lead guitar: “Roger and I had occasionally done it that way for fun,” he says. “It fits very well.” “Sunrise” (Version 1) This appeared on 1967’s The Who Sell Out as a fragile ballad. The ’65 demo shows jazzier, more confident origins. “I wrote…

One week, 25-year-old British actor Joe Alwyn was running scenes with his classmates at London’s Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. The next, he found himself packing for rigorous military training after landing the lead as a returning Iraq War hero in Ang Lee’s new film, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. It’s his first role, but he’s already being compared to a young Leonardo DiCaprio. “I am in every scene,” he says, somewhat sheepishly. “There’s no escaping me!” The son of a documentarian and a psychotherapist, Alwyn admits that being “thrown into the deep end” helped him get into the mind-set of a young soldier returning from war only to find himself appearing with Destiny’s Child during an NFL halftime show. “It’s surreal,” Alwyn says. “I went from being…

Ask most folks what the most iconic thing about Los Angeles is, and they’ll tell you it’s the HOLLYWOOD sign. Not Damien Chazelle. “It’s freeway gridlock,” replies the writer-director. “I liked the idea that if you were writing a love letter to L.A., you’d take the single most annoying thing about it and prove that even that can be the site for a musical number.” Chazelle’s new film, La La Land, kicks off with a five-minute song-and-dance that involved shutting down a ramp to the 101 freeway for two days while hundreds of people sang and danced on car roofs. It’s a fitting start to the most ambitious film to come out of Hollywood in ages – a full-on musical that puts a new spin on old-school MGM-style show-stoppers. Chazelle…