Lol Tolhurst x Budgie | Curious Creatures
The three-way ‘Los Angeles’ collaborative long-player was born out of a curiosity which just wouldn’t die. Made up of two of the most illustrious and inventive drummers of the post-punk era, The Cure’s Lol Tolhurst, and Budgie from Siouxsie & The Banshees and The Creatures, along with stellar producer and multi-instrumentalist Garret ‘Jacknife’ Lee, this unlikely alt-supergroup have spent the last four years spiriting up one of the most extraordinary albums to appear in 2023.
Perusing the tracklist, with its guest credits for, amongst others, LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, Bobby Gillespie, Civil Rights avant-gardist Lonnie Holley, Starcrawler wildchild Arrow de Wilde and The Edge from U2, you may rightly wonder just what the 13-track long-player holds in store.
The answer: a hard-hitting and compulsively exploratory 55-minute electronic headfuck, founded on unrivalled rhythmic expertise, fleshed out with an armoury of synths, guitars (Jacknife’s forté) and supplementary percussion (think: wooden teeth!), often overlaid with elite-class strings and brass, then universally twisted, manipulated and quite masterfully sculpted by Lee, with his super-producer’s hat on.
As per the title, ‘Los Angeles’ is a journey into the dark heart of contemporary LaLaLand, the city of its birth, a place of limitless possibility, yet also a diseased and consumptive hell-on-earth which, to quote Murphy’s lyric on the title track, “eats its children”, where pipe dreams shatter, racial inequality prevails and homelessness spirals.
Throw in the terrifying uncertainty occasioned by the global pandemic, which both interrupted and ultimately aided its genesis, and the ‘new Cold War’ terror that has ensued, and you get a record fuelled by fear and tension, but whose propulsive beats, mind-warpingly mangled instrumentation and exceptional vocal contributions provide release through the palpable joy of their creation. Far-sighted and visionary, it lands just in time for those Album of the Year polls…
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Square one for ‘Los Angeles’ was December 2018, when Budgie was passing through LA in esteemed singer-songwriter John Grant’s touring ensemble, and a friend of Lol Tolhurst’s had lined up an interview with him. Budgie and Tolhurst’s paths had crossed many times over the years, not least because The Cure’s Robert Smith gamely substituted for a succession of departing Banshees guitarists in the ’80s.
“I said, ‘Oh good, let’s all meet for lunch!’,” recalls Tolhurst, “and it ended up being me, my mate Joe, Budgie, and [Bauhaus sticksman] Kevin Haskins.”
“I was in tour bus mood,” adds Budgie, “so it was any excuse to escape the travelling circus. We’re all sitting in this downtown diner, with police on horseback outside, then as we’re finishing Lol turns to me and says, ‘I think we should do something together.’ With these things, I usually go away and forget, but for once in my life I said to myself, ‘Yeah good idea!’”
After leaving The Cure in 1989, Tolhurst “found love”, married and in ’94 settled in LA, where amongst other ventures he’s become the author of two books (his ‘Cured’ memoir, and ‘Goth: A History’). Budgie almost moved to the City of Angels in the mid-’00s, after the Banshees and then The Creatures expired. “I even had business cards printed,” he reveals with a rueful chuckle, “with Wilshire Blvd, Suite 35762 or whatever on them, but it didn't come off. Every time I got to LA something brought me back, until eventually I fell in love, moved to Berlin, and family happened.”
When the pair reconvened in early ’19 to make music, says Tolhurst, they first drove to his friend’s house up the coast in Morro Bay, taking “a whole bunch of stuff to make some noise and see what happens, and go hiking where the Chumash Indians had their grounds”. After a week there, they came back to take up an offer from Mötley Crüe tub-thumper Tommy Lee, no less (“all drummers are friends,” Tolhurst notes) to use his studio for a week. They mixed some tracks, and even got in some vocalists, in an effort, says Budgie, “to build this thing up into what we knew we did, but it just wasn’t sounding right”.
Adds Tolhurst, “It didn’t work because we were falling into that trap of trying to paint ourselves as we once were, and that doesn’t do anybody any good”. In what he describes as “a pit of despondency”, he went up to visit Garret Lee at his place in Topanga Canyon, armed with those tapes, for some blue-sky advice. This turned out to be, in true post-punk fashion: “rip it up and start again”.
“Starting with a blank slate is easy,” advises Lee, who is ten years their junior, but whose enviable CV includes Taylor Swift’s ‘Red’, U2’s ‘How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb’ and the final two REM albums as well as a mid-’90s apprenticeship playing guitar with Irish punks Compulsion. “Fixing problems is more difficult. Once you’re starting from nothing, you can do anything.”
Budgie also knew Lee, who’d approached him about making “a drum record” in 2010-11, and when he checked Jacknife’s website, it seemed auspicious that its homepage features just a drumkit, with various beats sounding out – “like, this guy knows what drums should sound like,” grins Budgie. Opines Lee himself, “I'm of the James Brown mentality, that everyone is a drummer, and all music is drums.”
When Budgie returned to California between commitments with John Grant, the three kindred spirits first repaired to Yosemite for a bonding weekend, and thereafter recorded in Topanga for two weeks, with Lee cannily straddling the roles of musician and mentor-cum-producer. They’d drink coffee, play records, banter a lot, go for walks, share experiences, and out of all that came, this time, some inspirational music.
“Conversation in the studio is vital,” Jacknife explains. “I never think of recording and talking as different processes. It's all the same. The record gets formed in the conversation, it sets the tone, and bit by bit you migrate into recording, but still chatting, trying things out… It's all a dialogue.
“One time, we were talking about Lol being in Chile,” he goes on, “and he was playing field recordings he made of some birds there, and that became the base of the song. Then, we were talking about standing on the top of pyramids, which led to a psychedelic record I've got from Uruguay. We put that on, then somebody is playing drums, we've got some loops going, we've got the birds singing. That way, music just happens. You’re switching off all the over-thinking, second-guessing, and ‘what should we be doing’, and getting back into the thrill of discovery and enjoying each other’s company, which is what musicians lose, I think, over time.”
“It’s like there’s this language you develop,” nods Budgie, “and the challenge every time is that you have to reinvent that language.”
“We were presenting ourselves as us, as we are now,” concludes Tolhurst. “People will know that it’s Budgie and I doing this, but it’s also so different that comparisons, as odious as they are, won’t even arise”.
A very special group chemistry emerged during those intensely creative sessions in what Tolhurst calls “Garret’s Aladdin’s cave of alchemy”. Reveals Budgie, “Lol is very levelling. He calls himself a pragmatist, whereas I’m very impetuous, and it was like Garret was bridging the two, in his consultation room”.
The other instrumentation came naturally. Back in his Cure days, Tolhurst switched from drums to keyboards circa ’83, and Budgie, too, was grappling with early synths through that era, especially alongside Siouxsie Sioux in The Creatures, so it was only natural that ‘Los Angeles’ would be brimming with synths. For Lee, with two elite drummers aboard, it was an opportunity to break from the grid-locked inflexibility of contemporary electronica and return to the swinging grooves of techno pioneers like Kraftwerk, and particularly turn-of-the-’80s duo Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft, aka DAF, whose instrumentalist Robert Görl hammered out their beats live, on a real drumkit.
“To me,” Jacknife maintains, “those are the best electronic records, and of course both The Cure and the Banshees were early proponents of mixing electronics with real drums. In the last few years, electronic music got very straight and formularized. It lacks groove and doesn't have that spontaneity, because it’s trapped within a strict framework of time. It's too quantized.”
As the record evolved, there would be instrumental contributions from noted guitarists, including The Edge and Idles’ Mark Bowen, but the rest were handled by Lee, and often digitally distorted beyond all recognition. Further visitors to Lee’s Topanga hideout were master orchestrator Davide Rossi (Goldfrapp, Coldplay) and brass specialist Jordan Katz (Father John Misty, Ghostface Killah), whose taut arrangements were similarly manipulated, and even run at half speed, for maximum disorientation and weirdness – a sense deepened by the beats on any given track often firing out from several different-sounding kits.
Come March 2020, they were fairly certain they were done recording. “We were quite prepared for it to be an instrumental album, which was the original intention,” says Budgie. “We were getting really excited by these ten-minute tracks that Garret was mixing.”
Outside of their little Topanga dreamworld, however, an imponderably harsh reality was fomenting in a chemical lab in Wuhan, China.
“The whole world was suddenly going into the pandemic,” Tolhurst recalls, “and we had to get Budgie to the airport, and home to Berlin. It was like, ‘You can’t leave if you don’t fly today, otherwise you’ll have to stay here until the world opens up again’”.
“It was March 12 when I got out,” says Budgie, “and LAX was empty”.
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In the surreal weeks that followed, Lol, Budgie and Garret were “talking backwards and forwards,” says Tolhurst, “like, ‘What do we do with this now?’ All this material was just sitting there, and it was going to take time to organise, edit and make sense of it.”
Amid all the catastrophic tragedy which COVID-19 wrought upon the world, its arrival at this point in the genesis of ‘Los Angeles’ proved to be somewhat serendipitous. While they still viewed their creation as an album of instrumentals, Lol had taken the step of contacting post-punk superfan James Murphy with a vague idea of him voicing on one or more of the tracks, and in those first fallow weeks of isolation Lol put feelers out to a few other friends and admirers, to see if they might also be interested.
“Maybe at that early stage in the narrative of the pandemic, some of them were properly shut down but a few of them didn’t get back,” says Garret, “so we sent more out. We probably ended up over-sending songs to people, because as time passed, they all started to come in, as everybody was sat at home with nothing to do. That’s when the shape of the record changed, and I'm very grateful that it did.”
“Adding some vocalists that we like,” reasons Lol, “was obviously going to make it more attractive to people in general, so over the space of about 18 months to two years, we got a whole bunch of them in, and as far as lyrics went, we just said, ‘You make something up!’”
Amongst the first was Bobby Gillespie from Primal Scream, a Banshees obsessive who nailed three tracks – ‘Free’, ‘Ghosted At Home’ and ‘Country Of The Blind’ – within a few weeks, pinging ideas back and forth digitally to help shape the music. When it was decided that ‘Free’ required a choral section, hardly practical mid-COVID, Lee became the choir, stacking up tracks of his own voice into a vocal throng. Lyrically Gillespie set a tone of political dysfunction and existential emptiness which harks back to the Scream’s ultra-toxic turn-of-the-2000s ‘Xtrmntr’ era.
Murphy, on the other hand, took a few months to come through, though the longer wait proved worthwhile, as the LCD leader’s caustic New Yorker’s take on California dreamin’ on ‘Los Angeles’, says Budgie, “pulled it all together for us, what the album was about, and even what the overall title should be.”
Lee observes that both Gillespie and Murphy have a past in percussion, that the album was becoming “like a community of drummers”, but they ultimately cast their net more widely, for instance bringing in young Arrow de Wilde – “there couldn’t be a more LA band than Starcrawler”, quips Garret – whom Lee encouraged to sing beyond her usual idiom of punk shrieking on ‘Uh Oh’. The track also features tortuous guitar from Mark Bowen of Idles, whose singer Joe Talbot was due to contribute, but had to withdraw for personal reasons.
Lonnie Holley, by contrast, the 73-year-old self-taught visual artist and vocal improviser, habitually synced with this project’s mantra of self-challenge, serving up an on-the-edge meditation on man’s inhumanity for ‘Bodies’, climaxing with a rousing surge of defiance. Pan Amsterdam, aka recent Iggy Pop collaborator Leron Thomas, also voiced fully ‘with the programme’ in a startlingly whacked monologue on ‘Travel Channel’.
The presence of Isaac Brock of Modest Mouse on ‘We Got To Move’, meanwhile, was another astonishing feat of engineering from Jacknife: his gabbling vocal pre-existed from another project Lee worked on, and had to be artfully nipped, tucked and shoehorned to fit the music of ‘We Got To Move’, whose thundering DAF-like groove emerges rather unbelievably as an album highlight.
True to the original intention, four tracks remain as instrumentals, each unguessable, unsettling yet ineffably beautiful. Two – the motorik-propelled ‘Train With No Station’ and scuzz/gleam tussle ‘Noche Oscura’ – feature those doctored parts from The Edge, whose rarely-mentioned pedigree as an experimentalist stretches as far back as 1983’s ‘Snake Charmer’ album, alongside PiL’s Jah Wobble and Holger Czukay from Can.
“He was doing some pretty radical stuff even then,” says Lee, who has worked often with U2, “and he said yes straight away. I was expecting him to send us something that was Edge-like and heavily FX’d, but he just sent us acoustic guitar through, so I did the noise later. He was great with it, and really helpful.”
The finale of ‘Los Angeles’ arrives with ‘Skins’, another mindblower featuring James Murphy, here voicing in an unusually high register. “The words are dark,” Tolhurst explains, “but then in the final section everything becomes hopeful. James sings, ‘We’ve got a ways to go’, and I’d recorded some birds on my phone in Buenos Aires’ biological gardens in a rain storm, so we thought we’d put them on at the end. ‘Pornography’ [The Cure’s masterpiece from ’82] was like that, this wall of sound for the whole album, then at the end it's like, ‘I've got to fight this sickness, I'm going to find a cure – there's hope!’ Even in this death and destruction, hope is swimming past for you to grab onto.”
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After plunging into the unknown with their own music-making, then navigating the unplannable chicane of Coronavirus, it’s frankly a miracle that Tolhurst, Budgie and Lee came through four years later with an album so coherent and hard-hitting – about freedom and slavery, beauty and decay, hope and despair. As such, for its creators it could only be titled, ‘Los Angeles’, the sleeve’s ageless monochrome image of a stationary derrick flagging the city’s roots in oil prospecting.
“There are still lots of derricks around, hidden in plain sight,” says Tolhurst. “Some, they built buildings around so you can't see them – you think they’re skyscrapers with no windows, but they’re actually constructions to hide all these oil pumps.
“So, it’s not exactly a concept album,” Tolhurst goes on, by way of summation, “but it does tell a particular story, about this place, and how it has affected us, and how the world has changed in the last few years. It's everything all rolled in together, which is kind of miraculous to me, that everyone individually was on the same wavelength about what the record should be. You don't often get that kind of synchronicity.”
Plans are afoot now to take ‘Los Angeles’ into the live arena, both as a stripped-down touring model with vocals and other contributions banked up digitally, but also for a couple of highly ambitious shows in major cities on either side of the Atlantic, with as many of the star guests as possible appearing on one stage.
Budgie, Tolhurst and Lee aim to spread the word far and wide about their miraculous conception: future-facing, empowering, and on its own terms thoroughly triumphant.
Contact:
Agent
Trey Many - Wasserman - TMANY@teamwass.com
info@fenwayrecordings.com