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The Lemonheads Tickets

Gigwise is beckoned into a smoky hotel room with weed paraphernalia and booze strewn all over the table (come on, I’m hardly ruining Evan Dando’s squeaky clean image here!), Joni Mitchell playing quietly in the background.

Suddenly, there he is. The boy wonder of brilliant Indie pop with the Midas touch for melody, smiling beatifically and strumming along on his acoustic guitar. So, which Evan Dando will we get today? The perpetual stoner? The allegedly difficult interviewee? The grunge-era survivor still stunning audiences across the globe with those brilliant songs and unpredictable covers at idiosyncratic but excellent live shows?

Well, speaking of the covers he immediately pick up a copy of the artwork for forthcoming covers record ‘Varshons’ and intently explains that the entire idea for the record, featuring covers of everyone from Gram Parsons to Wire to Leonard Cohen, came from this painting. So, what we really need to know is: why a covers album and why now?

“I had this painting, which is done by a contemporary of ours, he does Op art and I hadn’t quite finished my own record so I just thought ‘fuck it’.

“Now I have to make great haste with great honor because I don’t think I‘ll make fine hand pickings for the handmaidens of Odin” he adds with a wry grin, referring to getting on with his next original record.

Speaking of handmaidens, Evan has some unlikely collaborators on this record in the form of celebrity friends Kate Moss and Liv Tyler.
“The Harpies. They are both godparents of the same child and I’m the godfather. I was in a movie with Liv in 94, Kate and me got real close at a christening. Kate was perfect for ‘Dirty Robot’ (originally by Dutch techno artists Arling and Cameron) she has the coolest, meanest voice“.

The Godfather of Indie rock? It somehow fits. Gibby Haynes, ringleader of the demented Butthole Surfers provided the inspirations for many of the covers by making Evan eclectic mix-tapes and serving production duties on ‘Varshons’. Evan speaks enthusiastically about his inspiring friend: “Gibby is actually really smart. What’s sanity, what’s insanity? He opens up that question. I perform with Gibby, we’re called the Time Whales”.

He starts singing one of their songs, A cappella: “I feel lucky tonight, lets get stoned and take someone’s life, hard liquor and a rental car, gonna hold up a bank, Inhale deeply and beat up whores”. What?? That sounds more like the vapid hedonism and casual misogyny of mainstream hardcore rap but it turns out to be a bit of a running joke to confound the expectations of the audience. “We’ve been doing some gigs at hipster venues and everyone is horrified. We’ve made tons of records on cassette”.

Moving on, Evan realises that I’m from ‘Up North’ as his wife is originally from Newcastle upon Tyne. We digress, discussing North East metal titans Venom and Penetration. “They inspired this generation of homicidal Norwegians,” says Evan, not entirely serious.

He tells me that the current line- up of Lemonheads, featuring the original drummer from hardcore group Zero Boys and John Perry (guitar / backing vocals), on loan from his day job in The Only Ones are touring in May, returning to the UK this September.

Somewhat inevitably, talk turns to his illustrious past as a celebrated pop songwriter and kind of druggy poster boy during the so-called Grunge era. If the past is a foreign country then it is one that Evan is comfortable traveling to, for the most part. To oversimplify, The Lemonheads arguably blossomed with ‘It’s a shame about Ray’: an album of perfect, concise and affecting pop songs in an age of predominantly masculine traditional grunge and rock.

“I was kind of rebelling against that. Grunge was just like (Lemonhead’s first record) ‘Hate your friends’ but with sexier drumming. Those guys did it better.Even my Mother was horrified when I played her ‘It’s a shame about Ray’ she was like ‘Where’s the loud guitar? It’s just getting popular'. I have that perverse thing, I had to go the other way and my real strengths were somewhere else”.

Elaborating on that era of American pop luminaries he continues: “We had two years of being the biggest band. All of our friends got famous. It was hilarious, even Superchunk got huge. We were friends with Beat Happening, Screaming Trees, Dinosaur, all those people. It doesn’t happen to every scene but it felt like fate, it was weird”.

Does he ever hear the legacy of that time coming through in new groups?

“I heard it in the first Strokes record, really hard, really melodic but with a bit more of a Television influence in there. Dungen are full on 60’s but they have that spirit. It’s whatever rock n roll is. You know, Eddie Cochran, back to basics”.

I ask him what it is like playing songs like Rudderless, does he still connect to the emotional turmoil documented in such songs?

“I wrote that in Melbourne, July 1991. It was in the papers, the word ‘Rudderless’ was in a story, I hadn’t heard it (the word) before. I knew that I had to write a good record, everything we had worked on for five years. It felt like something was going to happen and that time it pretty much delivered. Those songs are close to my heart. ”

From here, the conversation turns down a darker, sadder but not altogether unfamiliar corridor for Evan. Do you ever get tired of people asking you about Kurt and Courtney?

“Yeah, especially as a lot of people, are misinformed about that. Not to mention Kurt, who went to his grave misinformed.

He elaborates: “Courtney was saying that we were having an affair- I was never attracted to Courtney.
 
"She was like ‘I made Kurt cry last night’. She is crazy”.

He hints that the singer may know the truth in an afterlife: “It made me very sad and I was thinking, now that Kurts gone, he knows what really happened but I had a really weird spiritual moment that everything is OK with us now. I was too close to that and it really didn’t have to happen.”

I tell him that I watched the reformed Jesus Lizard just the other night, one of Cobain’s favourite bands and arguably the kind of band he wanted Nirvana to be but then he also had a love of The Beatles, Young Marble Giants and The Wipers and could write these incredible pop songs. Dando agrees and clearly has a great deal of admiration for the late Nirvana singer:

“Lets face it: Kurt was amazing, he could do so many amazing things but we never really got to know each other as Courtney was right between us all the time. It was horrible”.

He goes on, brightening up: “It was all connected. It was an amazing time. The way that we got into Raw Power (by the Stooges), kids will be getting into Sweet Oblivion (by the Screaming Trees) for years to come. Or ‘Jamboree’ by Beat Happening.

“Bands now, they don’t seem to understand irony. There was always a dose of irony to the whole thing, we were making fun of the whole rock star thing but it will come back around again”.

Revealing a little more about his famous cover of Oasis’s ‘Live Forever’ he says: “I did that on Liam’s 22nd birthday in Seattle I made it as a birthday tape. We had a funny thing with Noel but I put it out to show that there were no hard feelings. I really like those guys”.

Enough of the past - What does the future hold?

“I’m going to do a really honest, straightforward next record, pick up where the last solo album left off and it will be under my own name”.

We conclude with his convincing Geordie impression and some even darker theories about Courtney Love’s actions that are unfortunately off the record. Oh, and the Joni Mitchell song playing in the background at the beginning? Both Sides Now. Of course it was.