Josh Homme shakes his guitar and hammers home the final moments of A Song for the Dead. A smile breaks across his face. He is happy now and far from ”the fog” that engulfed him and the making of new album … Like Clockwork.
”I couldn’t be more excited … ecstatic is the word,” Homme says at one point, looking out to a huge home-town crowd in Los Angeles as his band gears up for a new round of touring that takes them to Europe in June and Australia next year.
His vocal cords are feeling the strain of intense rehearsal, but as the band cranks up older tracks Sick, Sick, Sick and First It Giveth, the burly frontman raises the bar on new song My God Is the Sun and charges through two dozen tracks, many for the first time.
Long-time guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen and the rest of the band had been welcomed onto the stage to rapturous applause, bursting into the first cut from …Like Clockwork as the huge screen behind them exploded with the gory animations that accompany the new release, the first since 2007’s Era Vulgaris.
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Relaxing in an upstairs room of the stately Wiltern Theatre the same week, Homme leans forward for emphasis when asked what still drives his band, Queens of the Stone Age, after 17 years.
”We’re happy guys, we don’t take ourselves too seriously, but we take what we do pretty goddamn seriously,” he says.
Keep Your Eyes Peeled, the brooding opening track on the new album hints at what’s to come and, as Home says, it wasn’t ”all puppy dogs and birthday parties” that inspired the writing.
”There is something different about this record for us because it started in such a f—ing fog,” he says, easing back into his chair and drawing a deep breath.
”I exhausted myself, I got real sick, had surgery and died on the operating room table and spent four months in bed.”
The 40-year-old father of two declines to elaborate on his surgery, but adds: ”When you spend four months in bed … it’s difficult to get back on your feet. And when you’ve been in a rock band since you were 14 years old, you go through some shit you never wanted to go through … so for the first time I didn’t want to play; I wanted to destroy every guitar I saw.”
Van Leeuwen, who previously played guitar in A Perfect Circle, joined QotSA a decade ago and was on the other end of the telephone last year when Homme called to say, ”Troy, it’s time to make a record, but I can’t go to where you are, you have to come to me.”
”There’s a starting point on this record that’s very real and, for a band that’s always searching for ‘real’ and ‘honest’, well, you better be careful what you wish for because this record came from the desperation of ‘there’s a strong chance we’re not going to make it through this…’.”
Beginning in 1996, QotSA released a self-titled album in 1998 followed by Rated R in 2000. Songs for the Deaf, featuring former Nirvana drummer and Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl on drums, was critically acclaimed and took QotSA to an international audience. The band toured extensively on the back of Songs for the Deaf, ending the tour in Perth in early 2004 when bass player and former Kyuss member Nick Oliveri was fired by Homme.
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The pair have known each other since Homme was 11 from their early days in Palm Desert and, despite axing him from the band, Homme says they remain friends. ”I’ve been hanging out with Nick since three months after we parted company, so it’s no big deal that he comes over,” he says, just as his phone beeps and a message from Oliveri pops up.
”Speak of the devil,” he says, firing a message back to Oliveri, who dropped by Homme’s Californian studio for a guest vocal role on two songs from the new record.
Grohl, who also worked with Homme and Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones in supergroup Them Crooked Vultures, again sat behind the drums last year when regular drummer Joey Castillo was dumped during ”the fog” that surrounded the first few months of the new project.
”We started with Joey, but things happen. I asked these guys to come in there and help me get out [and] five guys go in and four guys came out. There were internal communication problems, but long ago I gave up blaming someone for what is part of being alive. Sometimes you separate your musical relationship to save your friendship. Joey’s a great drummer and he’s a friend of ours, but that don’t mean it all lasts forever. We want to do something and you have to make hard decisions sometimes. What’s the alternative, shy away”
Jon Theodore from the Mars Volta was recruited after Castillo’s exit, recording one drum track on …Like Clockwork then joining the band full-time. Dean Fertita (keyboards, guitar) and bass player Michael Shuman have both been with QotSA since 2007. Like previous albums, most notably Songs for the Deaf and 2005’s Lullabies to Paralyze, …Like Clockwork features a host of guest musicians, among them Mark Lanegan and Alain Johannes, while Elton John performs on the song Fairweather Friends. Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) plays on the same powerful track and on the deceptively mellow Kalopsia. Arctic Monkeys frontman Alex Turner also turns up on a couple of songs.
”The record was hard to make, emotionally it was hard to make, so we had some friends come over to take a mini-mental vacation,” Homme says. ”Alex Turner is a mate of ours, we ride motorcycles with him and he never gets ruffled. It’s fully natural to say, ‘Hey, Mr Turner, come over and hang,’ and we’ll figure out something to do [on the album] or not.”
The other person who spent time in the studio, eventually creating the album cover and working closely with animator Liam Brazier on the dark, menacing clips that accompany the album, was twentysomething British illustrator Boneface, who Homme stumbled across in a local magazine story. It was the start of an artistic partnership that QotSA – who didn’t have a label deal prior to this album – fully embraced, giving Boneface (aka Stu Madden) freedom to interpret the songs with his confronting illustrations and create ”a boundless extension of what the music is”, according to Homme.
”His world view is askew, it’s like ours and it’s representative of this record. The question is, ‘Are you willing to do what’s not going on, do what’s not popular and what’s apparently not being asked for’ The clips are very full-on, but it felt good to let somebody who’s good at something, be good at something and make a movie that would reveal this record.”
…Like Clockwork is available from June4 through Matador/Remote Control.
– Sydney Morning Herald
