STACK June 2016 Issue 140

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unhealthily obsessed with other people,
whether they’re famous or not. You can
delude yourself into thinking something is
there that isn’t.”
Almost a year and a half has
passed since Catfish and
the Bottlemen supported The
Kooks across Oz, and in that
time – aside from having #1 Hot
Man Ewan McGregor star in the
clip for sweet acoustic earworm
Hourglass – they've become
bona fide stars. The Ride sees
the Welsh four-
piece sharpen their
simple doctrine: "I
always say if you
can play it on an
acoustic guitar and
win over a bar or
a kitchen of rowdy
people... then
you've done it,"
reckons frontman
Van McCann.
the platinum-selling and ARIA Award-winning
artist, and occasionally feels utterly alien.
“Living there has been so good for me, but
sometimes I just think it’s so funny I’m here,”
she says. “I’m not your typical Hollywood
gal. I can walk from my house to the Walk of
Fame in five minutes… I know everyone thinks
Hollywood is just a plastic place, but that’s
just one little aspect of it. There’s the whole
tourism thing… I understand because I feel like
I’m a lifelong tourist. I’m constantly in different
places with my bum-bag and my camera. The
important thing is that you have some close
friends there, and that’s really all you need.”
The tracks that Brown wrote and recorded for
Wild Things were birthed under the guidance of
producer Tommy English, whom the musician
met through her LA neighbour and tattooist icon
Kat Von D. English encouraged Brown to use
panpipes in the gorgeous Money To Burn (“We
were joking that we had to get some Toto-style
flutes into the album”), the cuica in Wonderland
(“It’s a Brazilian percussion instrument, it’s
in heaps of Paul Simon’s Graceland songs;
it sounds like ‘ooh-ooh-aah-aah!’ [imagine a
cartoon monkey noise –Ed]”), and the bongos
in Let It Roll. “Percussion is one of my favourite
things,” Brown says. “We did a lot of it live as
well; we just went to town.”
Meanwhile, Sweet Fascination encapsulates
everything Wild Things is about: it has very
emotive synth lines (think CHVRCHES), sparse
pops of digital keys, and terribly fearless Sky
Ferreira-style drums: a ticking hi-hat and a
thumping snare that falls in pitch as it lifts the
marimba-tinged synths into the chorus. “It’s
about obsession, which is one of my favourite
things,” says Brown. “I’m fascinated by
unhealthy obsessions, and how people become
LADYHAWKE
P each’s Castle, 12 Grimmauld Place, Maurice
Sendak’s mind; to this list of chimerical
locations we can now add another: Hillside
Avenue. The difference with Ladyhawke’s
imagined ‘safe place’ is, however, that it also
exists in reality. “’Hillside Avenue’ is actually a
street – it’s basically the street I live on,” the
lauded New Zealand singer-songwriter, also
known as Pip Brown, tells us. “It is also this
place I imagined in my head. I’ve lived in the
same [house] for three years, and in the space
of my living there, I was in a really dark place
and then all of a sudden I was feeling amazing.
I went through all this at Hillside Avenue so I
felt like that was my sacred place,” she says.
Brown’s fresh new album Wild Things could
be most efficiently described as your life’s
soundtrack if you lived on Sonic the Hedgehog’s
tropical, secret-laden, pixelated Angel Island; as
its central spot of importance, Hillside Avenue
features pom-pom synths which open out to a
calypso beat in the chorus, and a melody full of
aspiration and promise. “I’d wake up and the
sun was shining every day; it’s so sunny in LA,
and there are lots of beautiful trees around my
house, and I’d just look out the window and…
I pretended it was this magical place,” Brown
says warmly.
Residing in LA sometimes feels magical for
CATFISH and THE BOTTLEMEN
The
Ride by
Catfish
and the
Bottlemen
is out
now via
Caroline.
visit MUSIC NEWS
04 JUNE 2016
MUSIC
It’s early 1996, and amongst 'one
hit wonder' accusations, American
musician Beck Hansen isn’t entirely
sure how to choose the cover artwork
for his second studio album Odelay.
In his idiosyncratic and found-object
tradition, Hansen and Art Director
Robert Fisher begin poring over an
eclectic pile of vintage photography
books, and Hansen comes across
a startling image of a Komondor – a
huge, mop-like, Hungarian breed of hound – leaping over a striped hurdle.
According to Fisher, the elderly photographer responsible for taking the
shot lived very close by and met with the pair to give them an original
print. The album is a hit, spawning several cult singles and winning two
Grammys and a basket of MTV Awards, and those who dismissed Beck
as a talentless weirdo turn out to be the losers, baby.
WHAT'S THE STORY?
We have a look back at the fascinating tales behind some of our
favourite album covers.
INTERVIEW
continued
Wild Things by Ladyhawke is
out now via EMI. She's also touring
in July; check
for details.
This month: Odelay, Beck