Robert Cherry

Skinny Mirrors

Free download from the forthcoming EP.

David Bowie

Background note: The following interview was conducted on October 23, 2001, for an album preview for Alternative Press, which named Bowie’s Heathen one of 2002’s most anticipated releases. The phone interview left me with considerably more content than the brief assignment required, but since the discussion revolved around probes concerning the sound of a then-unheard album the world would soon hear, the transcription remained spooled away on my hard drive for over a decade. Until now. Read the rest of this entry »

Never Mind the Duty, Here’s Plastic Ants

Flouting the long-simmering tensions between the United States and Canada, Plastic Ants have tunneled through, crossed over, and crawled out—and now threaten to take over the world, albeit with tiny strides. Their first communiqué? The hard-jangle pragmatism of “Tough Girls (Got To Tough It Out),” out now on The All Night Party. Read the rest of this entry »

Introducing Hot Coma

He was sure he could hear the air seeping from the tires of the antique Dodge Challenger. Through the foam earplugs, beneath the mattress, under the cricket choir, audible even through the intermittent whines and scratches of the dog next door… yes, he was certain he could hear the air hissing from the radials (is that what they were?) like cold white noise filling the car port three floors below. Read the rest of this entry »

The Ups and Downs of Hot Coma

The Brian Jonestown Massacre

No Ropes Attached

Background note: A discussion with Anton Newcombe was always a memorable event, but he also holds the distinction of being my first, and thus far only, clothing-optional interview. This piece was first published around 2001, several years before the band earned greater infamy via the film Dig!

Since 1995, I’ve observed via post-show chats, interviews and friendly phone calls as Anton Newcombe first bartered his way out of obscurity, then nearly burned himself into oblivion. The last time I formally interviewed him, he was somewhere in between and, in keeping with his storied eccentricity, wearing nothing but a Cossack-style fur cap, sunglasses and Frye boots.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Birth, Death & Rebirth of Hair Metal

Round And Round

Background note: This originally ran as a cover story for “Guitar One,” in 2004. My inner 13-year-old was totally stoked to interview the era’s guitar heroes.

“Round and round! What comes around goes around! I’ll tell you why… why….” –Ratt’s Stephen Pearcy

Dig. Many thought it was dead and buried. Many even danced on its grave and packed on a few extra shovelfuls of soil by way of coolness-affirming jokes (e.g., What do you call a hair-metal guitarist without a girlfriend? Homeless). Hair metal… poodle metal… glam metal… cock rock… party rock… the names alone are pejorative enough, describing everything about the ‘80s pop-metal sensation except the music itself. What was so wrong about a musical movement that incited us all to have nothin’ but a good time, preferably while soloing along on air guitar, wasted? Read the rest of this entry »

The Darkness

Beware Of Darkness

Background note: This good-humored interview originally appeared as a cover story in Guitar One. The band broke up fairly soon after, but they’ve since reunited. Hopefully they’ll actually make it to the stage in Cleveland next time through to utter the immortal salutation.

Expectations precede The Darkness. Mine do at least. Beer in hand, I perch on a comfy settee in a well-appointed sitting room in Cleveland’s swank and indeed ritzy Ritz Carlton Hotel. I’m awaiting the group’s catsuit-sporting Justin Hawkins and his younger brother Dan. Together they form the band’s twin Les Paul fury–singer Justin taking the classic widdly-widdly lead role and Dan holding down the power riffage and rhythms.

It’s only noon, but I figure the party never stops around Britain’s new rock royalty, right? Or so I have read. “Wasting beer is disrespectful,” Justin recently pronounced. And in England, it’s certainly well past tea time. Judging from the waaay-over-the-top videos for the band’s insta-anthems, who knows what could happen?

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Placebo

Rock ‘N’ Roll Anima

Background note: Several weeks after I conducted this interview for Alternative Press, singer Brian Molko phoned asking if my group Ether Net would open for Placebo in Canada. A definite first in all my years as a journalist. We had recently lost our drummer but of course I said yes, then hustled to find a replacement. Weeks later I found myself vomiting backstage in a fit of pre-show jitters at Toronto’s sold-out Kool Haus, then stepped onstage to perform for three thousand or so Placebo fans. They were very kind. I subsequently made some lifelong Canadian friends on that mini tour, which also included Montreal and Ottawa.

Hang out with Placebo for a night and you’ll begin to understand what Lou Reed meant by his challenge in Metal Machine Music’s liner notes: “My week beats your year.” Even severe jet lag doesn’t impede Brian Molko and his “two husbands,” as he calls bassist Stefan Olsdal and drummer Steve Hewitt, from juicing the Big Apple. At the Soho Grand hotel bar, orders for double Sea Breezes keep pace with Molko’s candid responses to queries regarding Black Market Music, the corrosive, more political follow-up to 1998’s break-through Without You I’m Nothing.

Detailing Placebo’s coincidence-riddled history, the openly bi-sexual Molko recalls his impression of the openly gay Olsdal when they first encountered each other at school in Luxembourg: “I thought you were an aloof snob, and you thought I was a pot-smoking fag. How ironic life can be.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Psychedelic Furs + Echo And The Bunnymen

Parallel Lines

Background note: I first interviewed Richard Butler at the Gramercy Hotel in NYC in the early ’90s. As we sat down at the table in the bar, he fired up a cigarette and said, “You can’t write that I’m smoking, my wife will kill me.” So much for post-punk rebellion… Still, Butler and the ever-quotable Ian McCulloch were among my idols growing up, so it was always a thrill to interview them. This piece was written as a preview of their joint tour in 2001.

The distinctive croon. The doomed-romantic lyrics. The ever-present cigarette and shades. The fastidiously unkempt hair. From a distance, the Psychedelic Furs’ Richard Butler and Echo And The Bunnymen’s Ian McCulloch share much in common. But mostly it’s their separateness that links them. In fact, they each carved such individual career courses in the ‘80s that they never really crossed paths until 2001, when the two bands toured together for the first time.

“There were other bands who had that mutual-admiration thing going on–like the born-again Christians,” explains McCulloch, taking a playful jab at the Bunnymen’s rivals, U2. “We weren’t that kind of band, and I don’t think the Furs were, either.”       Read the rest of this entry »