Catherine Toal draws on her personal experiences, as well as that of other students here at Leeds, to discuss women’s experiences in higher education and the professional world.
Tharushi Wijesiriwardena interviews Angela Blackburn, Branch Secretary of UNISON University of Leeds, over the staff strike action at the University. Stressing the importance of student support, Blackburn answers a series of critically important questions over this ever-important issue of fair pay.
Owen sits down with Rebecca Harrison, director of Asides from the Elbow to discuss things ranging from SNL, Andrew Scott, to Scotland.
Isabel Ralphs speaks to Left Bank’s Director, Sue Jennings, and Community Projects Coordinator, Loren Turton, about how the pandemic helped them to realise their vision of a creative community space for the Hyde Park area.
As I enter the Zoom call for our interview, I make it no secret to Clem Burke that I am a huge fan. They say it’s best never to meet your idols, but the Blondie drummer is far more jovial than one would expect of someone in the middle of a press junket. He laughs as I stand up in front of my webcam to show him the t-shirt I bought from the band’s 2013 Blast Off Tour. “I like those cartoons,” he says of the drawings of the band members on my front. “They are gruesome, caricatures can be strange.”
Undoubtedly, Burke is best-known for his time with Deebie Harry, Chris Stein, and the other rotating members of the pioneering New Wave band. However, the list of the other stars he’s played with reads like a who’s who of music legends: Bob Dylan, Eurythmics, Iggy Pop, Joan Jett. It’s not hard to see why he was named by Rolling Stone as one of the greatest drummers of all time. “Clem showed up, and he was a real star,” Harry once told the Chicago Tribune. “He could play, and you could tell that it was his life.”
Burke tells me that he is in a very good mood. The previous night he played a private show at The Troubadour, the iconic West Hollywood venue that helped to launch the careers of Linda Ronstadt, Carole King, and the stateside success of Elton John. Since the onset of the you-know-what in 2020, he is grateful for the re-emergence of live music. “It kind of drew a line in the sand to realise how fast time does move because it’s hard to believe that it’s been two years almost,” he says. “But I’m ready, like everyone else, to move on.”
Skipping past the Covid era, his mind casts back to the last time he played in the UK, drumming with Bootleg Blondie (“the only tribute band endorsed by the real Blondie”) as part of an extensive national tour. “It was really, really wonderful,” he grins. “I got to do some songs that we don’t normally do, like deeper cuts, because we have so much new material.” Amusingly, the idea for the tour came when Burke dropped in on a Bootleg Blondie gig at Sutton FC’s football ground. “After a couple of beers, you want to get up and play. I played a couple of songs, there were a couple of hundred people there, and it was really fun!” The tribute band invited Burke to be a special guest at any of their shows next time he was in the UK, but he suggested doing a whole tour. “I was expecting to be playing pub back rooms and then the second gig was the Shepherd’s Bush Empire which was sold out.”
The tour included a stop in Leeds with a show at Brudenell Social Club. I remind Burke of this and tell him that I was in the audience. He is elated. “That is such a wonderful venue as well.” Then, he recounts an “inspiring” pilgrimage he made to The Refrectory to see the space where The Who recorded their seminal album ‘Live at Leeds’. Picturing the drummer of one of the greatest bands of all time pottering around the Student’s Union in search of the canteen is nothing short of fantastic.
But, alas, two years has passed, Blondie’s upcoming tour has been postponed twice, and Burke is itching to get on the road again. “The tour is called ‘Against The Odds’ for several reasons: having any kind of success in the music business is really against the odds and then with being able to actually tour [amid international coronavirus restrictions] is against the odds”
Although, this time, he is looking forward to playing big arena shows again. “At this point in our career, the bigger the better,” he admits. “We have Johnny Marr opening as a special guest; we want to give people value. He’s brilliant, he’s a friend. It’s going to be great.”
What’s more, the magnitude of 2022 for the band doesn’t stop there. The tour precedes the release of the first ever authorised archive project of the groups work, the similarly titled ‘Blondie 1974-1982: Against the Odds’. The collector’s box will include extensive liner notes, track-by-track commentary from the entire band, as well as the band’s entire discography complete with unreleased bonus material. With Blondie’s 50th anniversary fast approaching alongside this archival retrospective, I ask Burke how it feels to look back at such a long and illustrious career that few bands manage to achieve.
“Well, they say – not to flatter myself or Debbie or anyone – if you’re a living legend you’re kind of near the end of your life so I don’t really like to dwell on that too much,” he laughs. “I don’t think we think about time all that much, we think more about health and creativity. And to have a bit of optimism about the world as difficult as that may be.”
Yet, he confesses that the pause that lockdown gave the world made him reflect back on his memories as a musician. “When I get interviewed people once in a while would say that’s a great anecdote. You should think about doing a book,” he claims. “It’s almost a cliché, but I’ve been working on a memoir for some time that’s probably going to come out in 2023.”
“The working title is ‘The Other Side of the Dream: My Life In and Out of Blondie’. It’s about the success and accepting what happens after the success, the ups and downs of that and what still spurs you on creatively. I’m basically living the other side of the dream… anyone who’s [tried to have] success in the rock and roll business, that’s what they wanted. They wanted to be on the radio, be on tour, meet David Bowie. All that stuff happened for me. But what I’m also writing about is the other side of the dream. Taking out the trash, cleaning the cat box and then going and doing a gig. It’s the yin and yang of success.”
But now he’s reached that hallowed ‘other side’, I ask Burke who of the up-and-comers he has his eye on. He mentions Lana del Rey but saves his biggest praise for Måneskin, the Italian rock stars who have seen rapid success since winning last year’s Eurovision Song Contest.
“I like their energy, their glamour. They are taking from what came before and making it new which is kind of what we did with Blondie in a lot of ways. If you have the right influences you can make something different and great based on that. If you’re influenced by Marc Bolan and David Bowie, you are going to make music that I want to hear.”
However, despite the rise of new talent, Burke and the rest of Blondie are not content with simply resting on their laurels. In fact, he mentions that the band still has one goal in particular. “The ultimate gig for a New York band is to headline Madison Square Garden. not that we couldn’t get an audience for that but for one reason or another we’ve never headlined.”
Regardless, Blondie and Burke show no signs of slowing down. Referring back to his memoir, he says that he wants its release to coincide with the band’s new album in 2023. Considering that they already have a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a back catalogue that is the stuff of legend, and enough royalties to ensure a peaceful retirement, their tenacity is admirable.
“We are going to keep going because we are going to do the new record. So, we are going to have to tour again behind the record. It’s not the end yet.”
Blondie will play First Direct Arena in Leeds on 4th May 2022.
Calum Pinches sits down with Leeds Redugee Forum to dicuss the challenges that are facing asylum seekers in the UK.
Whilst at the epicentre of a fruitful UK rap scene, Kojey Radical sits down for a conversation with our writer, Liam Cattermole
Leeds-originated folktronica trio alt-J are set to release their fourth studio album, entitled The Dream, today. Ahead of the release, I spoke to keyboard player and backing vocalist (as well as past Gryphon contributor) Gus Unger-Hamilton to gain an insight into the production of the new album and to look back on his time within the group.
alt-J formed as a quartet in 2007, at which time all members were studying at the University of Leeds. Gus explained, “Joe came to University with the express intention of wanting to start a band. Unbeknownst to us, he was kind of interviewing us in the first few weeks to see if we’d be suitable candidates to be in his band.”. Seemingly, the establishing of alt-J as a band happened pretty quickly after the four initially met, “We met at a party in halls on the first night of freshers’ week, then Joe met Thom and Gwilym on their course doing Fine Art. Joe started making music with Gwilym at first and then he asked me and Thom to get involved too. By the beginning of second year, we were fully up and running as a band.”.
Each alt-J album thus far has seemed very much like separate, respective projects – whilst there are similarities between them all, alt-J are certainly not a group which churns out the same album every few years. The Dream is certainly no exception to this rule. Asked about the musical evolution of the group Gus said, “We like to try keep ourselves interested in the band. I think because we’re all people with quite eclectic taste in music and quite inquisitive natures, we just naturally do end up constantly evolving. Innovation for innovations sake often doesn’t sound that good but I suppose we do talk quite a lot in the studio about trying to offer our fans new things here and there, to try to avoid falling into making a ‘clichéd alt-J song’ which we have, in the past, come close to doing before going ‘hang on, this sounds a bit like we’re repeating ourselves a bit here, how can we make this more interesting?”. There is not an abundance of groups which sound like alt-J, they have a fearlessly original sound. On the topic of influences, then, Gus gave an explanation for the recognisable and original ‘alt-J sound’ saying, “We all had a healthy love of Radiohead which was important, not just for the sound but also the kind of approach they had to making music, which was constant evolution and extreme musicianship, but with a very poppy finish with very good hooks and stuff. I think we’re a product of all of our musical backgrounds; me on the more classical side, Joe on the folky Americana side and Thom on the heavy metal side – I think that all those three things coming together create a sort of magic alt-J potion that you might not have expected to happen.”.
The Dream is the fourth album from alt-J to be released on independent label Infectious Music. Gus spoke about how the trio’s relationship with Infectious was forged, “We had lots of major labels show and interest in us and come to Leeds to meet us, come to our gigs to watch us, come watch us rehearse and stuff and then they all kind of said the same thing which was, ‘We really like you, but we don’t know if it’s gonna sell’. So, in the end we got two offers from indies: Infectious and PIAS, and we went with Infectious.”. Although the label was acquired by BMG around the time of the band’s second album This Is All Yours, Gus explained that the band are still awarded the kind of creative freedom that comes with an independent label, “We were able to take that creative freedom and bring it into a more major label setup which we have now with BMG – BMG is still technically an independent label but Infectious, when we signed to it, was like five people in an office in Soho above Ronnie Scott’s, and now it’s a big office with hundreds of people. We have a licensing deal with Atlantic Warner in America which is a major major label, but they’ve had to accept the terms on which we signed our record deal which was ‘leave us alone, let us do our own thing’, so we’ve been quite lucky in that respect.”.
Aside from the music itself, another thing which fans love about alt-J is the iconography and artwork employed by the group. The artwork for The Dream feels like a new artistic direction for the band in comparison to previous album covers. According to Gus, however, the chosen artwork was not the group’s first choice, “Our first choice was actually a Picasso painting called ‘The Dream’ but it was just gonna be too difficult to use a Picasso painting, we had set ourselves a bit of an impossible task, because you’ve got the Picasso estate, the owner of the painting, the gallery the painting is in – it’s just paperwork. We attempted to do it and pretty much immediately realised it was gonna be, what you might call, a complete fucking nightmare.”. The final cover is credited to artist Joel Wyllie, Gus discussed the process which led the group to this image, saying “We all owned some of his drawings and we asked him to send us some new work and he sent us some drawings, and this was one of them. We just really liked it, it’s quite an ambiguous image, this unspecified semi-human creature engaged in an unspecified activity. I think we liked that about it – it’s open to interpretation, a bit like the music.”.
Speaking of the music, The Dream is perhaps alt-J’s most mature album thus far, and the single ‘Get Better’ stands out amongst the band’s discography as particularly heart-breaking. I asked Gus about the band’s initial reaction when ‘Get Better’ was proposed by lead singer Joe, “Joe played me that song and I had a very emotional response to it. I cried for quite a long time, which had never really happened to me before with any song really – let alone an alt-J song. I think it’s amazing that Joe was able to access these emotional depths without actually experiencing directly what the song is talking about, so that’s the real gift that he has I suppose.”. Mind you, you need not look far on this album for evidence of Joe’s extraordinary song-writing ability. Gus suggested that this ability might be thanks, in part, to the influence of psychedelic drugs, “Joe did have an experience at Uni where he took mushrooms for the first time and had a pretty crazy time, he thinks he experienced ego death. He’s adamant that he came back from that experience and his song writing ability had improved a huge amount. Before that, he was a good songwriter, but he came back from that and started writing really interesting, dark songs – Tesselate is the first song he wrote after that experience.”. Looking at the band’s early work, and particularly the album cover for debut album An Awesome Wave, it would be easy to assume that psychedelics played a large role in the creation of alt-J, but according to Gus “We’ve never really been into psychedelics… we used to smoke weed when we wrote but that’s not something we do anymore because we’re all boring and in our thirties now. I feel like there is a healthy background of mind-expanding drugs but it’s not a big part of our process nowadays.”
An Awesome Wave, the group’s debut album, earned them a Mercury Music Prize in 2012. Their third album Relaxer (2017) was also nominated for the Mercury Prize. It would come as no surprise then if The Dreamwas also to be shortlisted for the award this year. Asked whether the group attaches much importance to these awards and accolades, Gus responded, “We’re extremely proud of the prizes we’ve won. We would love to win the Mercury Prize again; I can’t deny that. It would be incredible, but prizes are a very arbitrary thing and ultimately you can’t really think about it too much. All we can do is do our best in the studio and hope that maybe some accolades will follow but we shall have to see.”.
The Dream is released on the 11th February through Infectious Music/BMG and is available to order from local independent record stores Jumbo Records and Crash Records. The trio will also be returning to their spiritual home of Leeds for a show at the O2 Academy on the 9th May as part of their tour of the UK and Ireland which runs throughout May.
Tasha Johnson interviews a local couple on their history, relationship and what it takes to create a long-lasting marriage.
The Kurds are the largest ethnic minority in Turkey, but have faced persistent violent assaults on their culture, language, and livelihoods since the First World War. Tasha Johnson speaks to Hüseyin Bahur about his experiences living as a Kurd in Turkey.
