One of the more surprising turnouts from the New Order burnout is the arrival of Bad Lieutenant, formed in 2007 by Bernard Sumner with longtime New Order guitarist Phil Cunningham and new gun Jake Evans. Even more surprising the quality and consistency of the bands debut album Never Cry Another Tear, released in October 2009, in which Webcuts, initially skeptical at the first fruits from the fallout of one of their favourite bands, confidentally admitted that “despite any misgivings, there are more highlights than expected”.

Second single “Twist of Fate” is due for worldwide release on the bands own imprint Triple Echo on March 22nd. The single sees the band doing what they do best – “21st century guitar music, blending catchy guitar hooks, and pounding bass sitting perfectly with Bernard Sumner’s familiar effortless vocal style”. Sumner is simply carrying on the musical legacy that began with Joy Division in the late 70’s, with New Order through the next three decades and into the future with Bad Lieutenant. There’s a familiarity in his voice, but a support base in the talented voice of Evans and in the hands of Cunningham and Steven Morris that take Bad Lieutenant to places New Order had yet to explore.

After a string of exclusive live dates last year and guest support shows with the Pet Shop Boys the band will be playing the following UK dates.

15th March – Sheffield Leadmill
16 March – Glasgow Garage
18th March – London Electric Ballroom
20th March – Preston 53 Degrees
21st March – Liverpool Masque

My first impression of Merrill Garbus, the brains (or bird-brains if you’ll excuse the obvious joke) of Tune-Yards, is that of a Daniel Johnston-type: ultra creative with a lack of shiny production or, at times, easy melodies, but with a sharp ear for construction.  The spots where her music gets most aggravating is usually where it’s most impressive, and where it seems like she’s laid out every shrill note exactly where she wants it.  These lines between chaos and quality, audible doodling and legitimate art, however, are rarely blunt.

Still, this isn’t just a self-gratifying vanity album filled with harsh avant-garde nonsense.  It bookends a more conventional sound, a ukulele and Garbus’s deep murmur, with hints of what’s to come in sampled yelps, distortion and moderate dissonant accompaniment.  The most straight-forward of these is the third track, “Lions”, which feels like a dark lullaby on a rainy night.  We can hear the rich, R&B strains in Garbus’s vocals, and the fleeting folk influences before the end of the song when the chorus becomes disjointed with the concomitant ukulele and the whole track gently fades out.

The rest of the album is peppered with touches of Afro-pop and world sounds, R&B and general experimentation.  Songs like “Hatari” and “Jamaican” offer little in the way of commonplace song ornaments, often breaking down the slim threads of musicality with M.I.A.-like outbursts and chants as well as warped sound effects and lo-fi electronic buzzing.  It’s fascinating for a while, as each song feels like it was stitched together like a quilt, but the lack of a congruity throughout the album is tiring.

It’s an unfortunate stalemate for those who appreciate good artistry but don’t have an ear for such a cacophonous sound.  I could easily see this album being one of the top records of the year that you never wanted to hear again; it almost has to be taken in small doses, dissected and studied like a science experiment, and slowly adopted into one’s listening oeuvre.

The real difference with the afore-mentioned Johnston sound and Tune-Yards is context.  Johnston did what he did during a time when do-it-yourself music was impractical and rare, and the only viral exposure came through local shows, word of mouth and (if you were lucky) media outlets like MTV.  His brand of offbeat brilliance brought about a cult of followers, not just because it was amazing but because it was so odd.  This same oddness is almost yawned at now, flip some quirky tracks in your basement and put it on your MySpace and eventually someone will hear it, no big deal.  What does unite Garbus and Johnston is intimacy.  It’s a trait unable to be faked that won’t diminish over time, no matter what technology becomes widely available.  That’s what will inevitably bring me back to Tune-Yards.

Perhaps in another hundred years Luke Haines will receive the recognition he’s craved/deserved/spurned outside of the dozen or so hacks and fans who‘ll praise a man who‘s rarely put a foot wrong; even when he broke both legs to avoid climbing the stage to perform for us. His one-time chance at the top with The Auteurs was short-lived, but the Haines name stuck throughout the 90’s and 00’s like a burr on pop music‘s back, with it being attached to his own solo work, side-projects and a film soundtrack. His ire and love of England undiminished.

Having released a comprehensive collection of rare/unavailable tracks from his varied career in Luke Haines is Dead, Haines’ resurrection in 2006 with Off My Rocker at the Art School Bop came a little too soon for this modern day Lazarus. Incredibly, 21st Century Man is his fifteenth album (counting Auteurs, Black Box Recorder, etc) and finds Haines at his most potent and memorable, like a commentator glancing back at the 20th century, stringing together disparate cultural ‘icons’ like Peter Hammill and Klaus Kinski, tongue firmly placed in cheek. In some ways it feels like it’s his most quintessential album. A man looking back over his own career, realising what worked, what didn’t and harnessing it.

“It’s the same old story we’ve heard before”, Haines begins, topically self-aware and never one to stray outside his comfort zone with the Satanists that lurk in “Suburban Mourning” and his recurrent themes of death and dying grimly given, yet cheerfully delivered. From “Peter Hammill” of Prog rockers Van Der Graaf Generator to “Klaus Kinski” (which manages to rhyme “lucky” with “fuck me”), Haines is still hot for the Glam Rock revival, culminating with the glitter band “Rock and Roll Part 2“ moon stomp of “Wot A Rotter“. The soft strummed “Love Letter To London” is Haine’s own “Waterloo Sunset” castigating those “who used you like a playground when they were young” and then fled to the suburbs to have children.

Stylistically 21st Century Man does feel like a quick whip-round the Haines back catalogue, with the Baader Meinhoff beats of “Our Man In Buenos Aires” making light of a miss-reported rumour that he’d departed England for another kind of paradise. As always, Haines saves the best, and most poignant moment till last with the epic autobiographical title track that farewells the 20th Century while namechecking the Rolling Stones and T-Rex. It’s a testament to Haine’s cultural recollection, the forgotten heroes of the past, and his self-effacing nature,  “I was all over the 90’s/I was all over in the 90’s”. It’s not all over yet.

With her love of all things from the past, and her embracing of technology (blogs and Twitter) she is, as she sang on the first Dresden Dolls album, the Girl Anachronism. She has branched out on her own with her solo record Who Killed Amanda Palmer?, and has met her match in author (and soon to be Mr Palmer) Neil Gaiman. Now the brunette bombshell is in Australia, where she has already engaged in some impromptu yoga sessions and “ninja gigs” and marched alongside Angie Hart and Missy Higgins in the Melbourne street rally to protect live music. Here for live shows until mid-March, her next project will be to release the concept record Evelyn Evelyn, made with her musical soul mate Jason Webley, about a pair of conjoined twins. Their intriguing back story stirred up a storm of controversy. The Amanda Palmer adventure continues. She spoke to Sally Browne.

Where are you right now and what’s the vibe like?

I’m in Melbourne right now and it’s beautiful. I’m lucky enough to be staying with friends of my fiancé, and my fiancé has all these great book-world people all over the globe that he hooks me up with, so I wind up staying in these incredible houses. In Melbourne I’m staying with this fantastic couple who are renaissance book-world people. They happen to have a granny flat that I’ve commandeered. And it even came with a cat. I have my own cat for a week. Fantastic.

How are Neil Gaiman friends and fans different from Amanda Palmer friends and fans?

You could write a book on that, I think. Most Neil Gaiman fans are really psyched for our relationship and like me, and a lot them have checked out my music and really dug it. There’s a small faction of his fans who actively want to hate me so I’ve had to fend them off with sticks. (Laughs) But mostly it’s been a really good crossover. It is interesting, though, when you have two fan bases, it’s kind of like getting married when you’ve got two big families. You pray everybody gets along and this crazy uncle doesn’t beat up that crazy uncle and everything can stay moderately peaceful.

Did you always expect to get married someday?

No. (Laughs) Not even close. I did not.

So what happened? He transformed you? Is that possible?

He convinced me. Which I suppose you could say he transformed me. I’ve just never been in a relationship that made so much sense where I felt so comfortable. I come from a whole network of divorced parents, and I had a rule for most of my adulthood that marriage was… I wouldn’t go out of my way not to do it, but certainly wouldn’t go out of my way to do it, and my theory was if I found someone that I thought I wanted to shack up with, I would need to test it out for eight or ten years, and at that point, if I still wanted to get married I would do it.

So when did you know ‘this is the guy for me’?

That’s a good question. There certainly wasn’t some turning moment where I said, “Oh Jesus, this is it”. Our relationship grew really gradually and beautifully. It was very organic. When we first met each other we weren’t even really that attracted to each other. And I think over prolonged exposure to each other’s minds and personalities, that’s where things really started to happen and I think that’s the stuff that lasts. When you really fall in love with somebody holistically and it’s not just some really sparky, fiery passion where you see them and your jaw drops to the floor and you go, “Oh – my – god – I – have – to – have – sex – with – you – now.”

We were sort of both entangled in other relationships when we met and we weren’t really thinking in that direction. It was through working with each other and really observing the other and saying “Wow, this person totally understands where I’m coming from”, and we do, we have a really fantastic ongoing conversation with each other about just about everything. We find it really difficult to fight and argue, and when we disagree about things it can get slightly ugly, but it usually doesn’t get very ugly, and we communicate well and we just take really good care of each other. And I’ve found that really hard. My lifestyle is strange. So is his. It can be really hard to find someone to fit in with this sort of life and not feel like they’re being excluded or threatened by it. I consider myself really lucky that I found him.

Tell us about your adventures at the Golden Globes (where she was Gaiman’s date for Coraline). What was going through your mind?

I had a couple of outfit choices, so I decided to bring both. I basically kept dress No. 2 in my ukulele case, which I was toting around with me, just in case I needed it. And I was wearing this really see-through dress for the red carpet walk at the beginning. And then I swapped it out for a much more conservative black coat dress that I wore to the after party, and on the way out of that after party, Neil and I got snagged by the photographers who asked if I would put the see-through dress back on. And I obliged them, and I got changed right on the red carpet, which I thought would be funny. And so, that was my adventure at the Golden Globes.

The event itself is pretty surreal. It’s one of those worlds that you enter where you just go, “Oh my God, there’s all this stuff happening here and I have no idea who these people are and I have no idea what’s going on,” but if you’re fascinated by people in general it’s a really incredible thing to watch. The cultural anthropologist in me gets really excited when I go to things like that, and I get to be a fly on the wall.

So does Amanda Palmer ever get nervous?

Sure. I probably get nervous in different sorts of situations. I’m nervous right now, my last blog about my upcoming Evelyn Evelyn album was really incendiary and pissed a handful of people off. The record is a concept record about these conjoined twin sisters that my friend Jason Webley and I discovered on MySpace, and their record is coming out next month, and I posted a blog about some of their back story, which involved some very unsettling and dark elements. Some people found it really disturbing and really offensive, and there’s a faction of disabled people who find the fact that their conjoined and putting out this record possibly really tasteless. So I’ve been trying to come up with a way of explaining the project and explaining myself that doesn’t cause an ever greater shit storm. Things like that.

I wouldn’t say nervous is the right word, but, when I deal with things like that, it’s so important to me to let people know where I’m coming from and as my blog grows and my fame grows, and stuff like that, I get really upset at the idea that people read the wrong things into my actions. The Golden Globes I kind of had to deal with the same thing, a bunch of people coming at me with fiery pitchforks calling me an attention whore. It’s like, well, if you really knew me and you knew my career and you knew my general life philosophy and my MO, if you knew all that and you were still saying this, then my guess is you’re looking into a mirror right now. (Laughs)

I want to ask you a few random questions while I’ve got you. One of them is can you remember a recent or standout dream?

I had a dream last night that was totally bizarre. I dreamt that I wandered accidentally into a hotel room where some ancient dance legend, like Anna Pavlova, was before she died or something, she was like 80, and she was really fiery, and she was giving a private dance lesson to two young dance students, but she was giving the lesson by strapping herself to a reclined armchair wearing like a Neil Armstrong astronaut space walking suit, and she was strapped to the chair and explaining gravity to the dance students, in this really humorous way wearing this ridiculous outfit and they were just loving it. And that was my dream from this morning actually. I don’t know what happened after that.

Can you interpret it?

Probably. I think it may have something to do with the current constriction I’m having due to the Evelyn Evelyn controversy, the fact that I need to get out there and do my weightless moonwalk before I get it going again.

What’s on your bedside table?

Right now my bedside table consists of a glass of water and my iPhone and a book by Richard Dawkins that I picked up in Sydney and am currently working on. It’s a collection of modern science writing. It’s really beautiful.

Do you come down on one side of the God debate?

(Laughs) I think God is very, very relative. I think human beings talking about God is hilarious. But then again, that’s pretty much how I approach everything. I think if you look too hard for answers then you wind up wasting your life (Laughs)

Australian and NZ tour dates:

The Garden of Unearthly Delights, Adelaide Fringe, Spiegeltent, March 4
Sydney Opera House, March 7
A&I Hall, Bangalow (Byron Bay), March 8
The Zoo, Brisbane, March 10
Bodega, Wellington, March 12
Al’s Bar, Christchurch, March 16
Kings Arms Tavern, Auckland, March 17

2009 will be looked upon by many as a strange and wonderful, confusing and bewildering, but ultimately a sad and tearful year. Yon writer feeling the weight of many a loss, but none as saddening and as that of the passing of Rowland S. Howard to liver cancer on December 30. Forever known as Nick Cave’s red right hand in the Birthday Party, Rowland was the purveyor of that skeletal, metallic guitar sound that along with the bass growl of Tracey Pew, defined the band. Not to forget as also the songwriter of one of Australia’s greatest recordings, “Shiver” that thirty years after being recorded still transfixes.

Throughout the 80’s and 90’s Rowland kept recording, be it with Crime & The City Solution, as These Immortal Souls, or partnering with the eccentric Nikki Sudden and the provocative Lydia Lunch to name but a few. Speaking to Static’s Chris Berkley, only a few weeks before his passing, Rowland S. Howard recounts his extensive career and his brief return the music, with his second solo album Pop Crimes. As the interview begins, I shall pre-echo the words here. It was a great pleasure and a privilege. Farewell Rowland.

A great pleasure and a privilege to welcome in Mister Rowland S. Howard. You doing alright?

Absolutely.

It’s been a period of busy activity. Does it feel like you’re awaking after a dormant sleep, running around and selling yourself again?

(laughs) A period of hibernation. Well, it’s nice to be doing something again. Nice to have a new record to promote.

You started this year playing the ATP festival, you’re seeing the year out by doing Homebake, so it’s been a year book-ended by big festivals. Did you have to be coaxed into doing those kinds of shows?

Absolutely.

How did you find ATP? You would’ve been among good folk, it couldn’t have been too hard an experience.

No, it was remarkably enjoyable. The audience’s were very kind and as you said, there were a lot of really good bands. I just hate playing outside, I hate playing in the daytime. I hate festivals.

None of that is conducive to your shtick is it?

No. It’s sort of the antithesis of what I do.

You didn’t suddenly have to write songs to play at ATP because the stuff from Pop Crimes had been kicking around for a while, right?

Only a couple of songs, but most of it was written specifically for the album. I think we did a couple of songs from the record at ATP.

Are you usually more keen to go into the studio then, or does it take someone like your producer, Lindsey (Gravina) to take your songs in and put them down?

It was just a case of nobody was offering me enough money to make a proper record. People would contact me and want me to go in and make a record in a day and a half. At this stage in my career I’m really not interested in the limitations that imposes upon you. I’m always interested in going into the studio but it has to be under the right circumstance. I’m not going to go in and just do anything.

I guess you’ve been there, done that as well. Is it good to have that support group like Lindsey, people that are helping you then once you’re in the studio to get the best out of yourself.

Oh yeah, Lindsey’s great and he’s one of the few people in the music industry who will go that extra mile for you and work for nothing to make sure the record’s finished, and I’m not saying he does that for everyone, but he does it for me and he makes great sounding records.

It seems throughout your career you’ve had a lot of collaborations and they’ve been your lifeblood, be it Lydia Lunch, Nikki Sudden or anyone. Is it good to have people to bounce off when you’re making a record?

Yeah, but a lot of that was also born of the fact that I just didn’t have the confidence to do my own songs myself, so it was easier for me to hide behind somebody else. Working with other people they often bring the most extraordinary things to songs you have written and make them so much greater than what you had thought they were.

It’s sort of a tradition that’s continued for Pop Crimes, you’ve done this song with Jonnine from HTRK and you had produced their album a few years ago. It’s this relationship that’s given you a Nancy and Lee type duet on the album. Was it great to have someone of her age and eagerness to do a song with?

Yeah, and I think HTRK are a fantastic band and I think Jonnine is a really great lyricist and singer and I knew we had that same sensibilities in what we found appealing and that we could conjure up a certain playfulness that would be fun.

Are those kindred spirits few and far between for you? You must get a lot of people coming slavishly to you but may not have the best interests at heart.

I don’t hang out with a lot of musicians. Just because somebody else plays music it doesn’t mean I’ve got anything in common with them. Most of the inspiration for what I do comes from other sources, other than music. Whereas most people just reference rock music, so it can only progress so far.

That said, you do hang out with a lot of musicians’ songs. Cover versions have always been your penchance and I’ve very pleased to see that you’ve done Talk Talk’s “Life’s What You Make It” on Pop Crimes and I’ve never realised what a bleak song that was until you did it, Rowland (laughs). Is that something you find exciting, inhabiting someone else’s song?

I like taking somebody else’s song and showing that there’s another side to it, despite that it’s written, in the case of “White Wedding”, Billy Idol has no credibility whatsoever. It doesn’t mean the song isn’t a good song.

Well you’ve twisted the knife completely with it, Rowland, channelled through you. But it’s a beautiful song nonetheless, right?

I just always thought that you could approach it like something from Fun House.

It’s great to have Pop Crimes under your belt and you have been making this new music, when you’re still doing that, going into the studio, and releasing new stuff, do you find it frustrating when people only want to pick over your past? Does that happen to you a lot?

Yeah. It happens. In these interviews that I’ve been doing, there’s a general lack of awareness that things that I’ve done.

It’s a very selective kind of awareness, people might only want to ask you about Boys Next Door yet they might not have heard any Crime and the City Solution albums.

Well, exactly. After the Birthday Party, there’s a big gap in most people’s minds to what I was doing and I understand why people want to talk to me about the Birthday Party, and if I met Ron Asheton while he was still alive, I’d want to talk to him about The Stooges, than Destroy All Monsters or whatever.

It is that albatross, but it’s something that seems to weigh heavier on other people or some people, doesn‘t it?

Yeah, I think because I’m not really a careerist. I’m not somebody who does this for fame. I occupy a grey area in a lot of people’s minds, and also you have to be fairly definitive in what you do for most people to, and I don’t mean this in a condescending way, for people to get what you’re doing. If there’s too much ambiguity or subtlety, a lot of people don’t really understand. Most people don’t really want to spend any time thinking about music, they just want to listen to it and that’s fine.

It’s not like you turned your back on it completely, you performed “Shivers” at ATP. So is that a given as well? Do you feel like you have to perform that song when you play live?

No, I very rarely do it, and in fact it’s interesting because people don’t yell out for it anymore because my audience is completely different than it used to be and people, because they’re young, they don’t have the same historical associations with that song that a lot of older people do. Which is fine by me, because it’s a very, very old song for me.

First broadcast on Static on 10/12/09. Static can be heard on Sydney’s 2SER (107.3 FM) and via the Internet (www.2ser.com) every Thursday evening (AEST).

Webcuts are very excited (literally, this is about as pumped you’ll see us. ever) to announce that sultry pop swingers She & Him will be playing shows across the UK and Europe for the very first time this Spring. The live shows will feature a seven-piece band including She (Zooey Deschanel) and Him (M Ward), performing songs from their gorgeous forthcoming LP, Volume Two (April 5th), as well as their debut, Volume One.

The tour, which kicks off in Madrid on 26th April, passes through mainland Europe and Scandinavia before finishing up with two UK shows – London’s Koko on the 7th of May and a performance at ATP (curated by Matt Groening) on the 8th. She & Him will also perform at this year’s SXSW, Coachella and Bonnaroo Festivals in the US.

Webcuts will be down the front to capture the London show for posterity and perhaps even (blush), get to speak with the paragon of beauty and take-home-to-meet-your-mother-ness that is Zooey Deschanel. Matt Ward, you’re a handsome fella, but you’re just not my type.

UK and European live dates are as follows:

26/04/10 Spain: Madrid – Joy Eslava
27/04/10 Spain: Barcelona – Apolo
29/04/10 France: Paris – Café de la Danse
30/04/10 Germany: Berlin – Lido
01/05/10 Denmark: Copenhagen – Vega (Jnr)
03/05/10 Sweden: Stockholm – Kagelbanan
04/05/10 Norway: Oslo – Cosmotpolite
06/05/10 Holland: Amsterdam – Melkweg
07/05/10 UK: London – Koko
08/05/10 UK: Minehead – ATP Festival

“In The Sun”, the first single from Volume Two (featuring guest vocals from Tilly and the Wall) will be released digitally on March 29th, along with a cover of the Beach Boys’ “I Can Hear Music”. A limited edition 7” will be released exclusively through independent record shops in a special edition Volume Two artworked tote bag, as part of Record Store day on April 17th.

Track list is as follows:
A – In The Sun
B – I Can Hear Music (Beach Boys cover)