Today we're spending Seven Questions In Heaven With Chanel Samson!
Describe your music for our readers who may not be familiar with you.
My name's Chanel Samson and I'm a circus freak with some angry yet comical love songs and always a good message. I do strange things like run around town with giant gold hearts for people to pose with and kissing campaigns :D
Who are your musical influences and idols?
Regina Spektor saved me as an adolescent, I can't get enough Gwen Stefani, and Led Zeppelin are musical gods! In terms of political music, Rage Against The Machine is top dog inspiration. I also did a lot of musical theatre growing up and I love '20s jazz. This all feeds into my sound, which I've named "Circus Rock" because it didn't quite fit any other title.
What was the first album, cassette, or CD you bought with your own money?
To bo honest I can't remember. Probably Evanescence :P
What was the strangest gig you've ever played?
La ti da... Depends what you mean by strange. There was a good few where the guy my whole set's about, Matthew, was in the audience and of course I pointed him out. We're still friends.
What is your current favorite guilty pleasure?
CAKE especially carrot cake from Bolt St. Coffee, Liverpool. I've had to make myself stop for a full month because i was getting addicted.
If they named an ice cream flavor after you, what would be the name and why?
Rainbow Jet because it sounds ace and colors make me happy.
Final question: You're the opening act of a music festival. You can get any five artists, living or dead, to perform on the bill with you. Which five do you choose and what song do you all perform as the final jam?
Well I'd have to recount a couple above. No Doubt, Regina Spektor, Led Zeppelin, Queen, Billy Holiday and go out on "I Love Rock N' Roll." Quite a mash up, but I think it would work ;)
LINK | Posted by Chris on Thursday, March 26, 2015
Today we're spending Seven Questions In Heaven with Millie Go Lightly!
Describe your music for our readers who may not be familiar with you.
I think of my music as my dark side. I like to let loose in my lyrics. Good girl gone bad is maybe a bit cliche to say, but it has a sensual, powerful streak, which is a side of my personality that I don't often share with the world so it's fun to get that across lyrically. I also like to write songs which are a bit more sass-queen and tongue in cheek. If I had to describe my music visually, I think Brigitte Bardot in a pair of Jordans sums it up.
Who are your musical influences and idols?
I took a lot of influence from R&B and soul music. As a kid I listened to a lot of classic American soul, The Drifters and The Platters still stand out to me melodically. My mum then bought me 50 Cent's The Massacre when I was 11 (sorry mum!) and then rap became the word! The past few years the light bulb moment for me musically has been Lana Del Rey's Born To Die album. I think her work taught me the importance of tying visuals and themes together along with the music, and also how songs can be a continuum between each other. Fleetwood Mac have also influenced me. I once chased Lindsay Buckingham down a street in London. I can't even front, that was embarrassingly recent.
What was the first album, cassette, or CD you bought with your own money?
The first single I can remember asking my mum for was the Jason Nevins Run DMC remix of "It's Like That." The first album I bought myself was In The Zone, I still listen to it all the time. "Breathe On Me" is killer.
LINK | Posted by Chris on Wednesday, March 18, 2015
On June 1st, 2015, The Darkness will release their fourth studio album, Last Of Our Kind. Last month, they released the album's killer first single, "Barbarian." We had a chance to talk with guitarist Dan Hawkins about the single, album, his new guitar pedal, new drummer, and more.
Let's talk "Barbarian." It's an awesome track, an awesome video. But what made you write about the Viking invasion of East Anglia?
Yeah, that's a good question. Well, it's my brother really. On this album, the riffs came first and then we turned the riffs into songs. It was clearly reminding him of a battle of some sort. We got onto a discussion about Vikings and their appearance in East Anglia back in the day and I think he did a bit more research into it, found the story and was inspired by it and picked it up from there. We got as far lyrically as the bridge before the chorus and we ran out of words so we just put a big scream. Hey, presto! There you go.
It's the first track off of Last Of Our Kind. What can you tell us about the new album?
I'd say it's our heaviest album to date, probably most riff-based album. We have a new drummer who's kind of changed the sound slightly. We took a year out to write this album. We didn't do any gigs and just concentrated on doing something that was an album we were really proud of rather than one that was just made in a certain amount of time and a fit schedule. We went to a remote island off the coast of Ireland and didn't come out until we had an album that was something we were proud of.
You worked as a producer on Hot Cakes, but you are the sole producer on the new album. Was there any added pressure with that title?
Yeah, I guess so. I solely engineered it and produced it and mixed it which is the big thing for me this time. I was so sick of producing the band or other bands and handing it over to someone to do the mix. I read somewhere that Steve Albini said, "You can't call yourself a producer if you have to hand it over to someone to make it sound good in the end." I thought, "Yeah, that's a fucking good point." So I wanted to mix it and be proud of the mixes and I knew it would help my production, which it really has.
It's challenging. It's challenging because you kind of have to not be in the band right up to the point to where you're playing on it and then you have to switch to being in the band. That's the difficult bit, actually playing on it when you're producing it because sometimes your quality control goes out the window.
You mentioned this earlier, but Last Of Our Kind is the first album you recorded with new drummer Emily Dolan Davies. How did you find her and what does she bring to the band?
For whatever reason, we had various problems with our previous drummer. I've had Emily Dolan Davies on the radar for a couple of years, actually. We were thinking about when we move on, if we got another well-known male drummer to replace the last one, swap one middle-aged man out for another, that's not very exciting and that chips away at The Darkness. If we got a young male drummer, it's like we're trying to reduce our age and whatnot. We just someone different and exciting, someone who excited us. Why don't we just have a look and see if there's any female drummers out there? To my knowledge, I couldn't name a female drummer in a male hard rock band. I did have a look on the internet, did a bit of scouring about and there she was. I thought it was a perfect match straightaway. She's done a few bits and bobs, sessiony bits and bobs, but nothing that she would be known for and I just felt that she was at exactly the right moment to join a big rock band. We hit it off straightaway and she's just totally awesome. Our shows over the last week with her have been going really well and people are just blown away by her. Happy days.
You guys did a PledgeMusic campaign for the album and one of the perks was a guitar pedal created by you. What was that like?
Awesome. It's been my dream since a really young age. Any guitarist will tell you they become like Star Wars figures to some people. You rely on them and you end up collecting them and to actually have your own one is just awesome. I'm working with these guys who are hand building these things. I'm tweaking, changing the levels each night, different modes as we go along this tour to try and get it perfect. I'll send it back to them with my options and then start producing them. I just thought it'd be a really cool thing to do.
"Christmas Time (Don't Let the Bells End)" is one of my favorite contemporary Christmas songs. What made you guys write a Christmas song?
I think I woke up one day and realized, "Fuck, I haven't got a pension. Better write a Christmas song." It had been a particularly hard touring year and my liver was about to burst so I thought, "Fuck it, I'm not going to being around forever. Best to write a Christmas song."
Fair enough.
The truth of the matter is I was in a bar having played on a big TV show in the UK. Things were going really well. We'd had a hit with "I Believe." I was just chatting to the head of the level and he was asking me, "What do you want to do next? I suppose, coming into Christmas, we'll release "Love Is Only A Feeling" as a ballad for Christmas." I said, "It's a shame to release a ballad just before Christmas without it being an actual Christmas song. That was the last year before the stupid X Factor fucking came and ruined that for the UK. The race for Number 1 was a brilliant thing that just captured the nation's imagination every single year. Unfortunately, that went out the window when The X Factor started releasing their winner's single before Christmas because it was guaranteed Number 1 and so people stopped making Christmas songs basically. When we released ours, it wasn't like that. It was still a big race to Number 1 and I just thought, "Well, fuck it. Let's just do it for laughs." We had half a Christmas song that we pissed around with for God knows why a few years before. I kind of lied and told the head of the label, "We've got a Christmas song and it could be a Number 1." He's like, "Great, let's do that then." So we had to scramble it together, try and finish writing it which we finished in the back of the tour bus supporting Metallica in Dublin. The rest is history.
Cool. I've got one final question for you. You're in charge of a music festival and you can pick any five artists, dead or alive, to perform on the bill with you. Who do you choose?
We're playing as well, are we?
Yes.
Well, we're on first so we can actually watch the other bands and get drunk and not have to worry about playing. We'll be on first. I'd have Led Zeppelin on early. They'd be on next, the mid-afternoon slot. Not because I don't think they're worthy of headlining but just because I want to take in everything that Jimmy Page is doing. I'd have them and then AC/DC to get things back on track, drinking-wise. I'd have Neil Young on. He'd go on after AC/DC to clear the air. We'll bring The Beatles on for a bit of a singsong and then we'll finish with Queen.
What song do you all perform together for the final jam?
Have you ever seen the footage from the Moscow Peace Festival? It's a total disgrace. All the metal bands of the day, just completely off their heads, doing a big jam at the end. I think it was "Rock And Roll" by Led Zeppelin. It's utterly atrocious. So what would we do? Blimey. It would be quite funny to count everyone in and everyone plays whatever song they want and the result is a horrifying noise. We've done that before. It used to be our sound check thing. I would count everyone in, "1! 2! 3! 4!" And then each individual member of the band would play a different song from the set, but no one plays the same one and no one knows what the other one's going to do. It's a soundman's worst nightmare.
Katrina Leskanich, former lead singer of Katrina & The Waves, is getting ready to start a solo US tour (dates below). First, she spoke with us about "Walking On Sunshine," the tour, her photography book, Hanoi Rocks, and more.
Let's talk about "Walking On Sunshine." It's thirty years old and you still hear it on the radio today. Did you think it would have such staying power?
No, we didn't. When we were first running the song in the early '80s, Kimberley Rew, our guitar player who wrote it, presented it to the group and we though it was pretty lightweight. It wasn't really where we were at, at the time. So it was really curious that he came up with it except I know that he really liked The Supremes and he liked that beat, that "You Can't Hurry Love" beat. It was in the dead of winter, early '80s, February and he rode his bike twenty-seven miles to get to our little homemade studio. Vince the bass player's first thought about it was it was a little irritating. All I could say about it was having lived with it a couple of days, it just kept going through my head, so we thought that was quite hopeful. At the time we were doing a lot of shows on military bases, US Air Force bases and Royal Air Force bases around the UK. We would play the song and we eventually took it out of our set because it was just a dance floor emptier. People didn't really know how to dance to it. We took it out of the set, but we did have a couple of attempts at recording it. When we finally got signed with Capitol Records, they signed up a hotshot new-kid-on-the-block producer named Scott Litt. Scott was kind of a cool guy. He hadn't done a whole lot up to that point. "Walking On Sunshine" was his first hit. After that, he went on to work with R.E.M., Nirvana, Indigo Girls, and a few other very uber-cool bands. Scott had the idea to start the song with the drum introduction, which was really inspired. We went to The Power Station in New York City, which was a studio that was known for a fantastic drum sound. That's where and when we got the track. That was in '84. We had just been signed by Capitol and by '85 we released it and the rest is history.
It's such an iconic song and it's been featured in plenty of television shows and movies like High Fidelity and American Psycho. What's your favorite place where it's popped up? American Psycho. That's pretty cool where Christian Bale is post-murder and he's walking down the corridor and he's got the old headphones on and he's listening to "Walking On Sunshine." When I first saw that movie, I didn't really get it. As I got older and wiser and figured it out, I saw how ironic the moment was. I didn't really get it before.
I suppose it was quite cool, if not a little bit cheesy, when John Travolta is the babysitter and he's dancing with the babies to "Walking On Sunshine." That was nice. Dolly Parton covered the song. She did a very interesting version and changed some of the lyrics. Instead of "don't it feel good," she sang, "and it's time to feel good." I don't know where she looked up her lyrics, but they're not quite right. But she's Dolly Parton and obviously we all love her and she can whatever the hell she pleases.
Tell us about your latest album, Blisland. Blissland is the first album I've recorded in ten years. Last year, I was invited onto a tour called Retro Futura with The Thompson Twins, Howard Jones, Midge Ure, and they all had new material. I thought, "I don't want to join this tour--and it will be the first time I've toured America in twenty years--without some new material." So I didn't know if I would be able to do it, where it would come from, what it would be about, blah blah blah. Picked up the guitar and pretty much had a go and bashed it out. I didn't have a long time to work on it, which is probably a good thing.
The name Blisland is the name of a village in Cornwall, which is in the southwest of England. It's a place I like to go because it's very beautiful, a very spiritual place. Blisland, the little village, is one of the first that you get to when you're entering Cornwall. The little village probably has around 127 people in it, but they also have a lovely little pub with some fabulous ales. It was all just a very good feelgood experience so I thought, "If I ever record another album, I'm gonna call it Blisland."
You're getting ready for a solo US tour. What can fans expect from the shows?
I'm using three badass New Yorkers who have worked with Blondie, Joan Jett And The Blackhearts, John Cale, list goes on. These guys are cool. They've been around awhile. I played with them on Retro Futura and we just clicked. I'm paring it down to just four pieces: drum, bass, guitar, and I'll handle the rhythm guitar. I'm doing a lot of Katrina And The Waves material, some material from Blisland, and I'm doing a few cool covers, stuff that I like. Sometimes it feels like we're living in an ugly world, but it's only because we're constantly bombarded with bad news. News is everywhere. We can be attacked by news and it's all bad. I just think it'd be nice to try and turn it around and look for some joy. So I thought it's a good time to wish "Walking On Sunshine" a happy birthday and remember what it's like to just go out and have some fun.
What inspired you to create Peggy Lee Loves London? Peggy Lee Loves London is a photographic book of all my favorite places in London. I've lived here since 1976 and the tour books don't know about places that someone who's lived here awhile knows about. I'm talking about pubs, clubs, bars, coffee shops, bakeries, parks, all the places I love to go. Peggy Lee is my little toy poodle and she gets in every shot. So if I take a picture in one of my favorite pubs, she's in there. Wrote a little bit about it, little captions, done. Little book. Joyful. Joyful and informative.
One thing I just discovered today was that Hanoi Rocks' "Don't Follow Me." How did that come about and what was it like?
In the early '80s, we were doing the rounds and we played in a club called The Moonlight. One of the guys from the music business we were working with was looking after them. He said, "Come on, you've got to meet these guys." They were so sweet. They were lovely and they said, "Can you come in and sing backup on our record tomorrow?" We'd had this huge night out and we'd all stumbled into the studio the next day. I think I sang on two tracks. We just did it in one take and it was just a really nice experience because they were really sweet. It just happened like that and probably happened as the result of quite a few pints of beer.
Final question: you're in charge of a music festival and you can get any five artists, living or dead, to perform on the bill with you. Who do you choose?
I would choose Mama Cass Elliot. I would choose Karen Carpenter. I would choose Nina Simone. I'm choosing all women, aren't I? Deborah Harry's always invited. I'd probably have The Shangri-Las.
What song do you all perform together for the final jam?
That would be "Top Of The World" by The Carpenters.
North American Tour Dates
March 17 Glen Cove, NY - Page One
March 18 Somerville, MA - Johnny D's
March 19 New York, NY - Iridium
March 20 New York, NY - Iridium
March 21 Londonderry, NH - Tupelo Music Hall
March 22 Hamden, CT - Outer Space Ballroom
March 23 Lancaster, PA - Tellus 360
March 25 Stanhope, NJ - Salt Gastro Pub
March 26 Rochester, NY - The Lovin' Cup
March 27 Buffalo, NY - The Forum
March 28 Hamilton, ON - This Ain't Hollywood
March 29 Toronto, ON - Hugh's Room
April 1 Dayton, OH - Canal Public House
April 2 Chicago, IL - Reggie's Rock Club
April 3 Milwaukee, WI - Shank Hall
April 4 St. Paul, MN - Amsterdam Bar + Hall
It's hard to believe it's been fifteen years since these guys put out new music. This is the first track off their upcoming 4-song EP, Happy New Year. They'll be hitting the road this summer with a very extensive tour with Barenaked Ladies and Men At Work's Colin Hay. We plan on being there!
Check out "Barbarian," the first track off The Darkness's fourth album, Last Of Our Kind, which will be released June 1st, so you'll be able to blast it at the pool this summer.
Culture Brats is intelligent, witty, and insightful commentary on pop culture from the '80s to today. The children of the '80s are reclaiming pop culture!
Today we're spending Seven Questions In Heaven With Chanel Samson!
Katrina Leskanich, former lead singer of Katrina & The Waves, is getting ready to start a solo US tour (dates below). First, she spoke with us about "Walking On Sunshine," the tour, her photography book, Hanoi Rocks, and more.
