- By David J Ham
WE ARE THE RESISTANCE.
PART 1 - “WE SHOULD ALL BE GETTING HIGH FOREVER”.
Amen.
“The strange people are really the ones that interest me. I don't mean, you know, weird people that don't cut their toenails”.
Crispian Mills pulls not a single punch. He means what he says. A rare commodity in today’s world. Plus he has the riffs and the clobber to back it up so take heed. In fact he had so much to say that you’ll be getting a very rare BOGOF deal here so make sure you check back in with Loaded next month.
Kula Shaker are one of those bands that are fully respected by anyone who knows their music, and perhaps more importantly, by those who have played their music and made a name doing so. They held their own in the ultra competitive melting pot of bands that strutted through the ‘90s. Kula Shaker were unique. They fused insightful lyrics with psychedelic rock and Indian spiritual influences, which set them apart from the era's more salty, urban narratives. The use of Sanskrit lyrics alongside traditional Indian instruments, and a transcendental outlook generated a mystical resonance rarely seen in mainstream British society let alone a music scene rumbling along with often snarling cynicism at that time. A cynicism I recall all too clearly as being a bolt-on of that period. People writing off certain bands left right and centre having succumbed to scene propaganda, denying the poetry and the melodies served to them for free on silver platters etched with the glorious names of those that went before. Probably the same people who are more easily indoctrinated by other recent societal ideologies and nod along under the groupthink comfort blanket. It’s a special moment to speak to someone who played a part in soundtracking the best years of your life, so I didn’t take it lightly. It was clear that the fire burns brightly in that band, off stage - and having seen them set Brixton Academy alight during their recent tour - on stage too, and that was reflected in some rousing and spiritually infused speeches during my chat with lead singer and songwriter Crispian Mills as their comeback UK tour alongside the perennially mighty Ocean Colour Scene was in full flow.
Among other things we discuss whether our reality is a fabrication, the view that Gen X might save creativity and whether Knebworth was too early for Oasis. First and foremost, the obvious question to be answered is the one regarding their reunion and especially Jay Darlington rejoining the band having spent a decade in another band you may have heard of - Oasis. Let’s start with Jay’s view of it which Jay himself kindly encapsulated for me:
“Gravity does strange things eh? The whirling planets did something funny and suddenly I was back in the Kula-verse. 'Just like that' as Tommy Cooper might say. Biff Bang Pow n all that jazz!”.
Over to you Crispian:
“After COVID, we all made the decision to really renew our efforts, to go and make lots of lots of records, and to be busy and Jay happened to be available. The whole thing with Liam had ended and it was really good timing. We didn't know whether he would ever come back actually because when we checked in with him when we started making records again, he was on tour in Brazil or something. I mean, he was, he was gone, and it was fine. And when Jay came back, it was like a massive shot in the arm”
We’ve all seen an old signing come back like a new signing and wreck the dynamics, carrying vapours from some other place that contaminate the incumbent air purity. That must have been a fear for the rest of the band? “This band is very much held together with the chemistry, and the magic that we spark off is all about the combination”. I suggest that it helps being a band that are instrumentalists to the core. That seeing a live band on top of their game can transcend industry fuelled opinion which can sometimes border on propaganda. Crispian agrees “I feel that's the same as with Ocean Colour Scene. People aren't stupid. They know what they’re seeing”.
Now that, I can vouch for, wholeheartedly. Their show at Brixton Academy encapsulated this spirit, the tightness of the band musically, their stunning ability as a unit to impeccably reel off a set list of winners. It’s not often you get to a large venue and the place is rammed for the support with bar runs timed to sandwich the performance rather than throughout it, each song being sung with gusto by the audience, especially at a London gig where people generally tend to file in as late as possible. In an age where every emerging band seems to dress like they’ve nipped to the corner shop for some milk and asked for a quid from a stranger along the way, how faith-restoring it was to see a band who care deeply about the whole aesthetic essence of their show, not just the music but their appearance too. Bassist Alonza coming in hard and strong with a sparkling black tasseled shirt and hat of the Gods. I was genuinely blown away by the band from all angles as were clearly everyone around me, including my wingman, ex Happy Mondays guitar slinger and current chief in Blitz Vega.
Even though Kula Shaker still have that chemistry, surely they invariably have disparate influences when they come together now and make a record? Could all get heated?
“Well, the secret to bands like Kula Shaker is that we all learned to play music together. We learned to play as a band together. So this all goes back to when we were kids. I started playing music with Alonza when I was 16, and then met Jay when he was 19, and Paul 17. So it's like with a family, you know, you could just pick up where you left off. And you have the same influences at the core, it was pretty remarkable. I've got to say, when
we connected with Jay again after a long break, it wasn't just musically. We were all simpatico. It was our view of the world and our sense of humour. It was all still in harmony, you know, our general attitude to life, and it was really, really funny
for us to all to come to the same conclusions about things generally. Turns out we were right all along!”.
When Crispian says they were right all along. He means it. More of that later.
Rumour has it that Kula Shaker had some of the strangest fans in the ‘90s due their points of differentiation as touched on above. I wonder if they all survived and still come to gigs in a more portly/ balding fashion, or perhaps the band are acquiring new oddballs?
“No, they're all pretty strange. And I like them like that. I think people who were into the band were already just attracted to sort of slightly left of centre ideas. It wasn't until I played with other musicians and Kula Shaker fans would turn up at gigs, they would say, ‘Wow, you got some really strange fans’. Thank you!”
An alignment between band and fan then.
“I mean, it's this; the strange people are really the ones that interest me. I don't mean, you know, weird people that don't cut their toenails. I just mean that there's something in it, a little bit of a mad glint in their eyes that probably makes them funnier or a little bit more surprising”.
Listening to some of the band’s earlier albums prior to this interview, distinct influences jumped out at me that I perhaps didn’t pick up on with clarity as a teenager first time around. Such as in ‘The Death of Democracy’, I could hear The Kinks, clear as day. I could hear the Who in a few other tracks and a big dose of country too. I wanted to know more about their influences as a band, and if those same influences are present in the creative process now?
“Yeah. Absolutely right. I think we've always aspired towards those classic, timeless moments in music, especially in that seminal period, mid to early ‘70s, because for a band like us, that's where all the myths and magic was made. So you tend to always be umbilically connected to that. But we also like the really obscure stuff that was just kind of too weird for everybody else. You're taking something that's really bizarre, weird and non-commercial, and fighting for a way to be able to share it with a larger popular audience. That's a real thrill. And I think that's what we did with K. We took some pretty crazy shit and we wrapped it up with something that people could really understand, and it worked. And it's only half conscious. There's a certain element…you have to know what you're doing, but you also have to just let it happen by itself. That's the best thing about anything creative and I think that life should be a creative act, not just music or cooking or gardening or whatever it is. Let it happen. The balance between controlling something, crafting something, and letting the magic have a life of its own. But then there's the madness and the genius that often comes from stepping back and letting it then play out in its own magical way. That's what Govinda was about. On one level you have to reconcile opposites for life to become magical. You got to reconcile, you know, control and letting go. You got to do both, and how do you control and let go? Well, you got to start working at it, and that is part of it, by being conscious that there's two aspects to everything that you're doing. It's not even that philosophical. It's just that's just the way life works”.
Seemed to me that Crispian was referencing the muse. The muse that Noel Gallagher speaks about often; that songs fall out of the sky and you have to be ready to catch them and craft them. That if you wait, if you're there and you put the time in, something beautiful can happen.
“Yeah, for sure, I think Noel is right. I think the people who don't believe in the Muse are probably not very good, not very interesting, not very interesting artists. I believe that belief is a thing. I believe that trees have spirits. I believe that rivers have spirits. So it makes perfect sense. You know, there's a whole invisible world that we just, we sense and we experience it, but we can't bang our heads against it like a table. Thank God. Life's more interesting than that. Well, unless you don’t care. With music you get…you get a flash of inspiration, and then you have to craft it. And then you also have to, by crafting that, that flash of an idea, you also have to let more chaos and magic flow through the crafting process as well. You have to work at it, though. There's a scene in Rear Window where James Stewart actually runs through the whole film as a guy in one of the windows in the movie, he's trying to write a song, and he's just got one melody, and at the end of the movie, finally, he's having a party, and he's got his song finished. That's how it is. I love the Leonard Cohen story that you know, he spent two years writing the lyrics for ‘Hallelujah’. Then finally, he had a conversation with Bob Dylan and Bob said he loved that song and Cohen confessed to Bob that it took him two years to write. Then Cohen said ‘I love that song you wrote, ‘I and I’. How long did it take you to write that one?’ and Bob said, ‘15 minutes’. Wow”.
There's a clear strand of karma permeating Crispian’s creative eye. And third eye. As with many things in life, I’m sure many of us have a book or two sitting on the shelf gathering dust because it just isn’t the right time to open it. But some little trip wire in some dark place in the back of your mind will know when that time is and it will flick to ‘on’. Down the road somewhere. Triggered by who knows what. So maybe it's just something to do with a timing we’re not privy to?
“Yeah, the songs often hang around for a long time in various forms, until, you know, lightning strikes, it is the moment, and it's ready.”
Onto the new music. I wanted to know if there are any instrumentals on the new album as there kind of should be if a band know they can flex their muscles instrumentally as well as Kula Shaker can.
“Yeah, there is and I'm really excited about it and this record in general. I enjoyed Natural Magik. It had its challenges. Natural Magik was a record where we really focused on writing short songs, short pop songs. And that was the kind of focus of that discipline. This one, we kind of got the best of both worlds truly coming together”.
Having been lucky enough to have been sent the first single - ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ - it struck me immediately as a very catchy play-it-again-Sam winner, and it was stuck in my head for about four days. It hit bullseye on the second play.
“Ah the ear worm. You know what you have to do for an ear worm? The palette cleanser is ‘Tainted Love’. Just listen to ‘Tainted Love’. You have to listen to the Soft Cell version and it gets rid of it!”.
Marc Almond coming in your ear. Bring on the next earworm! To be more specific on the earworm-ness of it, I put forward that it reminded me of the band’s single ‘Shower Your Love’, because that had that magic that’s been discussed already and is a perfect Kula Shaker pop record. It's got everything, beautiful and melancholic all at once.
“Oh thank you. Well, we recorded that record for K and we had a very upbeat, jingly, jangly version of it, which was very much sort of, you know, borrowing a lot from The Love, from The Lahs and so it had that kind of mood to it, but we felt it was just too sweet. The head of A&R said, ‘I promise you, if you put it on this record, it will sell 150,000 albums’. We said, ‘nah, we're not going to do it’. So we just told them flatly, ‘no’, and it sold over a million. Haha! But we did end up recording it for the second album. We changed the feel, and it had that kind of swing to it and was less chipper, a little bit more melancholy. Somebody played me an AI version of it with John Lennon's voice singing the lyrics, and it just didn't sound that different at all, because I already have a slight John Lennon tone, so it really was a real disappointment. I was super excited. I think maybe I should have had Luther Vandross instead”.
Holding onto the John Lennon vibes, would the long haired lover from Liverpool make it into Crispian’s supergroup?
“You know, they're just never going to be as good as you want them to be. Think about it. You know that group that played at the Rock and Roll circus with Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Mitch Mitchell, John Lennon, it was all right. Chemistry is a magical thing. I have definitely thought about it, you know, Johnny Cash and Ray Manzarek. It's just, it's in your head. I used to have a fantasy group, a funk sort of crowd, a funk group made up of philosophers like Karl Marx and Nietzsche, you know, the Monty Python sketch, where they're all arguing. Like that. But you know, that's as far as I could go really”.
So that’s cleared that up then. Back to the new as yet untitled album, what can you tell us, can we start with the artwork?
“Yeah we’re working with a guy called Sea Sick Sailor, who has gone for a sort of Bollywood movie theme that's going to run through our artwork. We've just started, and it's been fun so far”.
“I think we're gonna be drip dripping the singles out but it's a really weird business now. So much of it is fractured and splintered and the way that people can focus on music is very, very difficult now. So much of it is a weird marketing exercise in terms of how do you find and connect with the people who will actually like this. It's like the way through a
lost city. And so I think it's going to take six to nine months”.
It felt like we were only just getting going and Crispian had a couple of gears to slip through, and boy did he, taking society on full speed and demanding that I become a “f*cking Jedi, a weapon”.
See you for Part 2.
PS: I implore you to see them live, album tour dates TBA, download the singles and the album and FIGHT THE POWER.