Interview: Nikki Sixx

The Mötley Crüe vet on addiction, wrecked Ferraris, and his new music project based on his book, The Heroin Diaries.

Few rock stars have lived up to the title with more reckless abandon than Mötley Crüe bassist (and primary songwriter) Nikki Sixx, whose triumphs with groupies and near-death battles with drug addictions fueled iconic hair metal songs like "Girls, Girls, Girls," "Live Wire" and "Kickstart My Heart."

Sixx, somehow, survived the '80s—an era that the band once dubbed Decade of Decadence. Mötley Crüe survived, too, and is planning on a new album and tour in 2008. In the meantime, Sixx embarked on a personal creative journey, writing The Heroin Diaries, a book that splices his no-holds-barred diary entries from 1987 with reactions and remembrances from bandmates, friends and even ex-lovers. Sixx:A.M.—a new band made up of Sixx, singer James Michael and guitarist DJ Ashba—have now brought the book to hard-rocking musical life.

Sixx spoke at length with ARTISTdirect about The Heroin Diaries, his harrowing experience with addiction, the secrets of the Crüe's commercial success and his personal reasons for raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for at-risk youth at L.A.'s Covenant House.

How did you know that James and DJ were the right guys to accompany you on what must have been a pretty personal journey with Sixx:A.M.?

Well, first of all, we're all extremely good friends. I've always known how talented both of these guys are, and it's sort of an honor for me to be able to get their names out there. There's always a need for new talent, and these guys have both got a lot of experience and they're both songwriters and producers. James, DJ and myself basically wrote and produced this project together—three heads with one vision, inspired by the book.

And the book was entirely finished by the time any music started…

Absolutely. They digested the book and then you all came together to put the songs together?

Yeah, because we're friends, they had been around for the whole time I was putting [the book] together, talking about it, sharing my experiences and reading snippets. We'd talked about scoring a concept record. Before I met DJ, me and James originally had some conversations. Between the three of us, we've written a lot of songs with and for other artists; chemically, it just seemed like the right thing to do. Those guys are selfless, and we were able to tell the story in a selfless way—almost taking myself out of the book 20 years ago and turn it into a character. It's Quadrophenia, it's The Wall, in that there's a story with a beginning, middle, and end.

There aren't a lot of album-long narratives in the iTunes world.

That's the thing—I can't tell you how many people told me that they listened to the record from beginning to end when they got it. I've fallen into it, too—I'll hear a new song and I'll listen to it and bounce around the record. But The Heroin Diaries isn't really a "skip through the record" type of thing.

Track sequencing can be somewhat arbitrary, but it must have been an important part of your process.

Yeah, the track listing was very important to us, actually—having "Christmas In Hell" at the beginning, "Intermission" obviously in the middle, and "Life After Death" ending the journey.

Was it a grand plan from the outset that the diary would be seen by others in some form?

When they were written, they were very personal. I've kept diaries since late '79 or early '80 until now. Some of them sporadic and some of them are more focused; a lot of times when I'm on the road, I write every day, twice a day, all the time. I get home and skip a week or even a month when my life gets busy. At the time in the book, I was barricaded with my disease in my house. The pen and paper was almost like my only friend. I was going through something and I didn't know what; I didn't know how to express it to anybody, so I expressed it on paper.

Were you trying to let people into your world through what you were writing?

No, I never shared it with anybody. I don't share my diaries, and I'll tell you that I'll never publish any of my other diaries. They're personal. But there's a piece of The Heroin Diaries that I think is important for people to read, because the story ends in success. The recovery is the piece that's important to me. I'm willing to throw myself under the bus and let you see the ugly, dirty truth. To read that, people also have to read about what comes out on the other side. And it's not an evangelist or a preacher, it's not on a soapbox for anti-drugs or alcohol—it's just sharing one person's experience out of a billion people out there. If I can raise some awareness to a global epidemic and give money to a charity that deals with at-risk youth, then this year is a year of giving back—and I've had so many years of receiving.

There are so many charities that deal with so many worthy causes, and obviously a number of charities that, like Covenant House, deal with at-risk youth. What made Covenant House call out to you?

Yeah, there are some wonderful, fantastic places that deal with teenagers, from shelters all the way across to places that actually have more infrastructure. But something about Covenant House that really struck me was how the people at Covenant House have a plan for the future. They walk these kids—these adolescents, these lost souls—through the process of getting up on their own feet. The thing that we felt would be another great piece to the picture was the music program; we implemented Running Wild in the Night, which will be the music program inside Covenant House. To be a part of that has been awesome.

But they need money. We've raised about $350,000 so far for Running Wild in the Night. I know that nobody is going to help these kids unless there's an awareness. So proceeds from the book go to the charity. So many of my friends in the industry and people who own guitar and amp companies are coming forward and saying "We want to be part of this." In the end, it's really those kids that have the ability to change the future—whether it's global warming, music and arts, whatever they decide to get into and make a difference in our system. I know this: it resonated with me because that's how it started for me—I was a runaway and I was angry and I was alienated, and music saved me. These kids are on the street and Covenant House is pulling these kids off the street, and they're meeting with doctors, they're in therapy, they're in safe environments.

I read a statement where you called out the music industry for not taking responsibility for musicians who are battling addiction, instead looking the other way so long as the artist is generating profit. Was there really nobody who tried to talk you back from the ledge?

I don't really have a clear answer for that. I know that enabling is part of killing somebody, but I also know that it's very scary to confront somebody. If I had been confronted and they had said "There's no future unless you get help"—then I guess we'd have an answer to that. Would I have reacted badly? Oh, I can guarantee I would have, but that's why they have professionals that come in and do this stuff.

I just wanted to point out that if it was a united front when people are dying from something—if it was the record company, the manager, the agent, the accountant and the family—and everybody just said, "You're done. You're done because we're not going to watch you die," I think we'd have a better outcome… rather than this sort of holding hands softly and, "Oh, we've just got to get you a little help and you stay a couple days in rehab."

In my own personal life, I've had to make some very difficult decisions with people who were falling apart at the seams. It's not a phone call that we like to make. It's not a face-to-face that we want to do. We don't wake up and think "Wow, I can't wait to have some alcoholic screaming in my face with all these threats and anger and 'You'll never be my friend again'"… but you take the higher road and try to do something for that other person and be as selfless as possible. It's kind of hard to be selfless when you're making money off of somebody.

The Heroin Diaries covers this low point personally where, like you said, you're isolated on the island with your pen and paper. But it also correlates with a crest in the career of Mötley Crüe. Would the music have suffered if you pulled drugs out of the equation?

Well, you know, there's a difference in drugs and alcohol and addiction. I'm not going to tell you I did not have a lot of fun—I had a gas. I'm not going to apologize for wrecked Ferraris and destroyed hotel rooms. That's not what this is about; this about unpeeling my own onion and getting to the core issue and realizing why addiction played such a part in my life. It was a Band-Aid for something that was painful, and I didn't even know what it was. I was downward spiraling and I didn't know why. [Mötley Crüe] was climbing the ladder, but I was climbing the ladder and had a noose around my neck at the same time; if I slipped, I was definitely not going to make it. I have to take responsibility for my own actions.

In answer to your question: we did an album after Girls, Girls, Girls called Dr. Feelgood. I think the answer is pretty clear for me personally—I was on my game. That's like saying let's get Muhammad Ali in the ring and have him doped up on smack and coke—would he be a better fighter because he was blind angry? Or would he better if he was a machine? I think if you listen to The Heroin Diaries from beginning to end, you go, "This guy is lucid, he's focused, he's working with lucid, focused, talented artists, and it's an exciting record."

Now I'm not telling you that people shouldn't drink, and I'm not going to tell anybody what to do. I can tell you what's behind door number one, I can tell you what's behind door number two, and you're going to have to make your own decisions.

This is my story—it inspired a soundtrack and we're raising a lot of money and a lot of awareness for kids who don't even have a chance to get to the question of "Wouldn't it be better to be a fucked-up rock star and make great music than be a sober rock star and not make good music?" These kids can't even afford a pillow, much less a guitar pick. We choose to put ourselves in these positions sometimes, but a lot of times the choice is taken from us—that's what happens when you're young. A lot of the kids in Covenant House come from the foster care system; when they turn 18 years old, they cut 'em loose, and they have nowhere to go.

Do you think it's possible anymore for a band to get as big as Dr. Feelgood-era Mötley Crüe?

It's no secret that 90 percent of the successful tours are done by bands that are 40-year-olds; if you look at Pollstar, most of the [chart-toppers], whether country or rock or mainstream, are established artists—they're brands and they're lifestyles. The problem has been that it's been undependable; you can't really get to know something that's so fast-moving. You get a #1 hit single, the record blows up, the band plays a little bit, and then the band comes back and no one even listens to their record—they've moved on, they've gone from McDonald's to Burger King.

Sadly, when I see Rolling Stone and I look on the cover, I go, "Who's that?" Then I read who it is and go "Oh, that's that band." I don't know their names, I don't know what they look like. We don't have the video outlets we used to have; we have channels but we have limited airplay on them—it's mostly programming and stuff leading to reality TV. It's like ADD—you can watch half of a reality show and flip to another channel. Half of this, a quarter of that, you catch every third show. It's very difficult for people to focus for some reason. I don't know why. Are there too many bands? Is life too busy now? Is it not connected with people? Is radio programming too same-same-same? I don't know. There's also the positive side—you have the Internet and you can get instant feedback about something you heard around the water cooler. You have Sirius and XM Radio where you can listen to everything from country to extreme heavy metal.

There's something about going out to an event and seeing a band play. You've spent the money for the ticket, you've spent the money on the T-shirt, you've spent the money on the parking, and you're going to watch it from beginning to end. You enjoy the whole process. The same thing with movies—you go to the movie theatre and there's an experience; very few people leave the movie unless it plain sucks.

I think it's interesting that you referred to bands functioning as lifestyles for their fans. Was that something you guys were consciously developing with Mötley Crüe?

Well, we lived it and we breathed it—it wasn't an act or a marketing campaign. It was honest and, because of that, I believe that it spread. It's very interesting—you go back before Mötley Crüe to the '70s and you go "How did this band called Led Zeppelin that played this blues-rock spread globally?" There were no multi-tiered media blitzes. It was just vinyl, and touring city to city to city. When it's good, it spreads.

Yeah, that's the hope. I don't know that it's always the case, but even with all the bands out there now, it does seem that even the bloggers gravitate to similar bands each year. Was it frustrating for you when knock-off bands came along and co-opted what you guys were doing and turned it into a marketing campaign?

Whether it was disco, new wave, heavy metal or '70s rock, there are always the ones that stick out, and then there are always the knock-offs. There's always that. That's the industry not knowing what they want. They go, "That's working, so let's do that!" I've always been of the mindset that each artist is individual. When alternative came in, I loved it. I was listening to a lot of those bands before they broke, and I really thought it was amazing. But then they came up with this slanderous title to try to wash the whole thing down the system so they could pump more "alternative" bands, and I thought that was ludicrous. But, fine, whatever it takes to flush the shit, and if we're shit, we'll get flushed, too. But the same press that was saying "Oh, hair bands are a joke, and alternative bands are politically correct," then when rap-rock came out, they were calling bands like Nirvana "shoegazers" and then when that was over, they were calling rap-rock "crap-rock"—and it's the same interviewer! Pick a side, man. When the Super Bowl is on, you gotta pick a team. You can't play the middle.

There's so much to pull from out there, moreso every decade. It lets you look at The Beatles, Elvis, the Stones, those early days, and go, "Wow!" I was able to look at Aerosmith, the Stones, the Dolls, the Ramones, Black Sabbath, all that stuff, and go, "Wow, if a band looked like the Dolls and sounded like AC/DC, it is over." But who did those bands pull from? It's absolutely mind-boggling how intuitive and ahead of the curve they were.

Shifting gears for the close: You're an important figure for my friend Randy, who dressed up as you for Halloween a few years ago, wreaked havoc in Hollywood and, lo and behold, even got the girl in the end. For anyone looking to follow in his footsteps, what do they need to pull off the tribute?

[laughs] You know, like with any human being, there are so many layers. There's the public persona of Nikki Sixx, and there's a very private side that only my very close friends and family know. What I tried to do with The Heroin Diaries was to throw out everything—you get to see what it's like now, you get to see what it was like way back when I was a kid, you get to see what it was like when it looked all glitter and gold. I think reading this book would be a very interesting process in seeing the evolution of somebody. If you want to be Nikki Sixx 1985, you know, look at the album cover. If you want to be Nikki Sixx 2005, look at the album cover. But if you want to get a little deeper, I think you have to dive into The Dirt or dive into The Heroin Diaries.

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Grizzly Bear Release Friend EP in November

Grizzly Bear have been running through the ten cuts on Yellow House (with a few covers thrown in for spice) for some time now. And, stupendous though the album is, a tour-happy band like Grizzly Bear--who, with this news item, have earned their fourth reference in Pitchfork news today-- need to keep themselves fresh, both for themselves and their fans.

So they've made a new Friend, a brand new ten-track (!) EP, who will hopefully assist in the band's big move out of the Yellow House. Though Friend is currently sans tracklist, it moves in November 6 on Warp.

In the meantime, Grizzly Bear-- as always-- are touring.

Grizzly:

08-29 Brooklyn, NY - McCarren Park Pool *!
09-06 Seattle, WA - Neumos #
09-07 Portland, OR - Audio Cinema #
09-07 Portland, OR - Doug Fir Lounge (Musicfest NW) ^
09-14 Austin, TX - Club De Ville
09-15 San Francisco, CA - Mezzanine
09-18 Northampton, MA - Pearl Street &
09-19 Buffalo, NY - Tralf Music Hall &
09-20 Toronto, Ontario - The Mod Club &
09-21 London, Ontario - Lola Festival
09-22 Ottawa, Ontario - Christ Church Cathedral &
09-23 Burlington, VT - Higher Ground &
10-05 Montreal, Quebec - Pop Montreal
10-06 Clinton, NY - Hamilton College Annex $
10-08 Grand Rapids, MI - Ladies Literary Club &
10-09 Milwaukee, WI - Pabst Theater &
10-10 Chicago, IL - Park West &
10-11 Columbus, OH - Wexner Center at Ohio State &
10-12 Pittsburgh, PA - Andy Warhol Museum &
10-13 Baltimore, MD - 2640 Space at St. John's Church &
10-14 Philadelphia, PA - First Unitarian Church Sanctuary &
10-18 Reykjavik, Iceland - Iceland Airwaves

* with Feist
! with Kevin Drew
# with Deerhunter
^ with Eric Bachmann, AU, Tiny Vipers
& with Beach House
$ with Man Man

[ via pitchforkmedia.com ]

***

New Flaming Lips on Heartbreak Kid Soundtrack

The Flaming Lips contribute two songs to the soundtrack for The Heartbreak Kid, a forthcoming Farrelly Brothers (There's Something About Mary, Dumb & Dumber) comedy starring Ben Stiller. The movie looks terrible, but can anything involving a Flaming Lips song called "The Horny Frog" really be all bad?

Other contributors to the soundtrack include David Bowie, Matthew Sweet (with Susanna Hoffs of the Bangles), Ozomatli, and World Party.

The Heartbreak Kid will hit theaters on October 5, and the soundtrack will come out on October 2.

The Heartbreak Kid soundtrack:

01 The Flaming Lips: "The Horny Frog"
02 David Bowie: "Ashes to Ashes"
03 Buva: "She Makes Me Fall Down"
04 World Party: "Put the Message in the Box"
05 John Alagia: "Honey Come Home"
06 The Weepies: "Painting by Chagall"
07 Brian Hyland: "Gypsy Woman"
08 Amy LeVere: "Take Em or Leave Em"
09 Buva: "First Cut Is the Deepest"
10 Julieta Venegas: "Canciones de Amor"
11 The Flaming Lips: "Maybe I'm Not the One"
12 Ozomatli: "After Party"
13 Mathew Sweet/Susanna Hoffs: "Different Drum"
14 David Bowie: "Suffragette City"

[ via pitchforkmedia.com ]

***

TicketMaster And Live Nation Head For Divorce

Not all marriages are meant to last.

On Thursday, it was widely reported that Ticketmaster is ready to end its relationship with Live Nation (nyse: LYV - news - people )after protracted contract negotiations broke down. The demise of the union between the country's biggest ticket retailer and the biggest concert promoter will inevitably shake-up the U.S. ticket sales industry.

According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, an internal memo released by Ticketmaster said the company did not expect to renew its contract with Live Nation. "We are now conducting our business with the clear understanding that our partnership with Live Nation is more than likely coming to an end," Chief Executive Officer Sean Moriarty and Chairman Tom McInerney said in a Wednesday e-mail.

The clear loser in this case is Ticketmaster, which depends on Live Nation for roughly 20% of its sales. In 2006, the online ticket store raked in $1.1 billion, about $200 million of which was generated by Live Nation tickets. In turn, it's a major hit for Ticketmaster's parent company, IAC/InterActiveCorp (nasdaq: IACI - news - people ), which relies on Ticketmaster for 19% of its sales.

Live Nation and its subsidiary, House of Blues, is Ticketmaster's biggest client and the premiere concert promoter in North America. The firm accounted for 42% of North America's total ticket sales in 2006.

"Live Nation holds the cards," Piper Jaffrey analyst Aaron Kessler told Forbes.com on Thursday, "It is by far the largest concert operator in the United States, there is nothing Ticketmaster could do to replace it."

Despite its dominating presence, Live Nation hasn't been that profitable. After Ticketmaster's cut, the company makes a razor thin profit on each sale. For instance, Live Nation reaped $1.0 billion in sales in the last quarter but it made only $9.9 million in net income. Meanwhile, Ticketmaster has fared far better. The ticket seller enjoys an operating margin of 25% for Live Nation sales, Kessler said . The profit sharing structure was clearly a point of frustration for Live Nation, which reported a loss of profit last year. Even though Ticketmaster allowed Live Nation to sell 10% of its tickets through its own site, Live Nation likely thirsted for more independence.

Ultimately, the spat between Ticketmaster and Live Nation boiled down to money and independence. Live Nation has already made moves to develop its own online ticketing infrastructure. Last July, Live Nation said it would purchase a majority stake in Musictoday, an online portal that provides ticketing services to musicians. By losing Ticketmater, Live Nation would have to beef up its online presence, but a revamped ticketing service would not be too difficult to set-up, Piper Jaffrey's Kessler said.

According to the 'Journal, Live Nation also wanted access to Ticketmaster's extensive database on consumers' transactions and e-mail addresses. Live Nation also wanted to minimize its partner's role, by forcing customers to come to their website via Ticketmaster to buy tickets.

It may not be completely over for the two companies, however. "They are still in negotiations as far as we know," Kessler said. Regardless of the outcome, it is unlikely that Ticketmaster or IAC will come out unscathed. "Its going to be a negative for IAC/ InterActive. Live Nation will either walk away or they will negotiate better terms," Kessler said. Kessler also maintains his "market perform" rating on IAC, with a $32 price target.

[ via forbes.com ]

***

My Bloody Valentine is set to make their first live appearance in more than a decade

Is the long wait finally over? My Bloody Valentine, the legendary sonic sculptors of feedback and tremelo who helped define the shoegaze movement only to disband after releasing just two full length albums, is set to make its first live appearance in more than a decade at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, CA in April, 2008. According to sources in the United States and the United Kingdom who are familiar with the negotiations, the band is close to signing a deal that will see a reunited My Bloody Valentine headline Coachella, scheduled for April 25–27, before embarking on a world tour sometime later in 2008.

[ via brooklynvegan.com ]

***

RUED LANGGAARD: SYMPHONIES 2 AND 3; SYMPHONIES 12 TO 14

Danish National Symphony Orchestra and Choir, conducted by Thomas Dausgaard. DaCapo 6.220516 and 6.220517.

DURING an oft-cited 1907 meeting between the two most important symphonists of the 20th century, one of them, Jean Sibelius, spoke of the symphony’s “severity” and the logic with which motifs were interconnected. “No!” the other, Gustav Mahler, responded, according to Sibelius. “The symphony must be like the world. It must be all-embracing.”

The symphonies of the Danish composer Rued Langgaard suggest a third path: one of obstinacy and a touch of perversity. Born in 1893, Langgaard was trained in music by his parents, both professional players. He enjoyed a measure of early success when, thanks to family connections, the Berlin Philharmonic gave the premiere of his hourlong Symphony No. 1 in 1913.

World War I put an end to Langgaard’s German prospects, while in Denmark, where Carl Nielsen was shifting from late Romanticism to a mature Neo-Classical style, Langgaard’s prescient experimental pieces like the orchestral work “Music of the Spheres” and the opera “Antikrist” were met with hostility.

Around 1924 Langgaard repudiated modernism — as well as Nielsen, the Danish musical establishment and pretty much everything else. He spent the rest of his career writing in a strangely anachronistic idiom redolent of Schumann and Wagner, spiked with a defiant formal unpredictability. Only half of Langgaard’s 16 symphonies were performed in his lifetime.

Thomas Dausgaard, a Danish conductor whose New York appearances at the Mostly Mozart Festival have drawn praise, is working his way through an authoritative new Langgaard cycle with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and Choir, ensembles maintained by Danish Radio. Two recent volumes from DaCapo offer works from either side of this composer’s stylistic schism.

One includes Symphony No. 2, “Varbrud” (“Awakening of Spring”), recorded in its uncut original version for the first time. The work, composed from 1912 to 1914, is a sumptuous sprawl filled with intimations of Beethoven and Wagner, ending with an effusive setting for soprano of a poem by Emil Rittershaus. Symphony No. 3, written in 1915-16 and revised from 1925 to 1933, is actually a red-blooded piano Romantic concerto with a wordless choral finale. Inger Dam-Jensen sings radiantly in the first work; Per Salo is the capable pianist in the second.

For all their peculiarity the later symphonies on a companion volume remain eminently approachable. Symphony No. 12, from 1946, is something of a bleak private joke, as if Langgaard had somehow boiled down his epic first symphony into seven minutes. The conclusion, a pointed outburst, is labeled “Amok! A composer explodes.”

Symphony No. 13, “Undertro” (“Belief in Wonders”), was composed in 1946-47, but its bold fanfares and bucolic strains might have come from the previous century. Its successor, Symphony No. 14, “Morgenen” (“The Morning”), is brighter still: a choral symphony entirely composed in major keys.

A glorious opening hymn is followed by a mesmerizing meditation for strings. Evocations of the everyday, denoted by quirky titles like “Radio-Caruso and forced energy” and “‘Dads’ rush to the office,” culminate in a final vocal paean: “Long live beauty.” On both discs Mr. Dausgaard’s keen advocacy elicits polished, persuasive accounts that live up to that motto.

[ via nytimes.com ]

***

Daniel Lanois Dabbles In Film, Writes With U2/Eno

Daniel Lanois has helped the biggest of the big translate their music to the masses (Bob Dylan, U2, Willie Nelson), but now he's turning the spotlight on himself. After years of being asked by friends, fans and media outlets to reveal his studio methods, the Canadian producer/artist did exactly that with the self-financed film "Here Is What Is."

The movie, which Lanois co-directed with Adam Samuels and Adam Vollick, premieres Sept. 9 at the Toronto International Film Festival.

"At first, I thought we could at least make an educational film that would be useful to somebody interested in this line of work-just to see how the interactions happen between people in the studio," Lanois tells Billboard, noting the film is not structured like a standard documentary. "But Vollick captured some actual performances on camera, and it's even interesting to me as he walks around and shows the cables, the wires and the equipment."

"Here Is What Is" also features reflections from fellow U2 collaborator Brian Eno and a glimpse at studio sessions for Lanois' next album, which will feature the Band's Garth Hudson on four songs. The goal, Lanois says, is for the film to be picked up by a distributor and hit theaters early next year, in tandem with live performances in select cities and the release of the aforementioned album.

Lanois is a "free agent," having most recently recorded for Anti-. But he's open to working with that label again for the new project. "I may ask [Anti- head] Andy [Kaulkin] if he's interested in putting out one more record," he says. "But I'll finish the record first. Whoever is excited about being onboard, it will be an interesting journey."

In the midst of finishing "Here Is What Is," Lanois has been writing songs for the next U2 album with Eno and the band in France and Morocco, a process documented in the film. Although the two producers have worked separately with U2 for years, this is the first time both men are collaborating with the band simultaneously.

"It feels like the 'Achtung Baby' period, when everybody was really hungry to do something fresh," Lanois says of the material so far. "They have everything, and they've done everything. But the thing they should never assume they still own is the ability to be original and invent something that's never been heard before.

"I'm not coming in with new flavors of the month or waving a magic wand," he continues. "I don't have an abbreviated name. But my eyes are burning a hole through their hearts, and I'm inviting them to come to where I come from."

[ via billboard.com ]

***

Daft Punk Ready Live Album

Daft Punk will release a live album entitled Daft Punk Alive 2007 on November 20th via Virgin Records. The album was recorded at the duo's first hometown show in 10 years at Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy, an 18,000-capacity arena in Paris, on June 14th 2007. There will be a single CD version and as well as a two-disc set packaged as a bound book with an enhanced CD with the video for "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger", along with five extra tracks from the show's encore and 50 pages of photographs shot on tour.

The video for "Harder..." was directed by Olivier Gondry and features live footage shot by fans. The album version of "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" is currently enjoying a second life and a surge in digital sales thanks to being sampled by Kanye West on his song "Stronger." The Daft Punk robots also appear in the "Stronger" video.

Daft Punk will return to the U.S. on October 27th for a performance at the Vegoose Festival in Las Vegas.

Daft Punk Alive 2007 tracklisting:

CD 1
Robot Rock
Oh Yeah
Touch It
Technologic
Television Rules the Nation
Crescendolls
Too Long
Steam Machine
Around the World
Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger
Burnin’
Too Long
Face to Face
Short Circuit
One More Time
Aerodynamic
Aerodynamic Beats
Forget About the World
Prime Time Of Your Life
Brainwasher
Rollin’ And Scratchin’
Alive
Da Funk
Daftendirekt
Superheroes
Human After All
Rock’N’Roll

CD2
Human
Together
One More Time (Reprise)
Music Sounds Better With You
Stardust (Instrumental)

[ via filter-mag.com ]

***

Efterklang announce UK tour dates

Danish quintet Efterklang have confirmed details for their forthcoming tour of the UK and Ireland.

The act will call on the talents of violinst Peter Broderick for the live shows - the American joining them onstage as well as supporting on most of the dates. Two others will also enrol for the tour, swelling 'Klang's human quotient to eight.

Dates:

November
21 Bristol Thekla Social
22 Birmingham Hare & Hounds
23 London Bush Hall
24 Leeds Brudenell Social Club
25 Nottingham Rescue Rooms
27 Glasgow The Arches
28 Dublin Whelans
29 Belfast Spring & Airbrake
30 Manchester Roadhouse

December
1 Brighton Concorde 2

The band's last record Under Giant Trees made reviewer Mike Diver glow and tingly; while details of the next were announced last week.

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Madonna sells Maverick Records; prepares to sign with Live Nation?

Madonna has sold her Maverick Records label, which has been home to acts such as The Prodigy, Deftones and Alanis Morissette.

Madge has flogged her 60% share in the imprint to label owners Warner Music Group, who have also agreed to buy the singer out of her contract with Maverick.

The news has fuelled speculation that Madonna will sign a money-spinning record deal with touring company Live Nation, which would see them manage her record distribution through an independent label, as well as controlling issues such as touring, sponsorships and merchandising.

[ via drownedinsound.com ]

***

Metal Machine Music Rises Again

On paper, the very idea of transcribing Lou Reed's 1975 extreme opus of analogue guitar feedback loops and distortion, sounds impossible. Leave it to Berliner-based avant-garde sax player, Ulrich Krieger, who quite literally transcribed Reed's original score into sheet music, and gave it a new lease of life for today's digital "I want it now" generation.

The result is a scorching, frenetic, physically compulsive and highly explosive live rendition feverishly performed by an 11-piece classical contemporary chamber music ensemble.

The pay-off?

A non-stop 50 minute plus roller coaster slab of industrial rock reinvented as a serious acoustic score which has to be seen and heard to be appreciated. If Lester Bangs were still alive today, I wonder what he would make of it.

The cool thing about this unique CD/DVD release is the DVD footage enables you to watch the original 2002 concert (performed live at the Berlin Opera House) with no slick cinematography. It's an arthouse affair.

For anyone that remembers Reed's original RCA album, you can't help but marvel at how precise Ulrich Krieger transformed the original feedback into a riveting avant-garde music performance.

The fascinating bit comes towards the end, when Reed ambles on stage to sit in a chair playing electric feedback guitar. Together with the chamber music ensemble's instruments (viola, cello, accordian, trumpet), you suddenly get a flashback to early Velvet Underground, when John Cale played the viola and Reed played drone guitar.

When Reed first formed the Velvets, Cale had already worked closely with experimental music composers John Cage and La Monte Young, but was also interested in rock music. Young's use of extended drones were a direct influence on the early Velvets' sound. Cale was pleasantly surprised to discover Reed's experimentalist tendencies were similar to his own: Reed sometimes used alternate guitar tunings to create a droning sound.

This drone guitar sound is evident on the third movement of Metal Machine which Reed performs with Zeitkratzer towards the end of the live album.

One of the highlights on the DVD is the 25-minute interview with Reed. It's a no-nonsense straight-forward Q&A. Reed goes into great detail talking about how he originally recorded Metal Machine Music in his New York City loft apartment. He explains how analogue feedback and loops created different sounds which were impossible to create with today's precise digital recording technology.

The big question is why has it taken five years for Zeitkratzer's live CD/DVD to get an official release? This is is an exceptional collaboration that transcends Reed's original '75 album.

Fans of Sonic Youth, John Cage, Glen Branca, Xenakis and La Monte Young, will marvel at this live recording. It's powerful, physical music that hits you in the gut, turns your head and knocks you for six.

Zeitkratzer have definitely pushed Lou Reed's musical envelope. This is dangerous avant-garde music territory. It's even more relevant today than it was upon first release 32 years ago.

***

The Chemical Brothers "Salmon Dance" [WindowsMedia Video]

We’ve all been at the point in the night when we think that the fish are talking to us (or is it just Filter?) but it’s all a little too real for the kid in the video for The Chemical Brothers’ video for “Salmon Dance.”

Taking the deliciously surreal song from their latest album We Are The Night and giving it a particularly literal video treatment featuring a talking grouper calling out dance moves to the other fish, who spiral out in coordinated kaleidoscopic dance moves while their hapless owner can only watch. Blending elements of their previous video for "Star Guitar" with a trip-hop Finding Nemo, the Brothers work it out perfectly.

[via filter-mag.com]

***

PJ Harvey "When Under Ether Audio" [WindowsMedia Audio]

Welcome back PJ Harvey! It’s been three long years since Uh Huh Her, and while last year’s Peel Sessions was a treat, it hasn’t sated our appetite for new PJ. Fortunately her new album White Chalk is coming on October 2nd, but we have an early sneak peek for you.

“When Under Ether” takes her distinctive vocals and underpins them with delicate, mournful piano, rather than the angular, distorted guitars of her early work. The result is less loud, but certainly no less powerful, and showcases a more mature, self-assured PJ at the top of her game.

[via filter-mag.com]

***

Two die from overdoses and 83 arrested at New Jersey Ozzfest

Two men died and more than 80 were arrested at the latest leg of the Ozzfest in America last week, it has been confirmed.

The Holmdel, New Jersey leg of the annual travelling hard rock tour was beset by problems, with police looking to clamp down on underage drinking.

Both deaths have been attributed to excessive consumption of alcohol, alongside the use of cocaine and marijuana, at the PNC Bank Arts Center venue.

Raymond Guarino, 26 and Patrick Norris, 24, suffered heart attacks and were pronounced dead on arrival at the Bayshore Medical Center, after collapsing at Thursday's event.

The efforts of law enforcement officers to clamp down on illegal alcohol abuse prompted a booze ban in the car park, leading to 83 arrests, as promoters Live Nation explained.

They said: "Although we do not have jurisdiction over the parking lot, we fully support the decision of the New Jersey Turnpike Authority and State Police to ban alcohol on the parking lot premises."

Ozzy Osbourne, Lamb Of God, Lordi and Static-X are amongst the performers on Ozzfest 2007.

***

THE STOOGES BLOW V FESTIVAL AWAY WITH FRENZIED SET

The Stooges turned in one the definitive sets of the weekend at V Festival in Chelmsford tonight (August 19).

Coming onstage at 8.20pm, Iggy Pop exclaimed "we are the fucking Stooges", before launching straight into "Funhouse" highlights "Loose" and "Down On The Street".

Pop was active throughout the set, climbing speaker stacks, running around the stage and jumping down to meet the audience countless times.

As at Glastonbury this year, Pop kept cool by continually pouring bottles of water over himself.

The Stooges went on to perform their best-loved songs over their forty-five minute slot, including "I Wanna Be Your Dog" and "1970", to an incredibly appreciative audience.

Earlier on the Channel 4 Stage, Manic Street Preachers drew a large crowd for a hit-laden set, which included "Motorcycle Emptiness" and "Australia".

Although James Dean Bradfield's guitar was mostly inaudible for the first few songs, this was soon sorted out, with Bradfield telling the crowd: "It's my shit amps!"

Uncut will be blogging from V Festival all weekend bringing you updates from the action, so take a look at Uncut’s festival blog:

"We are the fucking Stooges," says Iggy. Kicking off with 'Loose' and 'Down On The Street' is quite a beginning, but following it up with '1969' and 'I Wanna Be Your Dog' is something else. Then you get 'TV Eye', then 'No Fun', then '1970'. This is some show - these are more like nihilistic hymns than songs, more like forces of nature than constructed tunes.

Iggy scales the speaker stack, undoing his trousers. He jumps down to meet the crowd, and the bouncers stand up on the rails, telling each other to push us down if we try to invade the stage. This isn't Snow Patrol, that's for sure.

The Stooges are mostly over 60, but it's hard to believe how hard they rock. We might be sweaty, we might be exhausted, but we've just seen one of the best gigs we're ever likely to see. Long live The Stooges.

Blog Words: Tom Pinnock

***

NEIL YOUNG ALBUM DETAILS EMERGE

Neil Young has just completed work on his latest album 'Chrome Dreams II' which is due for release on October 16.

Neil Young played the album to record label Reprise yesterday (August 19) continuing a playback tradition that goes back to 1969.

'Chrome Dreams II' features three songs revisited from the 1977 album 'Chrome Dreams' that Neil Young planned but didn't complete, as well as seven brand new recordings.

The playback in Burbank, California was to 100 people, and lasted just over an hour. The album produced by 'The Volume Dealers' - NY and Niko Bolas features two epic tracks that clock in at eighteen and a half minutes and thirteen minutes respectively.

Neil Young's last release was 'Living With War' in May 2006.

More information is available from Neil Young's official website here.

***

Hot Chip to remix Kraftwerk

They provided Electronically Yours with the best electronic album last year (and we are still getting people to listen to 'No Fit State' and now the UK's leading electro band Hot Chip have officially been approached by the Godfathers Of Electro Kraftwerk.

NME yesterday announced that Hot Chip will be remixing Kraftwerk's 'Aerodynamik' and 'La Forme' from 2003's 'Tour De France'.

The tracks are expected to be released on September 17th across various formats including CD, a collectable limited edition 12-inch as well as digital downloads.

Hot Chip knob fiddler Joe Goddard is delighted to be working with one of the most influential music acts of all time: 'What makes Kraftwerk brilliant is the combination of fascinating textures and sounds, simplicity and efficiency in production and a habit of writing beautiful melodies'.

Hot Chip know their stuff and like Goldfrapp and Ladytron, they have a new album due for release in the fall of 2007.

***

Dave Gahan's 'Hourglass' Eagerly Awaited Second Solo LP Released October 22nd, 2007 on Mute; First Single 'Kingdom', Released October 8th, 2007

The inimitable Dave Gahan [Official Site/MySpace] makes a dynamic return on 22nd October with 'Hourglass' - his eagerly awaited second solo album. Best known as the iconic frontman of Depeche Mode, he continues his impressive career with a blazing new side-project, which follows his critically acclaimed solo debut 'Paper Monsters'.

Produced by Dave with Christian Eigner & Andrew Phillpott, both members of the Depeche Mode touring band, 'Hourglass' also reflects Gahan's growth as a songwriter. Initially showcased with 2003's 'Paper Monsters', he later wrote 3 stellar tracks for Depeche Mode's recent 2 million selling 'Playing The Angel' - 'I Want It All', 'Suffer Well' & 'Nothing's Impossible'.

Hourglass highlights include the gospel-tinged 'Saw Something', which kick-starts the album with stealth before effortlessly setting the tone for the other 9 tracks. "That was the catalyst that started the idea to write again," Dave recalls, adding that is was also "the first lyric, and the key to open the door to thinking, 'Okay, I can go here.'"

Other standout moments include the exhilarating, tour de force roar of 'Deeper and Deeper', the soaring epic first single 'Kingdom' (out on 8th October) and the addictive pull of 'Use You', where he scathingly lets loose his disgust with people, and specifically, himself. Meanwhile, on 'Down' - perhaps the most confessional song on the record - he confesses "I feel so old, down on the ground is where I'm bound to end up."

Sonically, the record cuts across a range of influences and styles with grace. Decidedly more electronic than his previous solo work, he has seamlessly swapped the guitar of 'Paper Monsters' for the synthesizer he epitomizes so well.

"It doesn't feel so much that the band is my identity anymore, although I owe everything to it. I'm starting to really feel that I have my own voice, and it's definitely coming out in the songs. For me, it's the best possible record I could make at this time. And it's gone well beyond what I expected of myself."

The track listing:
1. Saw Something
2. Kingdom
3. Deeper And Deeper
4. 21 Days
5. Miracles
6. Use You
7. Insoluble
8. Endless
9. A Little Lie
10. Down

***

It's been called the first punk record. And yet Jonathan Richman's Roadrunner is only a hymn to a suburban ringroad in Massachusetts

I'm out exploring the modern world,
By the pine trees and the Howard Johnsons,
On Route 128 when it's late at night,
We're heading from the north shore to the south shore,
Well I see Route 3 in my sight and
I'm the Roadrunner."

Roadrunner (Thrice), by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers

Dusk in a supermarket carpark in Natick, Massachusetts. Outside there is snow in the air and the wind is up. A shopping trolley whirls its way across the tarmac unaided and the cars of Route 9 rush by. I wind the window down. It's cold outside.

People make rock'n'roll pilgrimages to Chuck Berry's Route 66, to Bruce Springsteen's New Jersey Turnpike and Bob Dylan's Highway 61. They flock to Robert Johnson's crossroads, to Graceland, to the Chelsea Hotel, hoping to glean some insight into the music that moves them. In January this year, I made my own rock pilgrimage to the suburbs of Boston, to drive the routes described by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers in the song Roadrunner, a minor UK hit 30 years ago this week.
Roadrunner is one of the most magical songs in existence. It is a song about what it means to be young, and behind the wheel of an automobile, with the radio on and the night and the highway stretched out before you. It is a paean to the modern world, to the urban landscape, to the Plymouth Roadrunner car, to roadside restaurants, neon lights, suburbia, the highway, the darkness, pine trees and supermarkets. As Greil Marcus put it in his book Lipstick Traces: "Roadrunner was the most obvious song in the world, and the strangest."

One version of Roadrunner - Roadrunner (Twice) - reached No 11 in the UK charts, but the song's influence would extend much further. Its first incarnation, Roadrunner (Once), recorded in 1972 and produced by John Cale, but not released until 1976, was described by film director Richard Linklater as "the first punk song"; he placed it on the soundtrack to his film School of Rock. As punk took shape in London, Roadrunner was one of the songs the Sex Pistols covered at their early rehearsals. Another 20 years on and Cornershop would cite it as the inspiration behind their No 1 single Brimful of Asha, and a few years later, Rolling Stone put it at 269 on their list of the 500 greatest songs of all time. Its impact would be felt in other ways, too: musicians playing on this song included keyboard player Jerry Harrison, who would later join Talking Heads, and drummer David Robinson, who went on to join the Cars. Its power was in the simplicity both of its music - a drone of guitar, organ, bass and drums around a simple two-chord structure - and of its message that it's great to be alive.

Maybe you don't know much about Jonathan Richman. Maybe you've heard the instrumental Egyptian Reggae, which hit No 5 in 1977 and earned him an appearance on Top of the Pops. Or perhaps you recall his cameo as the chorus in There's Something About Mary (the Farrelly brothers are dedicated fans). But if you want to know what Jonathan Richman was about, first think of the Velvet Underground, and then turn it inside out; imagine the Velvets cooked sunny side up. Imagine them singing not about drugs and darkness, but about all the simple beauty in the world.

What characterises Richman's work, and Roadrunner especially, is its unblighted optimism. "Richman's music did not sound quite sane," Greil Marcus wrote. "When I went to see him play in 1972, his band - the Modern Lovers, which is what he's always called whatever band he's played with - was on stage; nothing was happening. For some reason I noticed a pudgy boy with short hair wandering through the sparse crowd, dressed in blue jeans and a white T-shirt on which was printed, in pencil, 'I LOVE MY LIFE.' Then he climbed up and played the most shattering guitar I'd ever heard. 'I think this is great,' said the person next to me. 'Or is it terrible?'"

There are plenty of versions of Roadrunner. The Unofficial Jonathan Richman Chords website lists 10 discernibly different versions: seven given an official release and three bootlegs. Richman apparently wrote the song in around 1970. The 1972 John Cale version was a demo for Warner Brothers, and only saw the light when the Beserkley label in California collected the Modern Lovers' demos and put them out as the Modern Lovers album in 1976. Two more 1972 demo versions, produced by the notorious LA music svengali Kim Fowley, would be released in 1981 on a patchy album called The Original Modern Lovers, and a live version from 1973 would appear a quarter of a century later on the live record Precise Modern Lovers Order. In late 1974, Richman recorded a stripped-down version of the song for the Beserkley, which apparently took a little over two hours. This would be the Roadrunner (Twice), the most successful version. A further take, extended beyond eight minutes, and recorded live, was titled Roadrunner (Thrice) and released as a single B-side in 1977.

While every version of Roadrunner begins with the bawl of "One-two-three-four-five-six" and ends with the cry of "Bye bye!", each contains lyrical variations and deviations in the car journey Richman undertakes during the song's narrative, though it always begins on Route 128, the Boston ringroad that Richman uses to embody the wonders of existence. In one, he's heading out to western Massachusetts, and in another he's cruising around "where White City used to be" and to Grafton Street, to check out an old sporting store, observing: "Well they made many renovations in that part of town/ My grandpa used to be a dentist there." Over the course of the various recordings he refers to the Turnpike, the Industrial Park, the Howard Johnson, the North Shore, the South Shore, the Mass Pike, Interstate 90, Route 3, the Prudential Tower, Quincy, Deer Island, Boston harbour, Amherst, South Greenfield, the "college out there that rises up outta nuthin", Needham, Ashland, Palmerston, Lake Champlain, Route 495, the Sheraton Tower, Route 9, and the Stop & Shop.

My pilgrimage will take me to all of these places. For authenticity's sake I have chosen to make the trip in January, because, as Richman observes in Roadrunner (Thrice) on winding down his car window, "it's 20 degrees outside". Having consulted a weather website listing average temperatures for Boston and its environs, I find it is most likely to be 20 degrees at night-time in January. And, as in Roadrunner, I will drive these roads only at night, because "I'm in love with modern moonlight, 128 when it's dark outside."

Richman was born in the suburb of Natick in the May of 1951. It was there that he learned to play clarinet and guitar, where he met some of his Modern Lovers. But that is not where I begin my journey. If you want to find out where Richman was really born, musically speaking, you have to head to a redbrick building in central Boston. On my first afternoon, as I prepare for my inaugural night drive, I pull up on Berkeley Street, within spitting distance of the Mass Pike, trying to find the original site of the Boston Tea Party, the venue where Richman first saw the Velvet Underground as a teenager.

Richman was infatuated with The Velvets, from the first moment he heard them on the radio in 1967. He met the band many times in his native Boston, opened for them in Springfield, and in 1969 even moved to New York, sleeping on their manager's sofa. Roadrunner owes its existence to the Velvet Underground's Sister Ray, though the three-chord riff has been pared back to two, just D and A.

A live recording from the Middle East Cafe in Cambridge, Massachusetts, made in October 1995, has Richman introducing his song Velvet Underground with the recollection that he must have seen the band "about 60 times at the Boston Tea Party down there at 53 Berkeley Street". So along Berkeley Street I walk, counting down to number 53, the cold from the pavement soaking up through my boots, the air before me hanging in frosty white wreaths. The venue is gone now, and today it is a civilised-looking apartment block with no hint of the rock'n'roll about it save for a plaque announcing that Led Zeppelin and the Velvets, BB King and the J Geils Band all played here. It does not mention Jonathan Richman.

That evening I drive along Route 128 for the first time. I head up towards Gloucester, as the night drifts from rain to sleet to snow. All the way there, the road is quiet; the rush-hour traffic has thinned, and I drive behind a minibus emblazoned with the words Greater Boston Chinese Golden Age Center. The street lights peter out and at times I can barely see the road markings; by the time I reach the North Shore I am hunched over the steering wheel squinting at the road. In Gloucester, I draw into the carpark of Dunkin' Donuts. Cars swish by on Eastern Avenue, rain falls heavily. Inside, one lone figure in an anorak is buying Thursday night doughnuts. This is the very end of R128.

It feels exhilarating, alone out here in the darkness. I peer through the windscreen at the cosy houses of Gloucester, a seaside resort and home to 30,000 people. Televisions blink behind drawn curtains, and I think how cold and late it is and how by rights I should be indoors. But what matters right now is out here: the radio, and the dark and the night and this glorious strip of tarmac before me.

Route 128 was opened in 1951, and is also known as the Yankee Division Highway. It runs from Canton on the South Shore up here to Gloucester. At times it intertwines with I-95, the interstate highway that runs from Florida to the Canadian border. Route 128, and what it represents, is an important element in Roadrunner. Between 1953 and 1961, many businesses, employing thousands of people, moved to lie alongside Route 128, and the road became known as America's Technology Highway. During the 1950s and 1960s, Boston's suburbs spread along the road, and the businesses were joined by people, the residential population quadrupling in the 50s and then doubling again in the 60s. This was the world in which Richman grew up, a world that rejoiced in technology, that celebrated the suburbs and the opportunities offered by the highway.

In Tim Mitchell's biography There's Something About Jonathan, Richman's former next-door neighbour and founder member of the Modern Lovers, John Felice, recalls the excitement of driving that route with his buddy: "We used to get in the car and we would just drive up and down Route 128 and the turnpike. We'd come up over a hill and he'd see the radio towers, the beacons flashing, and he would get almost teary-eyed ... He'd see all this beauty in things where other people just wouldn't see it. We'd drive past an electric plant, a big power plant, with all kinds of electric wire and generators, and he'd get all choked up, he'd almost start crying. He found a lot of beauty in those things, and that was something he taught me. There was a real stark beauty to them and he put it into words in his songs."

Driving back towards Boston, past factories and blinking red lights, I head down to the South Shore, to Canton, where Route 128 becomes I-95, heading off towards Providence, Rhode Island, and way on down to Miami. Canton is the home of Reebok and Baskin Robbins, and I drive aimlessly through its dark streets before scooping back up to Quincy, where Howard Johnson's and Dunkin' Donuts began, and out along Quincy Shore Drive. I put on Roadrunner (Thrice), my favourite version of Roadrunner. "Well I can see Boston now," it goes. "I can see the Prudential Tower/ With the little red lights blinking on in the dark/ I'm by Quincy now/ I can see Deer Island/ I can see the whole Boston harbour from where I am, out on the rocks by Cohasset/ In the night."

The next day I head out to Natick. My mission is to see the suburban streets where Richman grew up, and to visit the Super Stop & Shop, on Worcester Street. The Stop & Shop is a supermarket chain founded in 1914 and which now boasts 360 stores, most of them in New England. The Stop & Shop is one of the key locations in Roadrunner, for it is where Richman makes a key discovery about the power of rock'n'roll radio: "I walked by the Stop & Shop/ Then I drove by the Stop & Shop/ I like that much better than walking by the Stop & Shop/ 'Cause I had the radio on."

The experiment is important. Richman states that having the radio on makes him feel both "in touch" and "in love" with "the modern world", and the presiding connection with modernity throughout Roadrunner - with the highway, with the car, with rock'n'roll, conveys Richman's delight at living entirely in the moment.

Natick Stop & Shop looks too modern to be the same store Richman walked past, then drove past. "How long has this Stop & Shop been here?" I ask the cashier. He is young and slightly built, a faint brush of hair on his top lip. "Uh, I dunno ... " he frowns. "Did you know there's a famous song that mentions the Stop & Shop?" I press on. "No." He looks at me, hairs twitching, and his colleague interrupts as she packs my bags: "Can I take my break?" she demands, squarely. Outside, I walk slowly past the Stop & Shop. Then I climb into my silver Saturn with its New Jersey plates and drive past the Stop & Shop, with the radio on for company. I feel in touch with the modern world.

Some hours later, having driven out along Interstate 90 - the Mass Pike - and down the 495, past Framingham and Ashland and Milford, I find myself in the Franklin Stop & Shop, standing at the Dunkin' Donuts counter. "Oh my gawd! We've almost run out of glazed!" cries one of the attendants. "The other day we sold one glazed all day!" "Mm-hmm," replies her colleague, in a world-weary tone. "Some day you sell none at all, other days they all just go." They are playing Paula Abdul's Opposites Attract in the cafe, and I sit there with my doughnut and my coffee and my map of Massachusetts, plotting my route out towards Amherst and the University of Massachusetts, and up to Greenfield, about two hours west. I love to think of Richman making this drive, about the "college out there that just rises up in the middle of nuthin'/ You've just got fields of snow and all of a sudden there's these modern buildings/ Right in the middle of nothing/ Under the stars." There is the glorious feeling of driving for driving's sake, away from the draw of Boston, away from the ocean, and delving deep into the heart of Massachusetts.

It is late when I get home. After staying a couple of nights at a hotel overlooking the harbour I have moved to the Howard Johnson, out by Fenway Park, home of the Red Sox. It is a low-rise hotel across from a McDonald's, inside it is filled with a weary light and the stale smells of the Chinese restaurant attached. In its heyday, Howard Johnson's was a hugely successful chain of motor hotels and restaurants, famous for its 28 flavours of ice cream. Richman loved the Howard Johnson's chain, devoting an entire song to it in his early days, in which he declared happily: "I see the restaurant/ It is my friend." At one point, Tim Mitchell writes, Richman personalised his Stratocaster guitar by cutting out a piece of it, spraying it the recognisable greeny-blue of the Howard Johnson logo and then reinserting it. Today, there are only a couple of Howard Johnson's restaurants in existence, none of them in Massachusetts, and the logo lives on only as part of a budget hotel chain.

Outside the hotel tonight the snow is deep; it piles up around wheel arches and lies thickly across bonnets and windscreens. I haven't really spoken to anyone for days, and my firmest friend has become the radio. I'm tuned to AM, in homage to Roadrunner, with its gleeful shouts of: "I got the AM!/ Got the power!/ Got the radio on!" Tonight in the neon glow of the carpark, I flick through stations broadcasting only in Spanish, music shows, adverts for dating websites, custom replacement windows, car loans, Dr Kennedy's prayer show, until they blur into one long rush of song and speech and advertisement "Truththattransforms.org, for $29.99 you get one free, You wouldn't stay away as much as you do/ I know that I wouldn't be this blue/ If you would only love me half as much as I love you."

For my final night's drive it is snowing heavily. I decide to cover every single geographical point on the Roadrunner map in one long drive, setting out shortly after nine o'clock for Gloucester. It is a beautiful night, the roads empty, the snow falling onto my windscreen in great beautiful plumes, I put my hand outside the window and the flakes float gently, coldly on to my fingers. I drive past the Stop & Shop, I drive out towards Amherst, to south Greenfield. I take in Route 128, the Mass Pike, Route 3, from R9 I loop down to R495, down towards Quincy, I head out to Cohasset, to the rocks. And as I spiral about the snowy landscape I feel like a skater, pirouetting across the ice.

I drive for hours. "But I'm hypnotised," as Roadrunner (Thrice) puts it. And it is a funny thing, driving alone, late at night; pretty soon you come to feel at one with the car, with the road, with the dark and the landscape. This is one of the themes that rises up out of Roadrunner, that feeling that "the highway is my only girlfriend" that here, loneliness is a thing to be cherished. "Now I'm in love with my own loneliness," he sings. "It doesn't bother me to feel so alone/ At least I'm not staying alone at home/ I'm out exploring the modern world."

It is the early hours of the morning. I am tired. My mouth is thick with coffee and my throat dry from the car heater. As I loop back towards Route 128 for the final time I turn off the radio and put on Roadrunner (Thrice): "One-two-three-four-five-six!" Suddenly there is a lump in my throat. I pull over and wind the window down, let the cold night air rush in, and through the falling snow I watch all the lights of the modern world, blinking out over Boston.

"Well you might say I feel lonely
But I wouldn't say I feel lonely
I would say that I feel alive
All alone
'Cause I like this feeling
Of roaming around in the dark
And even though I'm alone out there
I don't mind
'Cause I'm in love with the world."

***

Suzi Quatro: 'I'm kinda different'

Four decades after her first gig, Suzi Quatro still rocks. Or does she? Her new book tells of six-hour sex sessions and dressing-room brawls - but she lives in a moated manor house and worries about visitors dirtying her spotless carpets.

'You'll have to take your shoes off," says Suzi Quatro at the doorway to her Elizabethan manor house near Chelmsford in Essex. "Beige carpets." When she smiles - and I mean this nicely - Quatro uncannily resembles the Jane Fonda of moisturiser ads: pretty eyes, perfect teeth, marvellously imperious and impeccably put together. At 5ft nothing, she's head and shoulders beneath me, but there's no chance I'm getting past her except in my stocking feet.

Aren't beige carpets unsuitable for whatever rock chicks get up to in the privacy of their own homes? As I settle in the panelled living room while the self-styled first woman rock'n'roller makes coffee, I sniff. Mmm, beeswax. Mr Sheen has recently paid more than a flying visit. I look out of the window and notice a feature I had missed as the taxi crunched up the gravel driveway: my God, this place is moated!
Having just read her new autobiography, Unzipped, this domestic felicity is not what I expected. One paragraph begins: "Around this time I became a go-go dancer ..." Then there are the six-hour sex sessions. The time she got a wasted Iggy Pop thrown off stage for trying to muscle in on her mic. When she dragged her drunken guitarist husband Len Tuckey up to bed (again!) after a gig. The day she shot Alice Cooper between the eyes with an arrow (it had a rubber tip, but let's not spoil the story). The time Elvis invited her to Graceland and she declined. The night her father socked Chuck Berry on the jaw in her dressing room. The Australian tour when she played bass with a broken arm ...

This is the woman, for crying out loud, who in 1975 released a badass-sounding album called Your Mama Won't Like Me. Today, the living room carpet and rug are impeccably Hoovered.

When she returns with coffee, however, Quatro points out the bass guitar hanging on the wall. It's the 1957 Fender Precision that her dad gave her back in 1964. What was he thinking of? Girls (she was 14 at the time) didn't play electric basses, still less one with a really thick neck that made it particularly difficult to master. "I used to play that thing until my thumb was blistered and bleeding." But aren't bassists supposed to pluck with their fingers? "Yeah, I learned that later, when I was playing in my band Cradle. Now I am a fucking good bass player." And, as a result, she feels entitled to dispense praise and advice. In the book, she informs Gene Simmons of Kiss that the offer of remedial bass lessons still holds. Two weeks ago she spoke to Paul McCartney. "I told him his bass playing on his new album was the best he's ever done."

Were there any role models for a nascent woman bass player with ballsy vocals? "I had no female role models. I was inspired by Billie Holliday and I really liked Mary Weiss of the Shangri-Las because she wore tight trousers and a waistcoat on top - she looked hot.

"I'm kinda different," she says, flexing her biceps. "See that?" Absolutely - amazing muscle tone for a 57-year-old, especially on the right arm. She has calluses, too, and weird knobbly bones sticking out of her wrist that she shows me like badges of honour. "For 43 years I've been doing this job and carrying my bass around the world. It's kept me fit if nothing else." It has also helped her sell 50m records.

She was born Susan Kay Quatro in Detroit to a Hungarian mother and an Italian dad. "Mom always said to me that they were 'Paprika and garlic - boy, oh boy, what a mix!'" Astoundingly, her surname wasn't made up by sideburned glam-rock image consultants in a Soho office in the early 70s, still less concocted by her long-time manager, the late Mickie Most. It was the name that the American authorities gave her grandfather when he arrived in New York, aged nine. His real surname - Quattrocchi - was deemed too difficult to pronounce.

Quatro's dad worked at General Motors by day and as the leader of a jazz band by night. He encouraged his five kids to play as many musical instruments as possible. Quatro played bass, piano, guitar and percussion. She and her sister, Patti, formed an all-girl band, the Pleasure Seekers, while they were in their early teens and achieved enough live success locally that Susan decided not to go back to school. Her dad supplied equipment and her mom provided food and drink for the band's rehearsals, as well as extra beds when needed.

One of the most poignant passages in the book is a conversation with her mother, who is dying of cancer in Easter 1992: "Susan," her mother says, "I have one big regret in my life ... I let you go too soon. You joined that damn rock'n'roll band at 14. You were just a baby. On the road with all those temptations."

And on the road, Quatro had her first big affair, with an A&R man from Mercury Records (called DC throughout). The first time they slept together was on her 18th birthday. He was married with kids. Her resulting pregnancy ended with an abortion. Tough stuff for a girl raised a Catholic. She writes: "When I get to those golden gates (hopefully), this is the sin I will pay for. Not a day goes by that I don't think about who that baby would be now. Children are a gift. I'm sorry, Father, for I have sinned ... please forgive me, Lord."

Why does she want to be forgiven? "My mom raised me as a Catholic to know right from wrong," says Quatro. "I should have known better. Because right is right and wrong is wrong. That's real simple, isn't it?"

It's also real complicated. The tentacles of guilt extend from mother to daughter and back again, wrapping round and reinforcing each other. The mother guilty that she let her daughter have too much freedom too early; the daughter guilty that she grew up too fast and that she had an abortion. How did her relationship with her mother affect the one with her daughter, Laura (Quatro has two children and one granddaughter)? "Well, she left home early too. I guess it was hard to live in the shadow of Suzi Quatro."

But that conversation with her fatally ill mother ends thus in the book: "So Mom, if you felt like that, why did you let me go?' 'Because, Susan, sometimes love is letting go.'" Quatro took that to be one of the most powerful things her mother said to her and it inspired a song on last year's album, Back to the Drive.

A few pages later, Quatro sees her mother wheeled into the operating theatre to have a tumour removed. On the trolley, her mother raised her hands to her cheeks and pinched them hard. "Mom had always been a bit vain, and by pinching her cheeks she had caused a nice natural blush to appear. I laughed out loud ... it was the last time I saw my mother alive."

"I think she was right," she says, welling up not for the first or last time during the interview, as she thinks about how her mother let her hit the road with a rock band at the age of 14. "You have to let go otherwise you suffocate your kids." But again there are tentacles of guilt: Quatro, after marrying and struggling to get pregnant, taking fertility drugs and having a miscarriage, toured the world with her kids in tow. "Len [her first husband] and I worked out some compromises about when they would be with me and when they would be at home. It wasn't ideal, I know. But I had to work. I was just another woman juggling work and family."

Quatro felt even more guilty when she left the US in 1971 for a London that had stopped swinging and was going glam. The most successful independent music producer of the 1960s, Mickie Most, saw her and her sister's band in Detroit in 1971. "He wanted me, not the band, and not Patti my sister, to come over to London where he would make me a star. And I think that broke her heart. The rejection!"

Was Most right? "I think so. I was the talented one. And if you're not chosen, as Patti wasn't, that's hard to take. Ever since, she's said to me that I got all the breaks and she got nothing."

Leaving Detroit also definitively broke her mother's heart. Did you feel guilty? "I felt guilty but I didn't regret it. In Detroit, for all that it is a great city for adrenaline-charged music [she was inspired by Motown and cites many rock acts from the city - MC5, Iggy Pop, Bob Seger, Ted Nugent, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels] there is also this attitude that you've gotta get out of this place. I had to get away, but when I did the mood in my parents' house was like someone had died."

Most put her up in a tiny hotel room in London's Earls Court. She had no money, no friends, no private bathroom, no band and a negligible grasp of English idioms (there's a particularly funny scene in which she is invited to her boyfriend's parents' home for lunch and she deploys her new vocabulary of bollocking, poxy and wanker to general horror).

Quatro gets cross when I suggest she was a manufactured pop star. "What you saw was what I was. The only image thing Mickie insisted on was the jumpsuit and that only happened because I wanted to wear a leather jacket like Elvis did. He said: 'Oh Suzi, you can't. It's been done.' I said: 'Not by a girl.' So he suggested a leather jumpsuit and I thought: 'Yeah! That would be practical. Easy to get out of.' I had no idea it would look sexy." Oh, come off it! "No, really! No idea. I had no idea that it would help so many boys through their puberty." Later, Quatro's mom told her daughter that her music was "very nice, but do you have to stand with your legs so far apart?"

Was she a feminist? "I was a me-ist. I believed in the right to do whatever I wanted to do regardless of gender. Still do."

At least she was a looker. Otherwise, British glam rock was, Bolan and Bowie excepted, an oxymoron. It featured men with stubble peeping through their foundation and beer guts swelling their ill-advisedly tight satin tops. Two years after arriving in the UK, she got a band together and supported Slade, all the while honing material that had mostly been written by Most's songwriting duo, Chinn and Chapman, the men responsible for her biggest hits: Devil Gate Drive, Can the Can and that delightful song about the male menopause, 48 Crash. Can the Can gave Quatro her first No1 aged 23, selling two and a half million copies around the world. These were the songs that defined her for a generation, not just here but around the world, where she still plays to packed houses. In Japan, there is a sake named after her.

During this heady time of early 70s celebrity, she started dating her future husband, the guitarist Len Tuckey. Their stormy 16-year marriage - the last six of which they were married in name only - is detailed unremittingly in the book. Why did they stay together so long? "We were essentially both stayers by temperament, which made it hard for us to give up on the marriage, especially when there were two children."

Eventually, though, she decided that Tuckey was holding her back. He never liked it when her career diversified away from rock'n'roll, especially when she was cast opposite Henry Winkler in the sitcom Happy Days. "I spent most of our years together treating him like a king, building up his male ego and taking a back seat in our personal lives ... Len told me years later that he was always aware that I was doing this, and loved me all the more for it. He also told me I had been wrong - he didn't need his ego building.

"He wanted me in a jumpsuit for the rest of my life," she muses. That, I suggest, is no way to live. "Yeah, I wanted to try other things. After he left, it was awful - the first Christmas with the kids here seemed so empty. I wrote a song, Empty Rooms, about it.

"But I had to find myself, not as somebody's wife. I'm more satisfied now. Divorce freed me to do other things - play in a musical [she starred in a West End production of Annie Get Your Gun] and write a musical [called Tallulah Who?, of which more later] and generally do things that took me out of my comfort zone."

Do she and Tuckey get on well now? "We do. We share a cosmic connection. I look at it this way: I've had two good marriages." Since 1993 she has been with Rainer Hass, a German concert promoter. The very big trainers in the hall next to my shoes may well be his, or those of some terrifying Norse god.

I am intrigued by her association with Willie Rushton. She collaborated with him - surely, against all odds - on a musical about the allegedly nymphomaniac bisexual Hollywood actor Tallulah Bankhead, which had a brief run in Hornchurch, Essex, but never made it to the West End. How did the leather-clad Motown rocker get on with the late, plummy-voiced and bearded cartoonist, satirist and co-founder of Private Eye? "I loved the guy. I know I'm quick-witted, but this guy would always come back with something wittier. I'd be basking on the laurels of a joke I'd told, and he would always wait until the perfect moment and come back with a better one-liner."

At this very moment, she's visited by Rushton's spirit. "Hey! I just felt him. Hi Willie!" she says. That or it's the Mr Sheen, for whom Rushton once did the voiceover in a TV ad.

Quatro is in touch with the spirit world, including the ghosts of two drowned children who once lived at her Essex home. She filled in the pond they died in, telling her children not to go to that part of the garden because the devil lived there. During the interview she is also visited - and why not? - by the spirit of Most.

What next, though? "I think I've got at least two more albums in me, and they would be worth doing, because I think I'm better than ever. I would like to do a movie - it's the only medium I haven't worked in." One medium she has mastered is radio - her Rockin' with Suzi Q show is one of Radio 2's most popular shows. This month she leaves for her 23rd tour of Australia; she hopes to carry on touring for several more years.

Interview over, Quatro walks me back to my shoes, past walls of framed gold and platinum discs. When will she stop rocking? "When I go on stage, turn my back to the audience and shake my ass and there's silence - then I stop".

· Unzipped by Suzi Quatro is published by Hodder & Stoughton, price £18.99. To order a copy for £17.99 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875.

· Suzi Quatro will be talking about her autobiography at Borders, 120 Charing Cross Road, London WC2, on Thursday August 9 at 7pm.

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A toast to Swedish music

Though leftwing hearts once soared at the mention of Leningrad, Managua and Havana, those of us who cling to the hope of a slightly more caring and sharing world are these days instructed to look to Sweden. It's great there: taxes are sky-high, but everyone is happy, and they're so brimming with Nordic genius that they invented flat-pack furniture, Ericsson mobiles and Saab cars.

As if to decisively confirm that Sweden is as close to heaven on earth as humanity is ever to likely to get, they are also no slouches at pop music, a fact that popped into my head the other day when I was giving yet another play to a new(ish) single by a Stockholm-dwelling trio prosaically called Peter, Bjorn and John. A crepuscular wonder entitled Young Folks, it successfully captures the magical experience of pulling someone in a wee-hours dive and experiencing a momentary feeling of existential liberation. It also features possibly the best example of recorded whistling since John Lennon's original and best rendition of Jealous Guy, though that's probably by the by.

Further research revealed that PB & J recently won the Swedish equivalent of a Grammy - cleverly called a Grammis - and are occasionally accompanied by a drummer called Lars Skoglund. From there, it was but a small hop to a big old Proustian rush, and the memory of a strange three days I spent back in 2002, hot on the trail of Swede-rock's essential secret, the mysterious reason why talented people from this dark and cold European country had so bucked pop's Anglo-American imperialism. Things have gone a little quiet since, but these were the fleeting days when Swedish musicians, like unexpected finalists in an international soccer competition, were giving rise to strange talk about Britain's place as Europe's rock hegemon being under threat - and thanks to the wan and useless likes of Coldplay, Travis and Embrace, there was nothing we could do about it.

So, I talked to the excellent and now sadly marginalised Hives. There were also encounters with the not-so-excellent Sahara Hotnights and Division of Laura Lee, and a tragically overlooked group of long-haired bohemians called Citizen Bird, whose singer, Simon Ohlsson, met me in a Stockholm bar and explained why everything in his home country had aligned so wonderfully: chiefly, a welfare state prepared to indulge the dreams of aspirant young rock'n'rollers, and crushingly dark winters that left musicians little option but to knuckle down and learn the slippery art of writing half-decent lyrics in their second language.

In Ohlson's case there was, perhaps, another factor: a methodical approach to inebriation that, it seemed, was all part of Simon's life-code. Not for him that British behavioural tic whereby we affect to get drunk by accident. "Are you dronk yet?" he kept asking. "I'm pretty dronk." And fair play to him: he was.

Now, it's rather unlikely that lining up the ales and approaching a night out as an intoxication contest is indeed the true secret of great Swedish music. With the possible exception of Benny Andersson - whose big beard and habit of bouncing up and down on the piano stool always suggested a Viking-esque heartiness - I cannot picture the members of Abba doing so, nor that ice-cold indie matinee idol Nina Persson from the Cardigans, the slightly sinister members of the pop franchise Ace of Base, or the long-lost Swedish rapper Stakka Bo, who was kind of like the Stereo MCs, only funny.

There again, I can recall a night out with the Gothenburg retro-funsters The Soundtrack of Our Lives - while we're here, whatever happened to them? - that proceeded in much the same way, so maybe there's something to it. Whatever: a toast to such Swede-pop classics as SOS, Gimme Gimme Gimme, My Favourite Game, All That She Wants, Young Folks, and many more besides. It's Friday, after all: as my friend would have it, let's get dronk!

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Interview: Simon Aldred plugged away for years with his music - now his band is topping the charts

"What a badly designed teapot," Cherry Ghost's Simon Aldred says after burning his fingers as we near the end of our lunch at a plush Manchester hotel, far removed from his working-class upbringing in nearby Bolton. Jokingly I suggest teapot design as his next project should the music fall apart, and he replies: "I'll get on Dragons' Den when all this goes tits up and I've turned into a content old fart living in Hampshire. Another invention of mine is the "bognet". You know when you go to people's houses when the lid flops right back down? I'd put a magnet on the top so it just attaches itself. In 12 months' time, that'll be my entry on Wikipedia – The Bognet – and there will be a footnote: 'wrote a couple of tunes'."

But Dragons' Den and teapot design are a long way off. When Cherry Ghost's debut album Thirst For Romance was released in July it went straight to No 7 in the chart, peaking at No 4.

At 31, Aldred is older than the average breakthrough musician, and his unshaven weather-worn features, dark suit, wearied air of northern gloom and jaded whiskey-soaked vocals make him maturer than his years. But it is his bubbly loquaciousness, sense of humour and genuine bursts of laughter; as well as his hope and defiance of gloom which are the themes throughout Thirst For Romance, that draws its inspiration from the ageing working-class community of Bolton. It is all illustrated in Aldred's current read The Condition of the Working Classes by Friedrich Engels, a study of the working class of Manchester amidst its Industrial Revolution 150 years ago.

"In conditions which appeal to brutality you either become a brute, or you rebel. And I think a thirst for romance is an act of rebellion in those conditions. For me it is about escaping the confines of the explainable and the mundane and trying to seek something of beauty. It's about hopefully believing something which is worth believing in. It's supposed to be a rock'*'roll statement, which is why the cover of the album is a very determined young man, a very rock'*'roll figure."

It's this determination and hope that we see in the characters of his songs. Aldred says: "There's a great integrity from that section of the community which is incredibly inspiring. These people have been through a war, they've worked in factories, left school at 14 and they're as pure as the driven snow – they still have a sense of romance about it, a very innocent outlook on life."

The song "Alfred the Great" is an ode to such a hero – and is loosely based around his grandfather and parents, while drawing on the poem by the Yorkshire poet Stevie Smith, which Aldred quotes with ease: "I worship and magnify this man of men/ Keeps a wife and six children on three and 10/ Paid weekly in an envelope, yet never has abandoned hope."

Aldred's favourite song on the album, "Mary on the Mend", is a triumph over divorce, alcoholism and illness. "It's about not being bitter in your circumstances and being eternally, hopeful, romantic, and full of a lust for life. All the things I aspire to be and all the things that should be respected in life. It's about giving a bit of romance to a pretty ordinary character."

The present and future may be positive for Cherry Ghost, but Aldred himself struggled for years before reaching this point. After gaining a degree in maths and some teaching experience, he continued playing in unsigned bands, but after five or six years feeling that he was compromising his own ideas amongst the conflicting egos of his fellow band members, he decided to go solo.

"The reason I'd opted away from that for such a long time is that I don't particularly like singer-songwriters. There's a handful that are worthy of note in the last 10 years – Johnny Cash, Cat Power, Bill Callahan, Willie Nelson, Vic Chesnutt, Daniel Johnston."

He took advantage of a six-month sound-recording course, a scheme offered by the dole (the other choice was working at Asda). Once he had secured £200 from the dole office for starting his own venture, and got his own computer, he managed to set up a mini studio in his bedroom at his parents' Bolton home. He began doing demos for bands before starting and sending out his own.

"People started paying more attention to what I was doing by myself than what I was doing in bands. It was a tentative step, but people were interested, like Richard Gottehrer who signed the Ramones in New York and produced Blondie's album. So I thought, alright, I'm not completely off track then."

It was these glimmers of hope that kept Aldred plugging away, despite his lack of independence, and work. He was ready to pack it all in and become an engineer.

"I was never the happiest of kids so it wasn't in my countenance to be a positive person. A bit of attention started coming in at the right time. I'm very fortunate that it happened when it did. If it had happened earlier, I might not have been as equipped to take advantage of it. The music industry is very corporate at the minute: if you don't make a mark in 12 months, gone are the days where you've got three or four albums to make an impression."

He already has five new songs, all in the minor key and which he considers more "atmospheric" and lyrically better than anything he has already put out. With his best songs yet to come, Dragons' Den seems a less likely suggestion than ever before.

'Thirst for Romance' is out now on Heavenly

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Ben's Brother: He named his band after his older sibling

Sitting at a corner table of a London restaurant and looking less like the beta male he professes to be and rather its alpha counterpart – he is broad-shouldered and rugged, his studied dress sense part bohemian, part high fashion – Jamie Hartman frowns silently over his sausage and mash, deep in thought.

"A lot of my songs are about stoicism in the face of insecurity," he decides with an air of solemnity. "I spent much of my twenties living the songs that now make up my first album. It was an eventful and," he considers, "difficult time. Why? Oh, all sorts of reasons. Music was my way of dealing with it all. Am I well adjusted today? Let's just say I'm as well adjusted as any singer-songwriter can ever hope to be..."

Hartman is a 33-year-old who is Ben's Brother, his band-name a wry, deferential nod to the fact that he spent so much of his life living in the shadow of Ben, his older sibling. During their teenage years, Ben was first the shining student, then the prodigious sportsman who might just go on to become a professional cricketer. Ultimately, he turned to advertising, where he now earns a healthy crust as a copywriter in one of London's bigger advertising firms.

"I suppose I did live in his shadow, yes," Hartman says now, "but I never hated him, which was fortunate because I could have ended up very bitter indeed. Our family has always been really close and also big on gallows humour, which means I've been able to laugh most things off."

That said, he still had a barrel-load of insecurity to deal with, which he would ultimately pour not just into his music but also into a manuscript of 300 angst-filled pages.

"Basically, it was a form of self-therapy," he says. "It was never meant to become a book or anything, just an opportunity for me to vent. I showed a few people what I'd written and, yes, Benny was one of them. He had several questions afterwards, that's for sure. But it was good for me to clear the air. I had to do it."

Beta Male Fairytales, his debut album, has allowed him more opportunity for venting, but mercifully this doesn't render the record a miserable 40 minutes of crotchety complaint. Rather, it's an uncommonly lovely thing of ballads full of ache, dashed hopes and cautious optimism, all delivered with the serrated rasp of a young Rod Stewart.

And although he may occasionally seem beaten and dejected (the track "I Am Who I Am" sounds like it was delivered on his knees), Hartman in the flesh doesn't give off the whiff of someone perennially woeful. Instead, he has an aura of quiet confidence about him, as if he has finally found peace: with himself, his brother, and the world at large. "Well, mostly I have," he says, grinning self-mockingly. "But let's not get too carried away. You never know, I could relapse."

Born into a good, middle-class family (his father was a successful lawyer), Hartman first started writing songs on the piano as a teenager. At 18, he went to Leeds University to study English and philosophy – or, as he puts it today, "the art of eloquent bullshit" – then returned to London and spent much of the next decade in and around Portobello Road, where he dated older women – "who smoked and taught me things" – played acoustic guitar in local bars and busked on Saturday afternoons for the tourists.

"I did get a few day jobs along the way," he says. "I worked in a bank for three months but ended up very nearly drinking myself to death, so I got out quick and learned instead to get by on whatever I could."

In his early twenties, he decamped to New York where he spent months living on people's floors and securing free studio-time in exchange for helping to write advertising jingles.

"That can actually be a pretty lucrative career, but I decided I didn't want to make $200,000 a year writing about Dr Pepper," he says. "I just wanted to be a singer. Trouble was, I was never quite good enough, at least not then. When I came back to the UK and heard [Radiohead's] The Bends, I realised that I wouldn't be good enough for several years to come."

Nevertheless, he continued to hone, and develop, his craft, and after much effort began to trade as a songwriter-for-hire. He has now written songs for, among others, Natalie Imbruglia and Lemar, while his austere ballad "All Time Love" for Will Young reached No3 in the charts in 2005.

"Was it satisfying?" he ponders now. "Ultimately, no, I suppose it wasn't, if only because I desperately wanted to be singing the songs myself. But it was a great feeling to have tracks riding high in the charts. And, of course, it gave me a certain position of power where, finally, I could perhaps start making a name for myself."

Last year, he signed a deal with KT Tunstall's label Relentless, assembled a band around him so that he wouldn't feel too alone, and began to create Beta Male Fairytales. The album's most poignant moment comes in "Bad Dream", a beautifully claustrophobic song in which he sings, "I'm having a breakdown... tell me that you'll never leave me." Another relationship gone bad, presumably?

"Actually, no," he corrects. "It's about my mother. A week after I landed my deal, I was in Paris celebrating with friends when I got a call from my brother. The first thing he said to me was, 'Are you sitting down? I've got some bad news.'"

Their mother, he explains haltingly, had been involved in a car accident when two illegal immigrants ploughed a stolen car into hers at 80mph. The steering column pierced her leg, and it took ambulancemen an hour to cut her out of the wreckage. "It brought me back down to earth like you wouldn't believe," he says. "I can't believe she survived it, but she did. She was lucky."

Things since then, however, have started going right for Hartman, at last. He is, he says, happier than he has been for a long time, and though he pines to be in a relationship again if only so he can "remember what being in love feels like", much of his headspace these days is taken up with the spectre of public acceptance, of which he feels a growing concern. But then the man has spent the better part of three decades worrying about something or other. He isn't about to stop now.

"I check my rating on iTunes almost every day," he says, blushing. "Currently, the album is rated four and a half out of five, and I'm happy with that. If it drops below four, I'll be devastated, and it'll make approaching the second album hell." He brightens momentarily. "That said, I've already got the title for it. I'm going to call it The Difficult Second Album because, believe me, it will be."

'Beta Male Fairytales' is out now on Relentless; the single 'Let Me Out' is out on 13 August

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Asobi Seksu "Citrus (Bonus Track Version)"

Asobi Seksu [ Official Site / MySpace ] are part of the contingent of bands who refuse to let shoegazing die. There are enough guitar effects on Citrus to make Kevin Shields proud and enough reverb and echo on the vocals to make Rachel Goswell blush. Asobi Seksu make judicious use of loud-soft dynamics, aren't afraid to disappear into great walls of guitar noise and most importantly, they write very good, adventurous, and memorable pop songs. On song after song they throw hook after hook at the listener, vocal melodies, guitar lines, basslines, atmospheres — everything here is a hook that draws you into the band's cocoon of sound. Singer Yuki has a very malleable voice; one minute she is whispering girlishly, the next she is spreading her wings and coasting on a cloud of guitars. Guitarist James Hanna is very adept at over-dubbing, he turns himself into a swirling, marauding army of guitars that never overwhelms the tunes and always provides perfect accompaniment to the vocals. As the record plays you will think of Moose (especially on "Strawberries" and "Strings") you will think of buzz pop bands like the Primitives ("Thursday," "Goodbye"), maybe some Ride ("Lions and Tigers"), definitely My Bloody Valentine (just about everywhere!). When the record ends you'll think that this is a damn good record by a damn good band, and who cares if you can hear their influences so transparently? There is no shame in keeping a sound alive, especially if you invest it with energy, new ideas, and some soul. It also helps if you bring songs that are as good as those that the originators had. Asobi Seksu have done just that and Citrus is as good a shoegaze record you will ever hear, regardless of release date. [Buy special bonus track version from iTunes here].

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