Table of contents for December 2017 in Rolling Stone Australia

Garrett Groan NO DENYING MIDNIGHT OIL are a great Australian band and freedom of speech is always welcomed through music. But seriously, once a politician always a bloody politician! Senator Garrett, you can wave your arms and flares around for stopping Adani, but maybe your shirt should have had “stop crap insulation batts and save lives” instead!? But hey, that’s probably off your endangered species list and conscience by now. Please keep it to being about the music . . . this country is sick of bad politics! Shezanne Gibbs-Hooper Via e-mail Yes Minister WHAT’S WITH RS AUSTRALIA and their false environmental prophet Peter Garrett? Last time you met with him he sipped from a disposable cup in an act of total environmental defiance. There are so many true environmental…

“Noel wants me to just vanish. As if I never even walked the Earth. Well, I got news for him – I’m back, mate.” IT MIGHT NOT HAVE SEEMED LIKE IT during the champagne-and-cocaine supernova of his Brit-pop Nineties – back when a given night might find him detained by police on a ferry to Amsterdam, tossed out of Abbey Road Studios midsession, or skipping an Oasis gig to go house-shopping – but Liam Gallagher was always thinking long-term. Or at least he was always thinking. Take his habitual onstage pose: arms clasped behind his back, every part of him immobile save for his lips. “I knew for a fact I was gonna live forever,” he says now, having made it to a lean, fiery 45. He ran about 11…

EVERYTHING IS IN ITS RIGHT place. The latched front gate. The geometric paving. The neatly tended pot plants. From the outside, it’s hard to reconcile this ultra-modern triple-storey home in Melbourne’s affluent beach suburbs with a hip-hop beast who had, by his own reckoning, “already died twice” by his 30th birthday. Sixty? “Matt,” says the tall guy with the pale blue eyes and clean white baseball cap who opens the door. He flashes white teeth and extends an elaborately tattooed arm. If it weren’t for the copious ink blossoming from T-shirt to jawline, he could be anybody’s boy next door. Inside, an upstairs corridor is lined with seven or eight gold and platinum sales plaques, peaking so far with 2011’s Falling & Flying LP and its blockbuster single with Gossling,…

Five Songs About Children The singer-songwriter’s latest, The Laughing Apple, features newly recorded versions of songs he wrote in the 1960s. Stevie Wonder “Isn’t She Lovely” Stevie Wonder had a massive impact on me. This song is about his daughter and shows the open, honest love that a parent has for a child. John Lennon “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)” This shows a sweet part of John that you don’t often get, since he was so cryptic. It’s an outpouring of love for his son Sean. Harry Chapin “Cat’s in the Cradle” This song has been haunting me for years, since people think that I wrote it. It reflects the dilemma of many homes. A beautiful song. The Lovin’ Spoonful “Younger Generation” John Sebastian wrote a wacky lyric about a future…

Caligula’s Horse SOUNDS LIKE: Rush and Dream Theater discussing philosophy with Jeff Buckley in an art gallery FOR FANS OF: Karnivool, Pain of Salvation, Porcupine Tree WHY YOU SHOULD PAY ATTENTION: Worldwide plaudits for their lush, deeply melodic prog have followed this Brisbane quintet since the release of their second album, 2013’s The Tide, the Thief & River’s End, leading to an international signing and two European tours with the likes of Opeth and Anathema. Exploring the origins of artistic creativity through a combination of cerebral storytelling, melody and intricate riffing, their elaborate latest release, In Contact, touched base with the ARIA albums chart and was followed by a sold out national tour in October. THEY SAY: “We play energetic, melodic and powerful progressive rock,” explains vocalist Jim Grey. “If…

Square One Tom Petty Highway Companion, 2006 Petty’s third solo album – co-produced with his Full Moon Fever cohort Jeff Lynne – was an unresolved hybrid of Fever’s pop modernism and the woodland flair of Wildflowers. But in “Square One”, Petty wrote one of his most honest ballads at a time when he had much to confess: turmoil in the Heartbreakers; hard trials in his personal life. “Square one, my slate is clear,” Petty sang with more gratitude than brio, ready for his creative renaissance. Scare Easy Mudcrutch Mudcrutch, 2008 Sometimes you can go home again – with the right friends. Petty’s first serious band – with Campbell, Tench, drummer Randall Marsh and guitarist Tom Leadon, Petty’s teenage bandmate in the Epics – left Gainesville to seek its fortune in…

 Six years ago, Janet Mock, the 34-year-old writer and media star, came out as transgender in Marie Claire. Since then, she has written two successful memoirs, hosted her own pop-culture news show for MSNBC, recorded the first season of her Lena Dunham-produced podcast, Never Before, and rubbed elbows with the likes of Ava DuVernay, John Legend and Rep. Maxine Waters. Her outspokenness about her intersecting identities – “I’m a black Native-Hawaiian trans woman who grew up low-income” – has made her one of America’s most influential advocates for trans rights. The litany of conservative bills barring trans people from using public restrooms that correspond with their gender identities and President Trump’s recent announcement on Twitter that he is banning trans people from the military have only “created an urgency in…

“How do we make Wonder Woman cool?” That’s what Patty Jenkins kept hearing before she signed on to direct Warner Bros.’ first comic-book movie with a female lead. “People weren’t confident enough in the character,” she says. But Jenkins, 46, who wrote and directed the 2003 serial-killer drama Monster, not only proved the coolness of Wonder Woman, she also showed how profitable the vision of a female director could be. “I hope this sends a flare,” she says. “Like, ‘Let’s go forward as if [women’s capabilities] are obvious to everyone.’ That’s what the movie itself tries to say.…

I’M THE TYPE OF PERSON THAT you’d walk past and go, ‘I think I went to school with her’, or, ‘I know her and I can’t quite place it’,” says the British actress Jodie Whittaker. On July 16th, it was announced she would be playing the 13th incarnation of the time-travelling alien on Doctor Who, the first female to take on the iconic role since the show debuted in 1963. Recalling a coffee date with showrunner Chris Chibnall, in which he asked her to consider auditioning, she says, “I remember walking through London after that, going, ‘What the fuck?’ As a young girl, I did not think that ‘Time Lord’ would ever be on my CV.” Though Whittaker had starred in a number of feature films and BBC hits like…

Beverley Wang is the executive producer of Radio National’s RN Drive and runs ABC podcast It’s Not a Race. Curating stories from persons of colour, Wang’s discussions of culture and identity are frank and intimate. Though she grew up in Canada and worked in the United States, Wang taps into issues that are peculiarly Australian – one episode analyses Australia’s denial of racism. Having joined the ABC in 2009, in 2016 she challenged herself to pitch a podcast by the end of the year. “I wanted to push myself to see if I could do something new and different. But I think there’s something in the air, a more welcoming appetite for these kinds of stories.…

Rivers Cuomo and Co. smooth off the edges on latest LP Weezer  Pacific Daydream Atlantic ★★★ ½ Weezer’s 11th studio album was initially supposed to be called The Black Album, a reaction to the good-time summer feel of last year’s self-titled LP (their third, commonly known as The White Album). As frontman Rivers Cuomo started to write, however, the new material maintained the good vibes, hence Pacific Daydream was born. Testament to Cuomo’s perfectionist tendencies, the songs here draw on thousands of riffs, chord progression and beat ideas, some of which he paired by using a formula on Google Sheets based on their key and tempo. Not surprisingly, every note and every melody sounds like it’s in exactly the right place. Lyrically Cuomo’s in typically quirky form – see his…

The sentence “The guy from Vampire Weekend made an anime with Will Smith’s son” sounds randomly generated. How did this show come together? Out of respect for true anime, I’ve always called Neo Yokio “anime-inspired” – it’s a hybrid. But I’ve always been a fan of anime, and I always wanted to do something that was kind of a homage to it. Maybe a loving parody. Vampire Weekend have seen some personnel changes: Rostam Batmanglij left as a full-time member, and you’ve brought on new collaborators. How has that affected the next album? I had this experience where I was in the studio with Kanye in Mexico, and it was so different than anything I’d done: One day Dave Longstreth is there; the next day Big Sean shows up. Sometimes…

Who is your biggest hero and why? David Bowie. The first video I saw on MTV was “Ashes to Ashes”. I hadn’t listened to a great deal of music at the time, because I was at Christian school. He’d created a radio pop hit that was so unnatural, so different, full of unease and tension. And yet it had some sexiness to it. It was like I was watching a movie. Now when I make a record, I want it to be like a movie. When you hear a song, it’s like a scene in a movie. If you accomplish that scene well, you’re going to want to see the next scene. What’s the best advice you ever got? As a kid, my dad told me, “Son, when you get…

“I would play ‘From Under the Cork Tree’ front to back and imagine what it must be like to be a performing musician.” The Last Song I Listened To Phoebe Bridgers Killer, 2017 “I toured with her almost two years ago, and she’s just a surreally talented poet and artist. I heard these songs live and I’ve been holding my breath waiting for them to come out, and the record is finally out and it’s so good. It’s a really emotive, haunting record and I listen to it and stare out the window dramatically. [Laughs]” The Song I Can’t Get Out Of My Head Paramore Rose-Colored Boy, 2017 “I wake up some times with that chorus that starts out ‘Just let me cry’ stuck in my head, and it’s my…

“WE HAD ARSEHOLE MOMENTS, BUT FOR THE MOST PART WE WERE NICE PEOPLE.” ‘FRAGILE’ IS GRACE KNIGHT’S latest album and “Lucky Me” its first track. In a life scarred by childhood abuse and vindicated by platinum success with Eighties synth-pop band the Eurogliders, she knows both like old friends. “Even while I was on stage I felt completely worthless,” she remembers of those heady days. It was well into her next life as the jazz diva of Come In Spinner that she realised, “I’m still here. The only possible reason is that I’m OK.” You landed in Perth from the UK in 1977. How was the music? I passionately hated it. I was from London and I didn’t understand Dave Warner’s From the Suburbs. Australia was so rock-oriented. I was…

“At the end of the day, all we need is each other,” Allison says. TWIN SISTERS ALLISON and Katie Crutchfield started writing songs when they were just teenagers growing up in Birmingham, Alabama. Huddled in a basement wallpapered with pictures of the Beatles and Velvet Underground cut out of ROLLING STONE, they played Guided by Voices covers – Katie on vocals and guitar, Allison on drums – and their own songs about Katie’s first breakup. “It was super-visceral,” says Allison. “I feel very attached to what happens to her. Something in our blood contributes to that.” Today, after woodshedding in various bands, together and apart, the Crutchfields, who are 28, have emerged as two of the most gripping songwriters in rock, setting an example for young DIY artists like their…

“I’m hoping [marriage equality] will be a really beautiful, unifying moment.” THE DE FACTO FACE OF THE YES campaign for the government’s voluntary non-binding statistically-dubious postal survey is Sally Rugg, GetUp’s Marriage Equality campaign director. The indefatigable 29-year-old Sydneysider has been all over social media with her beaming smile and relentless positivity, rallying Australians – especially young Australians – to the Yes cause. Rugg initially intended to be a journalist, but during her masters in journalism at Sydney’s University of Technology she realised that journalism wasn’t exactly the force for change she had envisioned it as being. “What I thought it would be is kind of like, ‘I can shine a light on the issues that really matter, and tell public narratives about things, and reshape the conversation.’ But that’s…

CANBERRA LOCAL CHI- ara Grassia is the director of Girls Rock! Canberra, a music program open to female, trans and non-binary youths. Grounded in DIY ethics, Girls Rock! is a week-long mission in which young people aged 10-17 learn to play an instrument, form a band and write a song. “We don’t have any acoustics,” says Grassia. “We plug in their guitars, we give them pedals and we make them be loud. Just to see their expression the first time a kid gets on the microphone and hears how loud they can be – it’s really exciting.” After volunteering at programs throughout the U.S., Grassia brought Girls Rock! to Canberra in 2015, with Melbourne and Brisbane soon following suit. Grassia was captured by the transformative space Girls Rock! fostered, where…

“I want a place in the culture,” says Rae. “I want people to reference this show.” ISSA RAE DIDN’T FIND OUT HOW her dad, a Senegal-born doctor, felt about her smash HBO series, Insecure, until after the first season wrapped. In fact, she thought he might hate it. “Then, in our family group chat, he dropped a really inappropriate reference about Lawrence’s back shots to Tasha,” she says with a laugh, referring to an explicit scene where her character’s ex-boyfriend rebounds with his bank teller. “I was like, ‘Wow, he made it to the finale! This is not the place to show me, but...great!’” Those uncomfortable moments are where Rae thrives. As a writer and performer, beginning with her hit YouTube series, Awkward Black Girl, she’s found comedy in the…

“Believe in yourself, With no doubt you’re number one, Fuck shooting for the fence, Go ahead and touch the sun.”—360, “Letters” 360 Vintage Modern EMI ★★★ BY JAMES JENNINGS Rapper 360 is the kind of artist you want to see come out on top. Despite a difficult run in life that’s included managing debilitating addictions and bipolar disorder, he’s never wavered from promoting a positive, adversity-crushing viewpoint while still remaining completely unafraid to air out and examine his inner demons in a public forum. It’s this candour that has forged a strong bond between the Melbourne MC born Matt Colwell and his dedicated fan base, and fourth LP Vintage Modern pushes his brand of forthrightness forward on his most inward-looking album to date. The self-examination comes in the wake…

Sepultura  Roots Rhino ★★★ After the breakout success of 1993’s Chaos A.D. (reissued last month), Brazilian metallers Sepultura were poised to take the step into the big leagues with their sixth record, Roots. They’d probably have pulled it off too, had frontman Max Cavalera not split with the band acrimoniously in late-1996. Prior to the blow-up, Roots represented the quartet’s most ambitious album to that point, foregoing the thrash/death focus of their past and incorporating elements of nu-metal (Korn helmer Ross Robinson produced the album; Mike Patton and members of Korn and Limp Bizkit were guests), as well as the music of their Brazilian heritage on songs such as “Itsari”, which they recorded with the Xavante tribe. Dubbed “tribal metal” thanks to the pummelling rhythms which pervade the album, at…

Nic Cester  Sugar Rush Bloodlines/Mushroom ★★★★ Nic Cester may have lost his head in the overnight whirlwind of Jet but he’s found his soul on this slow-brewing solo debut. While the Melbourne rocker’s retro sensibility remains unrepentant, his seasoned Italian band the Calibro 35 brings a more weighty range of feels to the party. “Sugar Rush” signals the descent into vintage psych-r’n’b smoulder with a jazz-waltz beat, fuzz bass, electric organ and wah-wah. “Lead me to a higher place, fill my soul with love and grace,” our reborn journeyman pleads, and, by Otis, he’s halfway there already. The timewarp envelops like an echo chamber as flutes and phasers lead us deeper, to the instant neo-psychedelic classic “Psichebello”, the mellow brass undertows of “Hard Times” and the prog-synth fanfare of “Strange…

 The last time I feared for my life “I do take pleasure in saying, ‘I am Tegan and Sara’ when people say, ‘You look like those Tegan and Sara girls.’” Every single time I am in the back of a car in LA driving on the freeways here. It’s madness. LA would be a much more tolerable city if there were half as many cars on the road. The last time I said, “Don’t you know who I am?” I don’t think I’ve ever said those words, but I do take pleasure in saying, “I am Tegan and Sara” when people say, “You look like those Tegan and Sara girls.” The last time I went to the dentist June! I had to get my veneers replaced on my two front…

When Vinnie Caruana and Brandon Reilly took the latter’s young son to the park on an autumn day in 2014, the pretence may have been a family get together, but Caruana knew something was up. “[Reilly’s son] would run off and [Brandon and I] would talk, and I could tell he wanted to talk about the Movielife and I also wanted to talk about the Movielife. And at the park that day we were both like, ‘I want to do it.’” Save for a brief reunion in 2011, the Long Island melodic hardcore band hadn’t performed together since splitting in 2003, the year they released their acclaimed third album, Forty Hour Train Back to Penn. Following their dissolution Caruana went on to form and release three albums with I Am…

WHEN IN 2012 NIC CESTER walked away from Jet – the Melbourne rock & roll quartet with whom he found worldwide fame thanks to their multimillion selling 2003 debut Get Born – he did so without any specific plan in mind. “I was hugely relieved to be out of Jet and had a wonderful few years with my wife travelling around and experiencing different cultures, but it was strange,” he offers, calling in from a cafe in Milan, Italy. “I was excited to have a new lease on life but also not quite sure what that meant at the same time.” For the next two years it meant not writing a note of music. “I had zero desire. I wasn’t sure if I even wanted to pursue music. I was…

In December, Chris Cheney, Tex Perkins, Kram, Tim Rogers and Phil Jamieson will team up for the Easyfever tour, performing Easybeats and Stevie Wright hits. Here, Jamieson writes about his love of the band... I came to the Easybeats late, maybe around the mid-Nineties? It was around the same time I discovered the Kinks and Marc Bolan. I had already befriended Nick [Wright, son of frontman Stevie] in 1995 and was aware of some of Stevie’s scintillating solo material, but had yet to delve into the treasure trove of goodies that was the Easybeats. I was familiar with “Good Times” from the Lost Boys soundtrack, but this is going back to the far reaches of my memory now, and it all gets a little cloudy. I do remember loving “Sorry”,…

 ON SEPTEMBER 25TH, TOM PETTY AND THE HEARTBREAKERS performed the final concert of a three-night run at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. It was also the climax of their 40th Anniversary Tour, a 53-show celebration of the singer-guitarist’s unbroken lifetime with his band as one of rock & roll’s biggest, best and most committed live acts. ¶ Thirty minutes before he walked onstage, Petty welcomed singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams into his dressing room. “He had a big smile, and he was putting a cough drop in his mouth,” says Williams, an old friend who had just finished her opening set. “I didn’t want to stay too long. It was getting close to showtime. I said, ‘Tom, the audience is rockin’. They’re good to go. I’ve warmed them up for you.’…

“You should be able to yourself express .” WHEN ZINDZI OKENYO arrives for breakfast in the inner Sydney suburb of Newtown, she is caught in a brief moment of scheduling quiet. Her latest project, a role in the upcoming Channel 10 television show Sisters, has just finished shooting. In her 11-year acting career, the 31-year-old has appeared as a Melbourne and Sydney Theatre Company stage actor as well as a Play School regular. In 2013, having been singing in various on-stage roles, she launched herself as OKENYO – an evocative chanteuse fringed with soulful epithets. “The cool thing is that it’s all feeding back into me,” she says. “If you’re an artist, you should be able to express yourself in lots of different ways.” OKENYO is acutely aware of the…

AUSTRALIA IS MAKING stately (or, to put it another way, agonisingly slow) progress toward gender parity in our federal parliament. Yet most of our parliamentary iconoclasts are female. In the Senate there’s Labor’s unflappable Penny Wong, One Nation’s endlessly controversial Pauline Hanson, Tasmanian populist Jacqui Lambie, and our first African-born parliamentarian in independent Lucy Gichuhi. And they’re not the only powerful women shaping the future of our nation in Canberra. The Pragmatist Labor deputy leader Tanya Plibersek shares several things with her Liberal party equivalent, Julie Bishop: both are considered future Prime Minister material, and both are consistently more popular with the electorate than the leader they serve. She’s a politician of principle – she joined Labor when Hawke was PM, then quit it over the decision to sell uranium…

Nakkiah Lui isn’t comfortable with young women looking up to her. “The idea of being a role model makes me feel bad,” she laughs. “I make bad decisions. I’ll have that one drink too many. I’ve dated some arseholes and I’ve probably been the arsehole too. I’m late and I spend my money frivolously.” It’s this combination of sharp humour and unflinching honesty that empowers Lui to address challenging issues. A Gamilaroi/ Torres Strait Islander woman from Sydney’s western suburbs, the playwright, director, podcast host and star of ABC television series Black Comedy is adept at starting honest conversations about everything from sexuality to institutionalised racism. “I’m very vocal about being an Aboriginal woman . . . I feel a responsibility to use my platform to talk about things. Most…

Stylists: Danielle Soglimbene, Jade Leung @ Viviens Creative Melbourne Hair: Briana Piggott, Nadine Muller MUA: Amy Chen, Nadine Muller 1.MONTAIGNE On . . . Björk “Björk has always been ahead of her time, and also of my own personal interest in her. The first time I listened, I didn’t get why people liked the music: it was glitchy and syncopated and kinda scary. But it grew on me like hair grows on my body: real quickly and thickly. She’s an oddball, a maverick, a champion of her own personality and artistic preferences, lacking shame or even awareness that what she creates might be in any way challenging or difficult to approach by the general public. Most important to me is the way she uses her voice. She ululates, growls, groans…

Liam Gallagher  As You Were Warner Music ★★★ ½ It may be the closest Liam Gallagher has come to apology. “In my defence all my intentions were good,” the ex-Oasis singer asserts on his solo debut, in a song that shares its title with Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth”. “But I am a dreamer by design,” Gallagher adds, as good a description of kamikaze stardom as anything he sang in Oasis, from his brother Noel’s songbook. Eight years after that band’s messy breakup, Liam puts his signature voice on the line in a mostly original set of strut and reflection that sticks to Oasis’ template – brawny Britpop, Beatle-esque ballads – and often invigorates it. Like his brother, Liam openly quotes his inspirations: “She’s so purple haze” (the suitably…

Whitesnake  1987 (Super Deluxe Ed.) Rhino ★★★★ Surging to popularity on the back of their Tawny Kitaen-starring videos, 1987 was the breakthrough former Deep Purple frontman David Coverdale had been chasing for years with Whitesnake. Its tracklisting reads like a playlist of late-Eighties U.S. radio: “Here I Go Again”, “Is This Love”, “Still of the Night”. The Super Deluxe edition has three discs of live tracks, demos and remixes, and though 1987 is clearly a product of its time, it remains one of the hard rock standouts of the era.…

Singer-songwriter devastates on second full-length Julien Baker  Turn Out the Lights Matador ★★★★ Julien Baker’s 2015 debut, Sprained Ankle, was one of those albums that seemingly sprung from nowhere to become an instant cult classic – a reputation-making record that ensured the 19-year-old from Memphis would enjoy a loyal audience well into the future. Now 22, Baker’s follow-up plays to her debut’s strengths – breathtakingly confessional lyrics, a voice that sounds as brittle and broken as it is beautiful, paired with funereal, choral guitar work – but expands confidently on the blueprint by incorporating strings, woodwind and more piano into these lusher arrangements. On Sprained Ankle, Baker lamented “wish I could write songs about anything other than death”. Turn Out the Lights is no more cheery, the singer focusing more broadly…