"A whole audience shitting themselves!" David Bowie, 1998

Cyberspace Oddity

David Bowie may be in his fifties, but he's no slouch when it comes to new technologies. Take BowieNet - it's his very own internet service provider and it's so exciting that he phoned us from Bermuda just to tell us all about it. And tinned poo. Interview: Peter Paphides.

Like the character in Space Oddity, he is a disembodied voice, straining to be heard from a gigantic distance. Grappling with space-age machinery in a bid to manipulate it to some greater end. Whether or not he'll achieve it though, is another matter. David! David! Can you hear me? Ground control to Thin White Duke! Is anyone out there? Hello!

'Get down, yer bastard!'

Pardon?

'Oh, ' chirrups the voice in the distance. 'I was just downloading some mail.'

David Bowie's computer seems to have a voice-activated mail facility, because the next thing we hear is a little cyberchipmunk squeaking 'You've got mail and you've got charisma!'

Bowie: 'Ho ho ho!'

Your correspondent: 'That's nice!'

Bowie: 'I think I'd rather have mail than charisma!'

It's not just any old afternoon which sees an American woman called Eileen phoning you up and telling you that David Bowie would like to have a word from his home in Bermuda. And when she does, there's usually a reason. Not content with nestling in our collective subconscious as a snaggle-toothed alien bloke with funny eyes and loads of hits about hanging around in space pretending to be a camp robot, David's been recently reinventing himself even more comprehensively: as a flesh and bone commodity floating on the stock exchange; a cutting edge mover on the art scene; and a drum'n'bass convert. However, it's none of these things that David wants to talk about today. You may have already heard about BowieNet, his grand new internet service provider (ISP) venture. BowieNet was only launched this week, but it's already been valued in excess of $500 million. David laughs in the face of such figures

'Well, yes, but in terms of what we're actually making, I can't buy a packet of cigarettes on it! Believe me!'

His enthusiasm remains undimmed, however. So excited was Dave about the imminent launch of BowieNet that on September 30 he decided to host a live chatroom via his website, with former Tin Machine chap and general BowieMate Reeves Gabrels. This was indeed a momentous occasion: David Bowie, out there in cyberspace. A real proper starman! Waiting for us in the sky! He'd like to come and meet us! And now he can!

'Ho ho ho!' chuckles the man who even kept a straight face singing with Bing Crosby. 'I tell you what. I think you might be overegging the cake just a little!'

And you know, he might be right. After all, the transcription of that history-making September afternoon makes for bizarrely depressing reading. Think about it: you, a BowieFan, have your hero (and admittedly, his BowieMate) in front of you! And playing in your head are all those One-2-One ads where you're sitting next to Dave in his space podule having a great old chinwag! And what do you ask him?! Do you ask him about all the drugs he took in Berlin? Do you ask him about what made The Laughing Gnome laugh so much? Do you ask him what the fuck he was playing at on the 'Dancing in the Street' video? [quick reminder: 'South Americaaaaaaaaa!!!'] Do you hell! You ask him when he's going to play Oklahoma, whether or not he plans to write with Roger Waters and in the case of some total psychopath going by the clever-clever BowieJoke pseudonym of Nathan Adler, you ignore him completely and ask BowieMate how he wrote a guitar solo. USELESS! USELESS! USELESS! David, do you sometimes despair of your fans?

'What do you mean?'

Well, they all seem a bit frightening.

'But you don't feel as though you're talking in a world that's unfamiliar to you. What on earth could be frightening about it?'

They're all like people you see in the queue at the Hard Rock Café.

'I think that's pretty much accurate! But then, that's a microcosm of what Europe's like.'

In a way, it's no surprise that David has seen fit to reinvent himself as The Man Who Sold The World An Internet Service Provider. Babyboomers will see him as a brand name they can trust, and they've jumped at the chance to have an e-mail address which ends in '@davidbowie.com'. More than that though, it's actually the logical realisation of the Ziggy Stardust ethos: that gender and identity and sexuality are all boundaries which are there to be blurred. Thanks to chatrooms - surely the ultimate forum for self-reinvention - we can all be heroes just for one day! Sort of! Or even better, if you're David Bowie, you can be a zero, something he's recently discovered to his evident delight: he 'crawls around' taking part in other people's conversations anonymously.

Have you ever pretended to hate yourself, as it were?

'Yes. Um, I've often raised the topic that some of David Bowie's actions have been questionable, yes But they just say, "Oh don't be such a stuffy bastard! Everything he does is great!" [quick reminder that this isn't strictly true: "South Americaaaaaaa!"] I go on them about three or four times a week. But back to the point about all this being quite prophetic. Someone did remind the other day about a song I wrote called Saviour Machine, which was about a computer which dealt with all the world's problems. And this machine did such a good job that, to create something for itself to do, it had to make things bad again. I think, without knowing it, that the Internet was something I was always absolutely desperate to get involved with.'

To such a degree, in fact, that David says he doubts if he would have even gone into music had the internet been around in 1968. Such an assertion shames those of us who agree that the infosuperhighway has changed the world completely, and yet - when it really comes down to it - do little more than use it to look at pictures of Jayne Mansfield's decapitated head and mangled Mercedes cars in Paris underpasses. Thankfully, The Webmaster himself has been finding similar distractions.

'Have you seen "Slap a Spice Girl" yet? That's pretty cool! Their heads pop up and you smash 'em one! Hahahahah! It's one of the cruellest sites on the net. I've seen a few Clinton ones too, involving cigars.'

So which Spice Girl did you slap first?

'What?' comes the mock-indignant response. 'I wouldn't dream of doing that!'

Oh come on. Of course you would!

'I wouldn't dream of it! How could you even ask me such a question?'

Look. Cyberspace is one of the few realms of life where your actions have no moral consequences, and you're telling me you didn't take advantage of this?

'Hahahahahahaa! If that's the truth, then I'm indifferent to it!'

That's outrageously diplomatic, David.

'Outrageous, at any rate!'

So would you have really not become a pop star if the internet had been around?

'Almost certainly,' he explains. 'When I was a kid, music was the fascinating alternative future. But not it's just another career choice such as banking or being a travel rep [in among other places. South Americaaaaa]. However, I feel the internet is at the stage where the information and how you can manipulate it and play around with it is still the exciting part of it.'

Indeed, you could take a lead from Prince and bypass the entire record company process by selling your records direct through your website.

'Well,' ponders the only prisoner-of-war camp inmate in 'Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence' with a really great hairdresser, 'Public Enemy recently put out an entire album's worth of material with MPEG3 [non-boffins: MPEG3s transmit sound files over the net] which was a great idea, but looking at the news today, I noticed that what they didn't do was ask their record company's permission. So they've had to take it all down again, which was a rather unfortunate bump in the manifesto.'

Many people have said that this potential for cutting out the middle man will revolutionise the way music is consumed. But David isn't so sure. He reckons the technology will soon be co-opted by record companies.

'We're soon undergoing a total demystification of product!' he declares triumphantly. 'In years to come, record companies will save a load of money on packaging. They'll just make different versions of artwork available on screen and you'll just print them up according to what songs you want to go on the record.'

David's on a big demystification tip at the moment. One of the big attractions available on BowieNet will be the Full View Camera - a 360-degrss camera with 'amazing picture quality' which enable you to home in on a scene live from any angle.

'The idea,' he enthuses 'is that, say I'm in the studio and you want to go in close on my nostril, you can do that. You can virtually direct your own viewing.'

Isn't there a possibility of too much demystification? What if you forget to switch it off and David Bowie's sat there in his pants smelling his belly-button fluff in front of global audience?

'Well, that's what you get!' he chuckles. 'Anything that muddles the parameters is to be embraced completely.'

It's that philosophy which lies at the heart of Bowie's next big project. Having recently discovered a whole load of outtakes and residual songs from 'Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars', he's planning some kind of crazy multimedia 'project' which seems set to leave the Bowie and Iggy-inspired 'Velvet Goldmine' looking like a rainy night in with Suede's mum. Possibly.

'Well,' he teases. 'I don't want to give too much away, but it's not just going to come out in one form. And it was never an intention for it be primarily be a film. Somehow or other, I wanted to attack it in a multimedia way. So let's just say the overall goal is to present Ziggy in various forms - all of which are autonomously interesting - but all the parts taken together present him as a whole.'

What the fuck are you on about?

'Sorry?'

Actually, I didn't say that at all. You don't say that to David Bowie. Instead, I nod sagely and tell him about a not-strictly-true project I'm working on called Hardware. Who knows? If he likes it, he might send us 50 grand to put it out.

'What's that then?' he enquires.

A friend and I have written an entire ultrasonic album. The only way you can listen to it is through your dog. It's sort of intended to play around with conventional notions of hardware. Also though, no 50 grand is forthcoming.

'Oh! I think that's wonderful! Very Dada! Although, it does have its precedents, you know.'

Oh good. Not only won't David give me any money, but someone else already has my idea.

'I remember Pink Floyd messing around in the 60s with black noise. They were trying to get the audience to debowel themselves during the performance. A whole audience shitting themselves! Matter of fact, I saw a similar thing recently in the entrance to the last Saatchi show. Some guy actually created a bowel-moving machine and out it in the entrance. When I saw that, I thought: An old idea is hard to leave alone.'

Isn't that a bit messy? A bowel-moving machine in an art gallery?

'Oh, I'm sure in an art gallery you could probably sell it! In fact, that was done by Manzoni in the 60s. He put his own excrement in tins and then he sold it. Very successfully too. They still sell at extraordinary prices.'

That's a very eco-friendly way of going to the toilet, isn't it? Unless you miss, of course.

'Hahahahaa! You'd have to eat a lot too, depending on how many you made.'

If you were going to write a song about it, you could sing "Here is my floater in a tin can"…

'Hahahaaha! That whole relationship of art with bodily functions has yielded some amazing stuff. Many many years ago, I got to know William Burroughs, and he told me that one day he went into the French patenting office, and for approximately $5, he bought himself a copy of all the plans for making a black noise bomb. What is it? Well, it works on the principle of the opera singer and the glass - that there's always a note that will destroy physical substances. And this guy had devised a method that reduces flesh to mush and leaves the building standing. It was not far removed from the frequencies that Pink Floyd were playing around with. When you hear things like that, you wonder why the human race hasn't been wiped out. But then, there are so many ways the world could end now.'

Indeed, planet earth is blue and there's nothing we can do. So to speak.

'Hyeeeurrgh! Absolutely!' confirms David, who addressed the problem memorably in 'Five Years'. 'Especially with the 2YK problem!'

The what problem?

'The year 2000? Do you know about this?'

Oh, you mean the millennium bug!

'Yes, that'll be right. They call it 2YK over here [surely Y2K? - Ed], which sounds almost like a….um, well never mind. But really I'm not sure how to play this one. Personally I don't think I'll be anywhere near aeroplanes or elevators on that day, that's for sure. There are two or three well known techheads who have already set up their own multi-year supplies of store cabins in the desert. They've actually taken guns and they're preparing for the breakdown of society as we know it.'

I trust you've stocked up on Pot Noodles, then….

'Heh-heh-heh! To be honest, I haven't even considered where I'm going to be.'

How about South Americaaaaaaa?

'I suppose Bermuda is a good a bet as any. I guess they're all pretty worried about it over in Britain too, yeah?'

You could say that. After all, most people are still trying to get to grips with setting the video.

'Jesus! Is that so?' David's 50-a-day cockney drawl modulates into instant haughtiness. He can't stand the idea of the Brits as a nation of technophobes. 'It's crazy, isn't it? You still come across people who make out like the internet is a passing fad. Don't they realise that the entire communications process is undergoing the most drastic revolution that we have ever encountered?'

You can just imagine. David getting similarly strident on the inevitable Branson-style TV ads for his new enterprise. An exclusive foray into pages on his website accessible only though BowieNet shows a zealous desire to reveal his innermost thoughts with fellow 'techheads' on a variety of subjects. Why, he even keeps a journal everywhere he goes. Negotiating the windy streets of New York, we get Bowie pondering how, in a parallel life, 'I could be back in Bromley, pushing the grandchildren's pram, forgetting to pick up a carton of milk.' Click onto another icon, and you get pics of Dave with a variety of trendy celeb friends such as Goldie! But you don't need a modem and a special top-secret password to notice his evangelical allegiance to this brave new world. That much is obvious to anybody within yards of his rather delightful cybermusing. Especially the lovely Iman.

'I do find the net incredibly addictive,' muses David. 'So much so, in fact, that one has to be a bit careful about it. Otherwise I think one can put oneself in the position of losing wives! Hahahahahah!'

There's an exclusive!

'Well, I tell you what! Do you know what was the first thing I did after the first month or two of being on-line? I banned myself from working late at night, because I'd just get carried away with it. And if there's one surefire way to break up a happy household…'

So your dinner was in the dog?

'It kind of gets like that. Talking of which…'

David suddenly realises he's been on the phone for an hour. His exotic missus must be a stern taskmistress, because quick as a flash he's saying his goodbyes. Woah there! Just one thing before you go, David….

'Oh, go on, then!'

Well, it's just that this is running in our Christmas issue. Any chance of a seasonal greeting for Time Out readers?

'Hahahahaha!'

Sorry?

'Oh, you're being serious! Um. "Sign up, sign up for Jesus!" Hahahaha It's a beautiful sentiment, isn't it?'

Very reminiscent of the Bing Crosby thing.

'Ah yes! That old chestnut! Yes. He'd have approved!'

And with one final gravelly chuckle, he's gone. Time it seems, waits for no Iman.


*******************************



Fangs for the memory

What's David Bowie been up to since we last spoke to him?

1. Having his teeth fixed!

'The problem was that the two that were kind of fangy had gradually been pushed out by all the other teeth. And I was finding out that whenever I'd woken up with my face down on the pillow, my top lip would be bleeding. I'd lived with them quite comfortably all my life, and I was never really bothered with them. But once they actually became an impractical piece of equipment, I had then ripped out and replaced. At first it felt a bit weird, because for weeks I was just rubbing my tongue on them wondering where they'd gone. It felt like a little bit of me was missing! Hyeeeeeuuurrrghk!'

2. Passing judgement on new versions of his songs!

I heard Oasis's version of 'Heroes' last year. I didn't think it was very good. That was the first thing I thought about it. And then, if I remember rightly, I didn't think about it much again. It felt like a very end-of-the-night-in-the-pub kind of thing, which is I'm sure how it was produced. The Aphex Twin did a much better version. They [David seems unaware that The Aphex Twin is just one bloke] do some really extraordinary things. Phenomenal! Anyway, if you were going to recreate 'Heroes' in the 90s, I think The Aphex Twin's version is more in line with what one ought to do.'

3. Doing some journalism!

'I've started doing book reviews for Barnes & Noble. They saw that I did a lot of book reviews on the site, and they figured that it might not be a bad thing if they got me to do some for them as well. I gave them five categories I'd be interested in reviewing, from art through fiction to music. The first one I've done is 'Glam' by Barney Hoskyns. What's it like? Excellent. It's good that everybody gets more equal space in it than they usually get - by which I mean Marc Bolan and Roxy Music. And of course, the great thing about doing these reviews is that now I get a whole load of books every month!'

"They were throwing shoes, umbrellas, anything they didn’t want to take home with them." Clint Mansell, 2009

Back when Clint Mansell was a rock star of sorts, he looked like, well… a sort of rock star. At the time of our last encounter, he had red dreads piled on top of his head and several piercings in his nose and ears. In 2009, even the most committed fan of Pop Will Eat Itself – the band with whom he notched up eleven top 40 hits – would stroll right by if they passed Mansell in the street. Somewhere along the way, as he gradually set about becoming one of the world’s most sought-after film composers, he changed. On the afternoon I walk into Air Studios in Hampstead, there are three soberly-dressed, sensible-haired middle-aged men hunched over a mixing console, all in some way involved with a timpani session for Christian Carion’s upcoming cold war thriller L’Affaire Farewell. Until a deep Black Country greeting – “Hello mate! How long has it been?” – leaves Mansell’s mouth, it isn’t altogether certain which of those is him.

Though my memory fails me on this count, it’s also likely that, as the frontman with Pop Will Eat Itself, Mansell wasn’t drinking red wine with the slow, appreciative sips of a man who, in time, would own a house in the Hollywood hills that came with its own wine cellar. It’s fair to say that there’s nothing in his old band’s cartoonish indie-rap canon to suggest that they were a dry run for the exquisitely understated neo-classical scores of films like The Wrestler, Requiem for a Dream and Duncan Jones’ acclaimed new sci-fi tale Moon.

But then, it’s remarkable just how much distance you can put behind you in 15 years. This Monday when Mansell – flanked by Los Angeles string ensemble The Sonus Quartet and assorted other players performs – at the Union Chapel, he’ll have 20-odd scores from which to choose. Flying in to introduce him will be Darren Aronofsky, who has used Mansell to score his films ever since the two worked on π (Pi) eleven years ago. Mansell remembers that at the time both found themselves uncertain about what their immediate future held. Aronofsky settled in New York with the screenplay for π but no immediate funding prospects. Having dissolved Pop Will Eat Itself, Mansell also found himself in New York for no greater reason than his girlfriend lived there. “I had this idea that I’d do something different,” he remembers, “I couldn’t tell you what it was, but obviously my ego thought it was something that would change the world.” Without any clear idea of how to proceed, Mansell says he “lost any sort of drive.” Being so far removed from his bandmates and his family in Stourbridge was “a pure shock to the system. I had a lot of growing up to do.”

Mansell and Aronofsky met through mutual friends. That Aronofsky had never heard Pop Will Eat Itself almost certainly counted in Mansell’s favour. After all, when picking likely composers to score a psychological thriller about a man who builds a computer to find predictable patterns in the stock market, it’s unlikely that you would turn to the frontman best known for songs such as their paean to Italian porn star politician Touched By The Hand of Cicciolina and their not-about-the-animal early hit Beaver Patrol. “I’m not sure he had me in mind as someone who [ital] could [ital] score films,” confides Mansell, “There was this idea that I might write the opening title piece, and then the rest of the film would use pre-existing electronic music. He was going to license all these songs for use in the film. But the reality was that he had no money and no track record. So every time we were denied permission to use a song, I had to write a piece to replace it.”

Asked how he was supporting himself at this time, Mansell laughs, “Like all musicians, I had a girlfriend. In truth, it was hand-to-mouth.” No matter how bad things were, however, he could at least tell himself he was in New York. “If I had gone back to signing on in Stourbridge, it might have been more of a reality check. Time to put my rock star ego behind me and get a life.” As his relationship foundered, calling an end to his time in New York, Mansell realised that, at least creatively, his decision to place himself outside his musical comfort zone was yielding music that he had previously thought beyond him.

In particular, Lux Aeterna – the musical leitmotif at the heart of Aronofsky’s second film Requiem For A Dream – seemed to assume a life of its own well beyond the circumstances of its original creation. In 2002, four years after writing it at “a particularly low personal ebb”, Mansell walked into Mann’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood where he had gone to see Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love. But it was his own Lux Aeterna he heard booming out in surround sound, over a trailer for the upcoming Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers. Momentarily mislaying all residual self-deprecation, Mansell chirps, “It blew my mind! It sounded incredible. I kept looking around to see if anyone else was listening to it, but everyone else was talking!”

The intervening years have elevated Mansell to his current position as one of Hollywood’s most sought-after composers. Throughout it all, his working relationship with Aronofsky has endured. A few Christmases ago, he recalls the producer staying at his parents’ house in Stourbridge and watching his reaction as Mansell’s father played him a choice selection of old Pop Will Eat Itself videos. “There was one where I had my leather trousers on and a headband. He turned around and said, ‘Why are you dressed like a pirate?’ In my head I’d been going for more of an Axl Rose look… We weren’t very good at concealing our latest obsessions.”

Whether they even tried to do so is a moot point. Barely two years into their recording life, the group embraced hip-hop with precisely the sort of guileless glee that enraged purists. Displaying a naivety that almost proved to be their undoing, the group accepted an offer to support Public Enemy on a string of European dates promoting the rap troupe’s It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back. Just to recap, then: the militant black New York collective affiliated to Nation of Islam, supported by four white middle-class boys from Stourbridge. “We thought the first two dates at Brixton Academy might be a bit rough,” smiles a rueful Mansell. “There were no two ways about it. It was a black hip-hop audience. And we come on with our long hair, our leather jackets and guitars – I mean, maybe if they’d listened, they’d have gone, ‘Hmm… interesting hybrid!’ We lasted four songs. Once our roadies picked up all the coins that were thrown at us, it added up to about ten quid. But that was the least of it really. They were throwing shoes, umbrellas, anything they didn’t want to take home with them. In the heat of the moment, I was even goading them a bit, but then I turned around, tripped over a monitor and fell flat on my face. The place erupted. The worst of it was knowing that we were going to have to do it all again the following day. I mean, we were little kids really. We were shitting it.”

The life of a band is a distant dream, but by the same token, Mansell has had to work hard to feel a sense of entitlement to his current job. For the longest time, he was worried that he was going to be found out – “that somebody was going to spot the cheat sheet in my back pocket.” He admits that when he first dabbled in composition, he laboured under the misapprehension that “a jobbing composer goes, ‘You want a little bit of jazz? Here you go. A bit of reggae? Coming right up.’ With me, it’s less tangible than that. It comes from a different place.”

If, in recent years, Mansell felt he has anything left to prove, it’s a desire to convince the wider world that he can deliver exceptional work on a film that doesn’t bear Aronofsky’s imprint. This month, when the wider world finally gets to see Duncan Jones’ Moon, any lingering doubts should be kicked into touch. By sidelining almost all electronic embellishments for some of his most traditional-sounding arrangements to date, Mansell brings out the human frailty in Jones’ sinister space-age parable. “All my favourite themes were in there,” he smiles. “Isolation, melancholy, nostalgia. Plenty to get stuck into.” The same themes also loomed large in The Wrestler, Mansell’s most recent Aronofsky score. At the end of that film, of course, we see Mickey Rourke returning to the nostalgia entertainment circuit, realizing that whatever else happens in life, his old fans will always love him. Could that have been an option for Mansell, had things not worked out as he would have liked?

“Well, Pop Will Eat Itself did do four or five shows over here about four years ago,” he says, “You wouldn’t have heard about it. We just did them for fun and put the word out among the old fans. I tell you what though. It was knackering. After we did our last show, I could barely walk for the next three months. I took that as a sign.”

“Why are you wearing your sweater?" The Strokes, November 2005

It is, of course, tempting to dwell on the surly supersized adolescent who deliberately mumbles inaudible answers and then affects to have forgotten them when asked to repeat himself. Lest we do Julian Casablancas a disservice, we should start by remembering the good times. The way his face momentarily softens when you tell him that you think The Strokes have just recorded an album full of potential singles – enough, indeed, to reply, “I like your talk.” The way he ambles into the room and enquires “Is that a strumpet?” Such comic timing, delivered with requisite New York understatement is not hard to warm to. Needless to say, no strumpets have been delivered to The Strokes’ room at the Metropolitan (maybe four years ago, it would have been a different story). The Strokes’ drummer Fab Moretti picks up the tray – containing biscuits, by the way – and extends his arm in Casablanca’s direction. “I think you mean crumpets,” he tells his frontman. “But these are neither.”

“It gets a little confusing,” explains guitarist Albert Hammond Jr, whose friendship with Casablancas goes back to Le Rosey – the prestigious Swiss school where the two were sent in 1992. “Your biscuits are our cookies. Our muffins are your cakes. And our biscuits are… well…” “Sort of a savoury bread,” interjects the drummer, born to Brazilian and Italian parents, “Kind of a flaky, southern kind of food. The sort of thing an old lady in St Augustine would serve you. Right now though, the Metropolitan’s biscuits are helping my hangover.”

Casablancas absents himself from the room – his interview isn’t due to begin for another half an hour – it’s left to Moretti and Hammond to conduct a postmortem of The Strokes’ first UK show in two years – a reminder, if one were needed, that on the eve of their third album, the New York quintet can still elicit feverish devotion in their fans. I tell Moretti about the queues – 800 fans four days previously, snaking around the block at ULU for the chance to get in; then, a couple of hundred more on the night before the show, camped in the hope that extra tickets might be released on the day of the concert. Though still only 25, Moretti has that easy, solicitous air that will probably make a great father of him one day. He says he feels a responsibility to them. He worries that no Strokes show might be worth that sort of hardship. “But at the same time, I’m respectful of their choice. Because there are bands I would have done that for. Which ones? Guns ’N Roses, Nirvana, The Beatles. I would do it for The Beatles right now.”

And those fans lucky enough to get in would have had ample chance to digest The Strokes’ third album – First Impressions On Earth – because for the first half hour or so, that’s all they played. Such confidence in the ability of new material to hold the attention seems to tally with the diffident self-belief that radiated around the band even in 2001, when their repertoire barely extended beyond the ten songs on their debut album Is This It? If that record – and its successor Room On Fire – portrayed a band holed up in a damp New York basement in retreat from pop’s encroaching tendrils, First Impressions… is a development. The sense of airless claustrophobia is still there. But pop – albeit pop of a warped, febrile variety – has, one way or another, found them. Which means that once new single Juicebox has fallen from the charts, big tunes like Electricityscape, On The Other Side and Razorblade – the one with an amusingly similar chorus to Manilow/Westlife monster Mandy – should make light work of following it.

As Moretti and Hammond bowl down towards the bar to join Nikolai Fraiture (bass) and Nick Valensi (lead guitar), this seems a natural juncture for a returning Casablancas to make sense of the previous evening’s hysteria. He didn’t see the queue either, although he says that any fans who found him and told him they had been up all night had their names taken down. “They definitely got in the show,” he says, “But then I saw another girl later that day who said she was also in line. But she didn’t ask me, so I didn’t say, ‘Do you want to [go]?’’ He pauses. “If she reads this, I guess she’ll be kicking herself.”

Nonetheless, despite the “unreasonably high expectations” he has of himself, Casablancas enjoyed himself. It seems necessary to ask because, where The Strokes’ 27 year-old frontman is concerned, it’s not always so easy to tell: the impassive stature, the ever-present cop-shades which sit on the bridge of his nose in a barely-lit venue – all the better to focus on individual audience members without the burden of communicating? It’s a gentle line of enquiry – small talk, really – but the drop in the air pressure is enough to make the dogs across the road in Hyde Park start barking, “Um, no. No. No, no. Definitely no thought behind it.”

It wasn’t my intention to spend any great length of time talking to Julian Casablancas about his sunglasses. Still, as if to retreat from any unintended psychoanalytic slight, I suggest that it was purely a cosmetic choice. Which, in turn, prompts the retort, “Why are you wearing your sweater? I dunno… it’s as cosmetic as your sweater is.”

Though I point out that my motives vis a vis the sweater are mainly thermal, I also don’t want to be having a weird argument about sweaters and sunglasses. And, if the ensuing, piercing silence is anything to go by, neither does he. So we try again. First Impressions Of Earth is The Strokes’ first since Casablancas married his girlfriend Juliet in January. First Impressions Of Earth was so named because, when Casablancas surveyed the track listing, he wondered what an alien unfamiliar with our world would make of it. An alien would, I venture, hear songs like You Only Live Once or the vertiginious urgency of Heart In A Cage and deduce that our ambivalence towards love isn’t enough to stop us falling in it. It’s nice to hear The Strokes’ singer swapping skinny-tied insouciance for something more vulnerable. “Ummmm… sure,” ponders the singer, smiling to himself. “I dunno… whatever you think, man.”

Rewind fifteen minutes and Casablancas’ drummer is sitting in the chair now occupied by the singer. “There are so many love songs on this album,” coos an empathetic Moretti – whose own partner Drew Barrymore found herself “papped” as she helped Casablancas’ partner shop for a wedding dress. “It’s great for him, especially given that the person he married was a very close friend of ours for a really long time, so the love was always there between them. It was just kind of… a secret love. We had known her for six years, which is kind of a long time for us young kids.”

Back in the present, Casablancas is still deriving some peculiar amusement from the word “vulnerable”: “Umm, sure. Urm, I dunno. Whatever you think, man, I dunno.” Another pause. “To me, [songs] are loosely based on specific things, but meant to be delivered in a way that, urm… won’t only... um… have an emotional response…” Then comes the inaudible murmur, from which there is no apparent return. I ask him to repeat what he just said.

“It’s not just… it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s… uh… yeah, whatever I said. I can’t remember.” Perhaps realizing that this catatonic state won’t sustain him for the remainder of our allotted time, Casablancas tries to rally. He contends, “meanings of songs have only been destroyed” when he discovers what they’re about. Sometimes, I tell him, the reverse is true. An interview with Radiohead’s Thom Yorke yielded the minor revelation that Everything In Its Right Place from Kid A was inspired by his love of order and tidiness. The song’s dreamlike, spooky sense of euphoria goes well with the compulsive-obsessive overtones of the lyric.

The Strokes’ frontman remains unconvinced. He mutters something else barely audible about the Radiohead song only having one line. That it doesn’t, seems barely a point worth arguing at this stage. His publicist walks in and tells us we have five minutes. I tell him I don’t need them. For the first time since I told Casablancas I liked his record, he registers something other than profound indifference. A smidgen of surprise, perhaps, that maybe that should have been as unpleasant for me as it was for him. “Thanks,” he says. It was nothing, I assure him.

"Well, a person isn’t his work." Nick and Gabrielle Drake, January 2008

In two hours time, Gabrielle Drake has another interview in the West End. Not this sort of interview, she explains, but one concerning an acting role. On her way from our rendez-vous in Café Richoux, the sole of her shoe will snap in half – necessitating a search for superglue in the Mayfair streets that her brother Nick sang about on an eponymous early composition. A day later, she will email to say that her limping entrance – “like an aged Cinderella” – at the second appointment provided “a good talking point.”

The actress, who has recently garnered acclaim for her one-woman show about the life of Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, doesn’t seem especially nervous about the other interview. But when it comes to talking about Family Tree – a “new” Nick Drake album, she’s a little more hesitant. Up until this point, decisions concerning the output of the singer-songwriter who took his own life, aged 27, have been relatively straightforward. Where this selection of informal early recordings is concerned, she has no way of knowing if her brother would have approved. Diehard fans – who, these days, include R.E.M., Paul Weller, Elton John, Norah Jones, Brad Pitt and pretty much every British singer-songwriter to emerge in the last decade – know the contents of bootlegs commonly circulated over the last two decades.

The irony of Gabrielle’s quandary does not need pointing out to her.
The first people to release Nick Drake’s earliest recordings into the wider world were not bootleggers. It was Drake’s parents, whose grief at losing their son was heightened by the obscurity into which his work seemed fated to languish. In the years following his death in 1974, Nick Drake wasn’t even a cult artist. For all the dewy, autumnal wonder of songs like Northern Sky and Hazey Jane I, 1970’s Bryter Layter – his most commercial album – still failed to shift more than 3,500 copies in his lifetime. So when fans occasionally made the pilgrimage to leafy Tanworth-In-Arden, where Drake spent his childhood and his final, depressed months, Rodney and Molly Drake derived some comfort from the notion that someone might have been listening after all.


Gabrielle remembers letters from Rodney and Molly Drake imparting news of such visits. In a “letter” to her brother that she recorded for a Times podcast, she explained, “Mummy became adept at improvising and adapting. Meals would be rustled up, beds made and who cared if there were no flowers on the piano?” And while Molly Drake was “improvising and adapting”, Rodney Drake took delight in compiling tapes of performances these fans could have had no way of hearing.

If Gabrielle Drake’s eagerness to explain the circumstances of Family Tree’s release is touching, it’s also not strictly necessary. In the last decade, two biographies and sundry documentaries have appeared – all attempting to identify the constituents of Drake’s elusive sound. Taking Ewan MacColl’s famous Radio Ballads and, The Everly Brothers’ evocative musical family album Roots as his inspiration, it’s a job that album compiler (and manager of Drake’s estate) Cally Callomon manages to do in 68 minutes. Two revelatory compositions by Molly Drake, both serve as reminders that sung melancholy meditations are not the sole domain of sensitive young men with guitars. And so, no less eerily that Nick Drake’s Fruit Tree seems to portend his posthumous fame, Molly’s Try To Remember – recorded approximately a decade before her son’s fatal overdose – finds her singing about loss with prescient acuity. That Molly’s blues bore a greater stylistic debt to Noel Coward than the folk and blues guitarists that Nick came to embrace merely illustrates the changing cultural climate into which Nick and Gabrielle had to try and fit in.

Moving to rural Warwickshire from colonial Burma, Gabrielle remembers that “Nick and I were both facing this 60s world, growing up in a time when it was not fashionable to be what we were.” For Gabrielle, that sense of belonging came with acting. Taught the basics of guitar by a friend at Marlborough School, Nick seemed to find himself in music. The home recordings on Family Tree give a sense of that shift. Preceding the hobo romanticism of Bert Jansch’s Strolling Down The Highway and Jackson C. Frank’s Milk & Honey we hear Nick playing Mozart on clarinet with his aunt and uncle. Prior to that, a poignant brother-sister duet on All My Trials portends a parallel universe in which Drake’s musical fortunes might have been radically different.

“It’s funny you should mention that,” smiles Gabrielle, “After All My Trials, we sort of had the thought that we should do something else – some sort of act together, but it never materialized. Do you remember Nina and Frederik? We were very fond of them at one point.” The mind boggles at the notion that Nick Drake’s first tentative steps into the musical limelight might have been inspired by a Danish calypso duo. But with Gabrielle Drake’s career taking off, it wasn’t to be. Besides, within two years, it became apparent that something dramatic had happened in Nick’s musical development.

Thanks to the recent discovery of a cassette made by an old friend, the emergence of eight previously unheard Drake performances – recorded in 1967, during a gap year in Aix-En-Provence – illustrates that change. In a letter to his parents, the aspiring folk guitarist wrote, “I’m looking around for the opportunity to start playing music in public. I went to a jazz club in Aix the other night and stood in for about half-an-hour with some other students.” Other accounts from Aix at that time portray an erudite young man, emboldened by cannabis, using the opportunity to finesse the persona of a romantic young poet. American singer Robin Frederick – whose song Been Smoking Too Long is covered on Family Tree – was resident at Aix at the same time. “His physical grace and the aura of the Bohemian poet made it easy to fall for him,” she recalls, “I remember him showing up at my door one winter night with a dark velvet jacket but no coat. And it was cold! So here was a guy that was determined to look cool!”

Gabrielle Drake says she remembers the day in her brother strolled into the family drawing room following “what we would now call a gap year” in Aix-En-Provence. His confidence had grown. So had his hair. Though usually eager to play down aspects of her brother’s life which have since become mythologised, Gabrielle acknowledges that “Aix was a pivotal point in his life.” I suggest to Gabrielle that one of the most impressive aspects of his apprenticeship is the methodical nature of it. Most aspiring artists mark their own progress by writing songs. Prior to leaving for Aix, Nick Drake had never written a song. There was no indication that a year later, he would be have written the breathtaking bulk of Five Leaves Left. It was as though the jigsaw of his influences had to be completed and scrutinised before Nick Drake could rearrange it to reflect who he had become. Only then, could he start in earnest.

“Well yes – that’s a quality he inherited from my dad,” smiles Gabrielle, as though the thought has only just occurred. Because my dad was an engineer, he was very methodical. He would say, ‘Let’s look at this properly’ and bring his mind to bear upon it, so that he could start working on it in earnest. I think that Nick probably did that too.”

Despite that fleeting plan to become the new Nina and Frederik, Gabrielle and Nick Drake never worked together. In a strange way, his death has made more of a team of them than it did in life. The promotion that Drake found so cripplingly difficult in his final years – this was a man who left the completed master of his final album Pink Moon in the reception of his record company without declaring what it was – is now left to his sister. It’s a duty which she carries out with a modicum of ambivalence. “In one way, I don’t enjoy talking about Nick too much, because every time you repeat a story it makes it less true.” Perhaps that’s why she has refused to give her assent to a film. “Any films which deal with the lives of artists end up making them smaller, not bigger.”

Besides, it might be that all the narrative Nick Drake’s life needs is the one detailed by his recorded work – from the tentative self-discovery of Family Tree to the five, final songs, recorded in 1974, which portray a beleaguered soul trying to understand a world that has somehow failed him. It feels pertinent to tell Gabrielle that one thing that distinguishes Family Tree is its frequent air of levity. It’s a chronicle of happy times. “Well, a person isn’t his work,” she smiles, “In his time, Byron attracted a litany of and would-be poets who, he wrote, ‘expect me to be in a perpetual state of poetic creation. Good God though! How would one ever shave in such a condition?’”

Twenty-three years ago, when – as Nicola Freeman – Gabrielle Drake took over the Crossroads motel, most of her interviewers had never heard of Nick Drake, less still knew that he was her brother. Now she seems relieved that his fame has gradually overtaken hers. In 2004, Brad Pitt offered to narrate Lost Boy – a Radio 4 documentary about Drake. Its producer David Barber had initially started work on the programme twelve years previously, but stalled when he couldn’t get anyone to broadcast it. “At the time, when he told me that he couldn’t interest any radio stations in it, I decided not to tell my mother. I knew she didn’t have many months to live, and why make it worse? And in way, I’m glad I didn’t tell her, because she died thinking that something was going to happen. And, of course, something did happen.” Registering the photographer’s arrival, the immaculately coutured guardian of Nick Drake’s legacy rises and declares, “I must titivate myself!” – before returning to her thread. “So, you see, hindsight has vindicated my deception!”

“I started becoming bitter, and a little bit lost in the whole game,” Plan B, July 2010

Another hot high noon in East London means that the huge glass doors across the front of The Vortex have been thrown wide open. As Ben Drew – or Plan B, as you’re more likely to know him – crosses the paved expanse in front of it, Frank Sinatra booms emphatically from the outdoor speakers. Dotted around the place, three or four small clusters of mostly young black men shoot the breeze. Despite an album – The Defamation of Strickland Banks – that has yet to leave the top ten since its release in April, and a recent supporting role alongside Michael Caine in Harry Brown, no-one recognizes him. Were he to wear the suit that has acted as his de facto uniform in the videos to Stay Too Long and She Said, it might be a different story. But, seated outside this bar in shorts and a t-shirt, 26 year-old Drew looks like almost any young white man who knows how to look after himself in Dalston: squaddie-length hair, a slight pallor and eyes that defy you to think the worst of him. If you made him smile, you’d really feel like you’d earned it.

We met once before, I tell him. Surprisingly, he remembers. It was in the Hoxton Bar And Grill. Drew drank Jack Daniels and Coke and talked about the father who, at that point, he hadn’t seen for 15 years. “My granddad has cancer,” he said, “He’s lying in a fucking hospital bed. He’s blind and he’s deaf. He has a hearing aid in one ear, and he can hear about 20 per cent out of it. The muscles in his leg have stopped working. And my f***ing dad don’t give a shit.” It was an unusually intense encounter. Drew’s debut album Who Needs Actions When You’ve Got Words had already been out for a few weeks, and – though neither of us said it – we both knew that if things were going to take off for him, it would have already done so by now. The cliché about debut albums (usually cited when bands are struggling to succeed them) is that you have your whole life to write them. But in the case of a record that talked his absent father, his mother’s subsequent relationship with a crack user and the various addictions of his friends in Forest Gate, the cliché never rang truer. Drew had bared his soul – and all, apparently, to no avail. After a week at number 30, his album dropped out of the chart.

All of which, I bring up because – well, to be honest, I thought we would never hear from him again. In a life already coloured by rejection, this would surely have to be one too many. It seemed inevitable that this would be the point where his anger would turn inwards. Most of his friends in Forest Gate, where he grew up, had turned to drugs. The one time Drew had tried heroin, as a 16 year-old going to Glastonbury, he remembers asking the stranger who gave it to him why he had started taking it. “He told me about how he was molested as a kid. That was his reason.” Drew says that if he was ever going to let his circumstances swallow him up, 2007 was the year it would have happened. He scoured magazine articles in the hope that another musician might namecheck his work, but to no avail. Assurances from Radio 1, that they would playlist his single Mama, foundered when the song barely scraped the station’s C-list. His record company spent £40,000 only to release the song a week after the release of the album on which it already featured.

“I started becoming bitter, and a little bit lost in the whole game,” he recalls, in a cloud of his own cigarette smoke. “That’s how I wrote Stay Too Long. I haven’t got a problem with drink, but if you’re feeling bit insecure, and you’re in the wrong environment, around the wrong people, then you’re going to get into a situation where someone really offends you to the point where you wanna smash their face in. So I kept on getting into these situations where I’d go out with my mates, and they’d go, ‘Look Ben, we’re going.’ I would just stay on, then someone who’s being introduced to me as a fan starts to take the piss.”

It’s hard to ascertain how many times Drew fell into this pattern. On the occasion that made him resolve to change, he remembers asking a stranger what he did. “I seem to spend half my life talking about myself, so when he tells me he was a hairdresser, we go outside for a cigarette, and I’m talking to him about his job. Suddenly, he’s like, ‘Don’t you think we’ve been talking about barbering a bit too long now, mate?’” Drew relives the slight. Hurt and fury blur into one red mist. “You open up to people and you give them a chance to take the piss, innit? So I ended up thinking, ‘I’m not having it from this c***. I walked past him and barged him. He said, ‘Yo man, you just barged me.’ I said, ‘What are you gonna do about it?’ By this time, all these people are in the way telling me to calm down. I end up kicking a dustbin as the police get out, and then I just start shouting abuse at the police. So I’m arrested and I spend the night in a cell. They charged me and I had to go to court. Suddenly, I’m on suspended sentence. If I do anything else, I’m getting done for that, I get a criminal record, then it becomes hard to sell my music in America.”

Drew reasoned that he could either give up the drink that released his insecurities or he could tackle those insecurities head on. Looking up “anger management” in the Yellow Pages, he alighted on an address is Hackney and saw the same therapist on a weekly basis for a year. What did he learn during that time? “What did I learn?” Rotating the ice in his ameretto and coke, he chooses to address his glass rather than me. “I had stripped layers of confidence from myself to the point where I was a nervous wreck. I had no sense of humour. I couldn’t talk.”

Though he told his therapist what he did, Drew says he doesn’t know if she ever got around to hearing his music. Much of what he presumably told her over the course of a year, she could have got in condensed form on Who Needs Actions When You Got Words. “How long’s it been dad?” began I Don’t Hate You, before lyrically dismantling the father who left the family home when Drew was six. Drew’s father Paul Ballance had been a musician himself, fronting East London pub rock combos such as Dogwatch and Warm Jets – but when Ballance became a born-again Christian, Drew claims his father would use their fortnightly days together to spew passages from the Bible, using Mars bars as an incitement to pray. If nothing else, the recollections prompted the memorable couplet, “Everytime you put something in your mouth you had to pray to Jesus/Why the f*** do you think I never used to eat Maltesers?” For their creator’s ability to articulate the moment when victim turns perpetrator, other songs were chillingly reminiscent of Eminem at his best. Listen to the child on No More Eatin’ trying to explain to his stepfather why he didn’t retaliate when his bike was stolen, and the hurt in Drew’s bug-eyed refrain is one of the most unsettling sounds you’ll ever hear on an album of any genre.

By the age of 15, it became abundantly clear that whatever issues Drew was having to deal with, mainstream school was not managing to contain them. All these years later, he’s still visibly aggrieved at the memory of being upbraided by his drama teacher after an argument with a pupil over the direction of a project left his classmate in tears. She said, ‘I won’t have you making any student of mine feel uncomfortable. I was like, ‘Are you f***ing dumb, miss? Are you dumb? This girl, she’s manipulative. She’s chatting s**t to you, to get what she wants.’ I walked out, ripping all her posters off the wall, calling her a f***ing slag.”

Having already been expelled from two secondary schools – the second for throwing a chair across a classroom – he was sent to The Tunmarsh Pupil Referral Unit for “persistent non-attenders and excluded pupils.” It was here that Drew met Jo Bates, then a learning mentor at Tunmarsh. Bates remembers a teenager who “wouldn’t just accept what you told him.” Whilst such qualities might have been a problem in a mainstream secondary school, Bates says that Drew’s “questioning” nature was part and parcel of his creativity. Both she and Drew tell a story concerning his GCSE art project, but the differences in their recollections are telling. Bates only remembers the end result – “a huge multimedia thing that took everyone’s breath away.”

When Drew tells the story, you get a greater measure of the sort of sensitivity his character required. Lapsing into the vernacular of surly asbo youth, he remembers being in two minds about going through with his final exam. “My teacher was, like, ‘What’s the matter?’ I’d be like, ‘Everybody else is painting. I can’t be bothered. I haven’t got enough time. I’m late. I want to get a camera and take pictures, and I want to f*** about on photoshop.’” Drew’s project – which eventually involved a series of portraits distorted, printed onto acetate and subsequently projected – earned him an “unprecedented” A*. “They even exhibited it at East London University,” beams Bates.

Which is the better feeling – the A* or having an album go in at number one? For a second, Drew is a man bamboozled by the prospect of comparing such completely different chapters of his story. Considering how much he wanted the validation of a hit record, the sense of calm when it finally happened caught him unaware. It was a sunny day, he remembers – “my brother’s birthday, so we had a barbecue. I cooked some bream in rum and garlic.”

The Defamation of Strickland Banks was a new direction for the rapper. When he introduced the world to his sweet soul falsetto, a minority of detractors suggested the record was a calculated attempt to turn himself into a male Amy Winehouse. In fact, he had been trying to sing soul and R&B songs ever since his godfather gave him his first guitar along with the chords to Tracks Of My Tears. “The soul thing had never worked for me before,” he remembers. As the half a million people who have bought the album will surely attest, by God does it work now. Nevertheless, even when Love Goes Down, the song that opens The Defamation of Strickland Banks, appeared fully formed, it took him a while to realise that he might be the best person to sing it.

Though the songs began to come thick and fast, Drew told himself that he would sell them on to other artists. Only when he alighted on a narrative to knit them all together did he realise he had written most of his second album. On the face of it, Plan B’s second album may seem like a distancing from the raw memoir of its predecessor. In fact, there’s more of Drew in the story of Strickland Banks than one might first imagine. The album, sung from the first-person perspective of its main protagonist, tells the story of a soul singer who yields to the after-show advances of an obsessive fan. When it becomes clear that the arrangement is nothing more than a one-night stand, she then alleges that he raped her. After being tried and convicted of the charges, songs like Welcome To Hell and The Recluse chronicle Banks’ struggle to adjust to prison life – a struggle which climaxes when an attack from another inmate causes Banks to kill him in self-defence. Listen to his supercharged display on new single Prayin’, and you realise it’s the perfect conceit for someone who has spent most of his life defying people in positions of authority to condemn him. Save for the mechanics of the plot, it really isn’t such a great remove from what’s been happening to him for the last 20 years.

For the first time in his life, Drew has more options than he can action. Having been given a supporting role in Adulthood after director Noel Clarke saw him in the video to Mama, this year saw the release of Harry Brown – in which Drew starred opposite a vigilante Michael Caine. “Did I get on with him? It was fine. To be honest, we were all too intimidated by him to try and talk to him. I didn’t want to taint the experience by saying something stupid.”

On screen, it’s fair to say that it’s Drew that cuts the more intimidating figure. He says that he only accepted the role of amoral East End gang member Noel Winters on the proviso that director Daniel Barber let him change some of his character’s lines. “I said, ‘Look, there’s a hundred other kids you could get, but you’re getting me for a reason. You want realism and I can give you that… otherwise there’s no point. You can get some middle-class thespian.” If the scene which depicts Drew in his interrogation cell, hissing sexual obscenities at his female inquisitor, is anything to go by, Barber was well advised to let him.

Far from being fazed by the momentum his star seems to have gathered, Drew carries himself like a man who has spent the last few years meticulously preparing for just such a moment. In a few minutes, he’ll race off to attend a script meeting for III Manors – a film comprising six short stories, all by Drew, which he will also be directing. Plans for a Strickland Banks movie are also afoot. Somewhere amid all this, Drew is also finding time to write with other artists. He’s working on songs with French singer Sophie Delila, and produced an album by When We Are Kings – the latter fronted by his best friend and recovering heroin addict Jamie King.

Is he happy? You have to ask, because in his case, it isn’t immediately obvious. Personable as Ben Drew is, I don’t think he has actually smiled once in the two hours we’ve spent together. “I had a sort of breakthrough, if you want to call it that,” he explains. “And that helped. It came about halfway through recording the album. I realised that I had already achieved what I set out to achieve. I never gave a f*** about hit records before. When I made the first album, I just wanted to make something that reflected where I came from. I told myself to stop giving a f*** about top ten records, and concentrated on making something people would like in ten years time.”

Perhaps inevitably, it wasn’t long before his father attempted to re-establish contact. When the phone call came, Drew remembers that he was in the rehearsal studio with his band. “I remember looking at everyone there, thinking, ‘You lot don’t know how significant this phone call is.’” When I met Drew four years ago, talk turned to the fact that his father had been a musician, Drew’s animosity turned to curiosity. Someone had recently told him that one of the bands his father had been in sounded “ahead of their time – like, if it came out now, you would think it was good.” After a silence of 18 years, Drew and his father agreed to meet. After everything, what hope of a rapprochement?

“Do you want to know what happened? He denies everything. All our memories of him – anything negative, it never happened. He said it’s just distorted versions of the truth that my mother implanted in my head. He started kicking up a fuss about something that was written about him on Wikipedia… I tried to explain to him that anyone can f***ing edit Wikipedia. I’m a grown man and the guy was coming to me house talking to me like I was six years old, telling me not to swear. I’m like, ‘You’re lucky I didn’t smash your f***ing face in.” So, that’s what happened. Not a happy ending, as such – but neither, Drew is at pains to point out, should it be taken as a sad one.

Tapping a cigarette against its box, he explains, “He wasn’t in my life and it was his decision. Now he’s not in my life and it’s my decision. Finally, I got what I wanted. Closure.”

"Our brains are too complicated to be still all the time." Fleet Foxes, 2008

“Have I ever [ital] what [ital]?” Robin Pecknold, frontman with Seattle four-piece Fleet Foxes, smiles to conceal his embarrassment that I might even think him capable of such a thing. He heard me perfectly the first time, but I nonetheless repeat the question. Has he ever used his music to make himself more attractive to a woman? Finally, he gathers his thoughts. “No, no… I mean, I’m the wrong guy to ask that question to. That’s the last thing I would ever do. In the big debate about what music is and how it evolved, some people reduce it to a mating call – just like a bird has a mating call. You know, I’ve heard that a couple of times. Me, personally? I think music happens because our brains are too complicated to be still all the time, you know?”

Some half an hour after coming off stage to a rapturous ovation at Brighton’s Audio club, the bearded, blue-eyed Pecknold is too distracted to appreciate the irony of his utterances. Outside the venue, as he faces the lights of the pier, two young Japanese Fleet Foxes fans stare at him with an air of respectful adoration. If truth be told, it’s a reaction that isn’t restricted to the other sex. It’s hard to recall the last time a recorded noise elicited the sort of praise reserved for Fleet Foxes’ celestial four part harmonies. You must know you’re onto something pretty special when the worst reviews elicited by your eponymous debut album stop short of meting out a fifth star.

And yet the nearest Fleet Foxes get to arrogance comes during the actual show itself, when the freewheeling backwoods canter of Ragged Wood comes to an end and bassist Christian Wargo and drummer Joshua Tillman exchange high-fives. While they, along with Pecknold’s childhood friend and guitarist Skye Skjelset retreat to another corner of the bar, Pecknold points out that, often Fleet Foxes, are no less startled by their vocal chemistry – Crosby Stills Nash and Young quietly rejoicing at the bottom of a well barely begins to do it justice – than the rest of us are. Only twelve months have elapsed since Pecknold wrote Quiet Houses – the song that prompted him to junk everything they had previously worked on and start again. What changed, exactly?

“Prior to that, there were a few songs we were working on that were very much focused on the lead vocal, you know?” He almost baulks at the apparent gaucheness of such a conceit. “And I wanted to do a song that was the extreme opposite of that – where the vocals were just part of the music, and not just a platform for this guy, you know?” Not for Pecknold then, the ego-massaging benefits of lead-singerdom, the license to be just that little bit more cocksure than the rest of us? Fleet Foxes’, well… let’s call him their primary songwriter finds himself getting embarrassed “very quickly” by the mildest of misunderstandings. At some length, he relates a story about a show in Oklahoma with bucolic freak-folkers Blitzen Trapper, in which the venue owner’s wife served up separate meals for both bands. Pecknold asked if there might be any vegan food available, and when he returned to eat it, he recalls that “some guy who looked like me had been given the food.” At this point, all parties realised what had happened. Not a major faux, pas you would think – but Pecknold recalls feeling so embarrassed, he had to run back and hide in the van. It’s a tendency, he says, that his girlfriend finds exasperating at times. “If I order a coffee and they give me the wrong one, I would rather throw it away and buy a new one,” he smiles, “It drives her nuts.”

If the tics and traits of an “inward looking” childhood, remain mostly intact, it’s perhaps not so surprising. “By the time I was dressing myself,” says Pecknold, “I was uncomfortably overweight to the point where I would want to wear a t-shirt in the water when I was a kid.” It was by deciding to cut animal and dairy products from his diet at the age of 14 that the pounds started to fall off. “I went on a big bicycle trip – like, a summer camp thing – and decided I didn’t want t eat all the crappy food that everyone else had. At the same time, I had just heard about what a vegan was, so I told everyone that I was a vegan so I could eat special food.”

By the end of the summer, Pecknold returned home 30lb lighter. In keeping with what we already know about him, he says he’s thankful that his parents withheld from making a big deal of the transformation. “I think they knew to not make a big stink about it, so it’s not like you feel that they’re suddenly into you now. You know that they love you no matter what, you know?”

By this time, Pecknold – whose father builds boats and guitars for a living – was writing his own songs. Despite growing up in the town where grunge took off, Pecknold – just seven when Kurt Cobain did – found his inspirations elsewhere. His obsession with Bob Dylan made the life of a lone troubadour seem like a viable vocation. “The first time I heard Boots of Spanish Leather,” recalled his older sister Aja (yes, as in the Steely Dan album) “it was as if all of the oxygen had been drained from the room, suddenly replaced with the wavering golden longing of this one song. “Only it wasn’t Dylan singing, it was my 14 year-old brother.”

Written shortly after his return from that momentous camp expedition, his first song Sarah Jane was “just some story about a girl whose dad hated her and kicked her out, so she had to become a prostitute, then she became pregnant. A sob story, basically.” Looking back, Pecknold characterizes his early songs as attempts to write songs like his other musical role model Elliott Smith – “to see how he does it, you know?”

Perhaps a touch facetiously, I suggest that having a massive heroin problem seemed to help in that particular instance. Pecknold remembers being desperate to go and see Smith on his last ever Seattle show, but being too young to go. “That was the last chance I could have seen him, and I heard that tour was terrible. He could barely remember the words to his songs.”

Any worries that Pecknold may seek to lubricate the cogs of creativity in a similar way are without foundation on the basis of tonight’s encounter. Supping water from a polystyrene cup, he responds to a question about sharing drugs with his baby boomer dad by saying, “That has never come up. I don’t smoke weed. And I don’t think he does, either… although maybe he did at some point. Besides, having a drug habit implies you have money to spend on drugs. As it is, I might have to take a job when I get back to Seattle. I was a cook in a restaurant kitchen, so I’ll probably go back to doing that.” Having made the most unanimously feted album of 2008, it seems incredible that this even constitutes a possibility – but Pecknold says his band wouldn’t even be here in Europe had their label not advanced them £20,000 to finance these shows.

Far from complaining, however, Pecknold’s tone, in fact, is one more of gratitude that someone advanced his band the money in the first place. As if to mitigate any accidental negativity, he adds, “Maybe I’ll just be able to do get part-time work when I return. But hey, I don’t want to sound like a grouch. There’s nothing I really long for right now.” He pauses briefly. “Well, maybe nothing except for a list of countries where it’s acceptable to tip taxi drivers… because that’s another source of continual awkwardness.”

"I looked uncomfortable? That’s how I usually feel." Beyoncé, November 2008

On the steps of the Mandarin Hotel in Knightsbridge, Beyoncé Knowles is stepping out to meet the gathered paparazzi. From the hotel foyer, looking out into the filthy London rain, she’s a silhouette in a strobe of flashbulbs. A couple of young male fans are allowed to step forward, for a moment with their heroine. Instinctively, the first one places his left arm around the singer. No less instinctively, a vast minder detaches the arm from Beyoncé’s black-and-white designer dress, and places it back where it came from.



Before you’ve even met Beyoncé, it’s an episode that flags up something unusual about her brand of star quality. Fans of, say, Madonna or Cher wouldn’t dare entertain notions of placing an arm around their idols. Though still only 27, Beyoncé has had plenty of opportunities to appropriate their brand of starry untouchability. It’s three years since she formally dissolved Destiny’s Child after three albums and a run of machine-tooled, Grammy-chomping R&B hymns to womanly empowerment anthems such as Survivor and Independent Woman; six since her duet with Brooklyn rap demigod Jay-Z on his 03’ Bonnie & Clyde served notice to the world that America’s foremost hip-hop star and emerging queen of R&B were an item. In the past year alone, she is said to have earned $80 million from record sales, film appearances and endorsements. And yet, in the flesh, it all seems a galaxy away from her disarmingly open body language.



Two days previously, it’s precisely that lack of celebrity airs that the warm-up comic on Strictly Come Dancing picks up on, when she prepares to perform her new single If I Was A Boy. Relishing her presence on his territory, he leers, “You know, Beyoncé, you’re the kind of girl I could take to McDonalds and let you go large.” Her vulnerability is compounded when he enquires as to the whereabouts of Jay-Z, who she is rumoured to have married two months before his momentous Glastonbury performance this year. On hearing Jay-Z’s name, the gleam of her diamond-studded heels darts up to her eyes. “He’s looking for you,” she tells the comic. For a fleeting second, the Amazonian Beyoncé of Destiny’s Child is resurrected – just long enough, in fact, to terminate the exchange.



Reminded of the encounter, back at the Mandarin, she laughs. “I looked uncomfortable? That’s how I usually feel. When I walk into a room and everyone is looking at me, it’s still embarrassing.” After all these years, her singing persona and her private persona may never merge. But far from attempting to reconcile them, Beyoncé’s new double album I Am… Sasha Fierce embraces that division. Drop the first disc – the I Am bit – into the CD tray and, according to Beyoncé, you will hear the purest expression of the person she is “underneath the make-up.” Take her at her word and it would seem that, left to her own devices, the “real” Beyoncé of soft-scented power ballads like Halo and Satellites bears scant resemblance to the 22 year-old who, in 2003, lit the touch paper on her solo career with Crazy In Love.



But, of course, there’s another CD stuck to the back of I Am… to tell us that it’s not that simple. Anyone pining for the formidable Beyoncé of old will find her all over Sasha Fierce. The other half of Beyoncé’s album is just the kind of name a shy, privately-educated Houston daughter of a medical supplies salesman father and hairdresser mother might come up with when struggling to come to terms with the volcanic transformation she undergoes when she performs. And, indeed, watching the leotard-clad singer shaking her wondrous thighs on the video to her other new single Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It) – seven million Youtube viewings do date – it’s a part she plays astonishingly well.



It was, she insists, not quite as premeditated as that. “But there’s no doubt that in Sasha mode, things happen that wouldn’t normally happen. A few years ago, on stage, I had these earrings on, which were designed by Lorraine Schwartz. Anyway, we’re in the middle of the song and one of them fell. And, you know when you’re in the moment? I threw it out, and when I finished the performance, I thought, ‘What did I just do?’ Afterwards, my cousin – who is also my assistant – came in and was like, ‘You know, we’re gon’ have to have to tame Sasha.’”



The more she talks about it, the more it sounds like a coping mechanism; a device which allows her to normalize a life which, since forming Girl’s Tyme – aged just 10, with future Destiny’s Child cohort Kelly Rowland – hasn’t been terribly normal. She resents a lingering perception that suggests she was groomed for success in the way that, as children, Michael Jackson, or Britney Spears, might have been. In fact, two years elapsed between the dance classes she began attending as an eight year-old – to help overcome her shyness – and the first time her father (who eventually gave up his job to manage her, and even now, shares the credit of Executive Producer on her new album) saw her perform.



“The singing… when that began, [it] was definitely an escape,” she recalls. An escape from what? The answer, she thinks, has something to do with the birth of her sister Solange when she was five. “When she was born, I became the protector, and…”



The responsible one? She nods. “So, as an introverted kid, the stage was my place, where I could do whatever I wanted, and I wasn’t afraid of anything.” She is palpably a very different creature to Solange. Whereas an interview with Beyoncé amounts to a warm, yet ultimately tactful tango of discourse, an encounter with divorced single mum Solange Knowles – now also a singer – is characterised by statements such as, “I think people focus too much energy on getting people to like them… I’ve never felt any validation from that.” Whatever Beyoncé chooses to call herself, it’s hard to imagine her penning a title like ChampagneChroniKnightCap – the paean to self-medication which graced her sister’s recent album. “My sister…” says Beyoncé, struggling to stifle an almighty grin, “she definitely walks to a beat. The beat [of] Solange! She was born Sasha Fierce!”



With the role of family diva long since sewn up by Solange, it’s no wonder that Beyoncé has diverted a whole side of her personality into her creative life. In a story that she seems to enjoy retelling, the one time Beyoncé got close to entertaining delusions of diva-dom, she was publicly upbraided in a Houston record shop by her mother. After pointedly carrying on singing whilst her mother was asking her a question, the singer was slapped in the face and made to sit in the car. Perhaps, the most remarkable thing about this story is that Beyoncé was nineteen when it happened, with Destiny’s Child’s The Writing’s On The Wall well on its way to selling 16 million copies.



As a singer, she says that the challenge of keeping her feet on the ground has come down to taking none of it too seriously. However, acting has made different demands of her. Immersing herself in the character of Deena Jones – loosely based on Diana Ross – for 1996’s Dreamgirls, Beyoncé later admitted that “I had to be moody and angry to make this role work. I was creating drama in my life so I had something to feed off. I was mad at everyone.”



Who, exactly? “Well, like my dad. I would have fake conflicts that weren’t really going on! So now, my dad is like, ‘When you’re doing a movie, I’m staying far away.’” This year, she completed work on Cadillac, playing legendary blues singer Etta James alongside Adrien Brody – a film chronicling the turbulent life of James, played out among the daily dramas that marked the rise and fall of Chess Records. This time, Beyoncé found herself able to demarcate between life and work. “It wasn’t like I wasn’t terrified,” she explains, “When you’re playing someone who is addicted to heroin and every other word is profanity… it was just so different from me.” So what changed this time? Though surely not intended as a slight to Diana Ross, Beyoncé exclaims, “I didn’t have to work as hard to make Etta seem interesting. It was all on the page. And, of course, I drew from the pain in my own life.”



If no film character is entirely a work of fiction, that leads you to wonder if the same can be said of the characters created to make music. Much of the fun to be had from listening to the second part of I Am… Sasha Fierce is spotting where the façade cracks. Graceful, demure, shy Beyoncé would surely never flaunt her man’s USPs as boldly as Sasha does on Ego. “Let’s get lost/Who needs to call into work/Cos you’re the boss… I love his big ego, too much/He walk like this/Cos he can back it up.” Nevertheless, it’s hard not to see Jay-Z – formerly President of Def Jam Recordings, now co-founder of the StarRoc label – in those words. “I am attracted to someone that is strong and confident,” she begins. “Now, someone that is obnoxious and talks about themselves all the time and is overly confident is completely unattractive to me.”



Mention of Jay-Z’s headlining Glastonbury performance – a billing that seemed to offend Noel Gallagher and millions of other people who felt hip-hop had no place at the festival – elicits a proud glow. “I remembered seeing all the tents. I had never seen so many people. I’ve been at big shows before, but everyone seemed like they were in their own world. It was something I would definitely love to do myself one day. I knew that everybody would love Glastonbury, you know? But, whenever there’s controversy, it’s a little like, ‘OK, what’s gonna happen?’ It was like the [American Presidential] Election!”



She shoots a playful glare to let you know that she’s aware of the exaggeration. Nevertheless, both events signalled paradigm shifts in their spheres. This month, the hitherto apolitical Beyoncé travelled between Tampa and Miami in Florida and then Virginia to “meet thousands of people that have been waiting in the lines [to vote] to encourage other people to come and wait in the lines. Then, on the night, I was home with my friends and we had… you know, red white and blue balloons everywhere, and we had flags. I mean, this is new to me. It was like watching a Martin Luther King speech. He has a light, you know?”



Having discussed two big days in Beyoncé’s year – Glastonbury and the US election – it seems only fitting to round things off with a third. Which was the most nerve-racking of all – either of the aforementioned, or her wedding? For a nanosecond, she looks like she might, for the first time, let slip inadvertent confirmation of her nuptials. “That’s a good question,” smirks Beyoncé.



I persist. Hmm, Glastonbury, then? Solange would have surely thrown me out by now, but Beyoncé merely laughs. “And you’re good, ’cause you’re waiting for me to answer! Hahaha! I’m not saying anything. I’m just a’smile!”



One more try. Does that mean the wedding list question is out too? More laughter. In the ante-room, anxious ruffling can be heard. This time, no intervention is necessary. Between them, Beyoncé Knowles and Sasha Fierce have it covered.

"There is only one Dr Who, and that is Tom Baker." Ray Lamontagne, October 2008

Ray LaMontagne says that there are some days when he doesn’t want to leave his hotel room, such is his aversion to facing the world and the people in it. And when those days come along, he has no choice but to simply force himself. It’s hard to tell if today is one such day. At the Opera House in Boston, his band are already soundchecking when he leaves his room, at the nearby Hyatt, to join them. Such is his skill at not drawing attention to himself that you only notice his arrival when he dons his guitar and leans into a mike at the far right of the stage to sing Winter Birds, from his imminent third album Gossip In The Grain. Singing seems to make him appear. And sure enough, when he stops singing, he is barely there at all. If the song is anything to go by – a hushed woodland paean to nature going about its business, oblivious to human eyes – perhaps 35 year-old LaMontagne seems that way to the animals too.



Like the female fans who will tell him they love him between every song he later plays, your instincts towards him are wholly protective. It’s cold backstage. Shouldn’t he be wearing something over his t-shirt? Apparently not. It turns out that, in sharp contrast to, say, Van Halen and their “no brown M&Ms” rule, his rider demands are primarily atmospheric. “I prefer to have it this way. I like to feel cold.” Tempting as it is to trump his social ineptitude with a little of your own – “Cheer up! It might never happen” – something tells you the consequences would be catastrophic.



Sure, there are moments of unprecedented levity on Gossip In The Grain. As the title indicates, Meg White is an empathetic show of support for The White Stripes drummer, who he feels has been unfairly maligned by sections of the music press – while, by his standards, the lugubrious ragtime thump of Hey Me, Hey Mama is a veritable hoot. But the truth is that LaMontagne’s popularity is a paradox that he has yet to untangle. His crippling introversion is what lends his broken-winged blues its power. On the other hand, it’s also why his public performances are so fraught with what the bearded troubadour refers to as “anxieties”.



By his own reluctant admission, anxieties pepper LaMontagne’s life like sand on a beach towel. Raised alongside his brother and four sisters by his mother, LaMontagne’s childhood was a blur of continual relocation, a relative’s backyard here, camping in Tennessee horse ranch there. Perpetually “the new kid” at school, he was routinely victimised. His mother, he says, “was very strict. Public television was all we were allowed to watch, and in very limited doses. There was no candy, no sugary cereals.” It’s impressive, I say, to hold firm on those sorts of values in adversity, but LaMontagne’s answer suggests that I’m conferring my own middle-class sensibility on, what was mostly a practical problem. “She was kind of broke, so that maybe helped.”



Of the television he was allowed to watch, the only thing he remembers making any kind of impression were old Dr Who reruns on PBS. “I was a big fan,” he says. Has he seen any of the recent series? How do they compare to the old ones? Finally, reticence gives way to indignation. “There is only one Dr Who,” he says emphatically, “And that is Tom Baker. He is the only one. That’s it.” Then a pause. “Although William Hartnell was pretty great too.” I offer to send LaMontagne a DVD of David Tennant in Dr Who – although someone witnessing his reaction from afar would think I had offered to sew sardines into the hem of his curtains. “No, no, no… I can’t stand that stuff. The old shows had no special effects, and that is what made it great. It was so creative. It did so much with so little. Where is the fun in making everything computer-generated?”



How bad does a childhood have to be before memories of it fail to elicit even a gram of nostalgia? We’ve all met people who “had nothing” but were somehow happy. When LaMontagne talks about sitting beside his sister, by the glow of a small black and white TV, and watching those flickering images of Tom Baker, the memories seem more good than bad. But not to him. “I really don’t think I get nostalgic about anything,” he says.



What about records? Everyone has certain records that sweeten the memory of hard times. “We didn’t have a stereo or any of that stuff,” says LaMontagne, sinking his hands into his thick beard. “It was literally whatever we could fit into the trunk of the car.” If LaMontagne really did grow up in a music-free environment, that perhaps accounts for the near-mythical epiphany that took hold when, woken up by his radio alarm at 4am, he had a life-changing experience. Hearing Stephen Stills’ paean to leaving the system behind Treetop Flyer, he left his job in a shoe factory and, for the first time, acknowledged that music may be something that existed in him too.



After picking up the guitar for the first time, eight years elapsed before, aged 26, he recorded his voice to see what it sounded like. “I didn’t like it at all”, he says, “although, in truth it sounded much the same as it does now.” Perhaps his reticence to do so until this point had something to do with the fact that his estranged father – who he has spoken to for “about one and a half minutes in the last 20 years” – had also been one. Almost as if denial of the DNA they share, LaMontagne confirms that his father knows he turned out to be a musician too. However, beyond that, “he’s not worth discussing”.



LaMontagne talks about his tentative forays into a recording studio as though they were a guilty secret – an extravagance he could ill afford, considering the fact that he had a wife and two young boys to support. By the time, he came to the attention of Ethan Johns – who produced his 2004 debut Trouble, LaMontagne had trained to become a carpenter. By night, he might earn up to $200, playing the coffee houses of Maine.



“He’s come a [ital] long [ital] way since the first time I met him, says Johns, currently filling on drums at LaMontagne’s live shows. “But I think there was an instant connection with us. “He saved up something like $5000 and bought himself some land with it. And while his wife and two young boys lived in a camper van next door, he built a log cabin. He dug the well, did the whole thing… like something out of Jeremiah Johnson [the Robert Redford film about an American soldier forced to live outside of society]. Then, after they built the log cabin, he decided to tell the van and buy a Martin guitar with the proceeds. That was a real iconic moment in his life – the point where the real slog ended.”



To call it a happy ending, however, is stretching credulity. If you’ve spent years on Death Row only to earn a last minute reprieve, the tics and traits of a condemned man don’t disappear overnight. “Don’t put your trust in walls/’Cause walls will only crush you when they fall,” went Be Here Now, at the beginning last year’s Till The Sun Turns Black – before every ensuing song appeared to form a chapter the narrative of a relationship breakdown. Negotiating similar emotional and musical territory to Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, Lessons Learned seemed to freeze the moment when a comatose relationship either gives up or, somehow, finds a way to live. The songs that follow suggest that the latter turned out to be true. The last time a journalist broached the matter with LaMontagne, the singer snapped, “I won’t tolerate my business being invaded.”



Quite what a bona fide hit single – and the extra scrutiny it brings – will do for him is anyone’s guess. But, by releasing You Are The Best Thing early next year – the sort of mid-paced, radio-friendly R&B rapture that Van Morrison used to trot out in the early 70s – LaMontagne is sure to find out. This afternoon, he disdains the idea that hit singles have the power to change anything for the worse. “I don’t know what a hit single is. If people really like the song, that’s fine. The label makes more money. Maybe that translates to touring, but maybe not.” If LaMontagne talks about being an artist in crude economic terms, it’s probably because that his life has been defined by the comforts denied to him until his thirties.



He begs to differ, however. The idea that he should give his past adversities credit for his current success horrifies him. “I don’t want to go back,” he reiterates. “I want to keep going forward.” But aren’t we defined by our past? There’s a sense of entitlement – or a lack of it – to what life has to offer, that is forged in childhood circumstances. “You seriously feel like you’re the same person you were at 14? I always felt 40,” says LaMontagne. Even in the autumn, when the memory of going back to school fills you with a sense of renewal? That’s surely a universal feeling, isn’t it?



“I don’t know when kids go back to school,” he says, almost at a loss now. “I just don’t… I don’t remember when it started. I really couldn’t tell you. That is just a different life. A whole other life.”

"...like a procession of Nazi oompah-loompahs beating tin drums." Abba, The Guardian, 2002

The glass-fronted kitchen units are bright yellow and filled with many different kinds of crispbread. On the work surface there is a wooden block on which sits a large Plopp and a knife with which to cut it up - Plopp, of course, being a popular Swedish chocolate bar. When Benny from ABBA walks in, though, it's a circular disc of crispbread that he goes for. But for the greying whiskers and an expensive suit, he's barely aged since the group dissolved in 1982. Five minutes later, Björn from ABBA pulls up in his Lexus. Given that he and Benny employ everyone in the building, it's worth noticing that Björn makes his own coffee. Along with the communal Plopp and an office dog called Bjork, all the signs suggest that Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson's Stockholm HQ must be a nice place to work.

It's only after a few minutes that the nagging sense of something missing dawns upon you. But for a poster proclaiming the 1999 premiere of Mamma Mia! - Catherine Johnson's West End musical - there are no gold discs or awards to suggest that Björn and Benny's 1970s might have been unusually productive. It can't just be modesty, either, because you can't move for posters and discs relating to Chess, the 1985 musical they wrote with Tim Rice - and who remembers that?

"Actually," says Björn, deploying that impeccably precise English in which Scandinavians seem to specialise, "there aren't as many ABBA awards as you might imagine. For the main part of the group's lifespan, the critics despised us." Maybe that's why, aged 57, he seems so happy to receive them now. Last month, at the annual Tony Awards, he and Benny, 56, received two awards for the Broadway production of Mamma Mia! Two weeks ago, they arrived in London to pick up a Special International Award at this year's Ivor Novello bash, and treated the throng to an impromptu chorus of Fernando.

"It's better than receiving a Brit, isn't it?" Oh, yes, I assure him. The Brits are a bit cheesy, really. Stevie Wonder and Leiber and Stoller have won this one. "Good. That's what I'd thought."

Björn Ulvaeus has two abiding memories of the ABBA years. The first goes back to the group's Eurovision Song Contest victory in 1974. In the preceding years, Björn and Benny, along with the group's manager, Stig Anderson, had become obsessed with the contest - reasoning that it would be the only chance the group had of getting recognition beyond their own country. "Stig rightly suggested that the song should have an international theme, so we all came up with Waterloo. It's the feeling of having won that I remember more than anything else. Just sitting in a room the day after, discussing what we were going to do worldwide. Suddenly we had a sense of something beginning."

Everyone remembers the footage, of course - especially Björn's stage costume. Sporting a sparkling skintight satin jump suit with what appeared to be knee-length Cuban-heeled wellington boots, Björn looked so bizarre that security guards refused to let him pick up his composer's award at the end of the show. "They couldn't believe that someone who looked like that could have had a hand in the composition," he explains.

In truth, Björn had waited a long time to jump about on stage looking like a total loon. To understand why ABBA were so brilliant in the 70s, we need to grasp just how bad the 60s were for them. Björn spent the most exciting decade of the 20th century in the Hootenanny Singers, clean-cut, short-haired purveyors of indigenous wholesome campfire fare like Song Of The Birch and I'm Waiting At The Stack. In 1963, just as his group scored their first Swedish hit, Björn heard the Beatles. "In my guts, I instantly knew that was what I would rather be doing, but we were beginning to have some success, so we kept repeating the formula. I would have much preferred to have been in a band like Benny's."

Benny Andersson also had a fairly clear idea of what he wanted to do in 1963 - and the fact that, at 18, he already had two children with his girlfriend, Christina, wasn't going to stop him. He grew his hair long and joined Sweden's nearest equivalent to the Beatles, the Hep Stars. He shifts uncomfortably when recalling his first brush with fame. Benny was not a frequent fatherly presence.

"I felt very immature at the age of 16, but clearly I was mature enough to get a girl pregnant. Whatever I might want to think, the fact is that I chose to keep on working instead of being with my family. Which, as you can imagine, was a disaster for them. But I've been talking to the kids through the years and for some reason, they feel that I made the right choice."

"When Björn and I finally met," recalls Benny, "our bands were staying in the same hotel. We met under an elm tree in the middle of a nearby park. We figured it would be a good idea to try and write a song together." By the time they got around to it, it was more in an atmosphere of desperation than glory. The Hep Stars had split up, but the Hootenanny Singers hadn't. "I remember," says Benny, "thinking it would be great to make a record like Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys, but also wondering if I did, who on earth was going to listen to it."

Instead, they recorded the soundtrack to a Swedish soft porn movie, Inga, and plotted their next move. The details of what follow read more like the synopsis of an unmade early Woody Allen film than the genesis of a supergroup.

Agnetha Fältskog, who married Bjorn in 1971 and had already scored a string of self-composed hits in Sweden, had the most to lose from the arrangement. Björn convinced his new wife that a cabaret run might arrest his and Benny's sliding fortunes. With Benny now dating aspiring Norwegian jazz singer Annifrid Lyngstad (known as Frida), the two couples decided to put together a . . .comedy revue.

Hidden away in Björn and Benny's personal archive, there is a picture of them dressed as schoolboys with lollipops and little helicopter propellers on their hats. After a year of playing half-empty nitespots to Swedish businessmen, Björn and Benny wisely put their school uniforms away.

It wasn't until 1972, a year later, that they had the idea of making a record as a quartet. Given that the couples were near neighbours and were spending all their time together, this seems incredible. And even then, People Need Love was a world away from the breathless pop majesty with which they later became synonymous - an unsexy beer-hall clomp on which yodelling featured heavily.

Also, the group - who had so far traded as Björn & Benny, Agnetha & Annifrid - had yet to think of a proper name. That came a year later when Stig Anderson ran a competition for Swedish radio listeners to come up with something snappier. When the best names on the short list were Alibaba, Friends And Neighbours and Baba, Anderson took things into his own hands and proposed that the quartet be called ABBA. That this was also the name of a Swedish brand of canned fish didn't seem to bother him; nor did Björn and Benny's initial lack of enthusiasm. He wrote to the fish canners and asked them if they minded sharing their name with a pop group. "They wrote back and said it was fine as long as we didn't do anything that reflected badly on the fish industry." ABBA was born.

Time spent with Benny and Björn is like time spent with a married couple, as befits two people who have been working together for 36 years. Benny is the alpha male - taciturn and vaguely intimidating. He borders on truculent when asked about his private life. Björn often seems to direct his answers at Benny, as if keen not to misrepresent him. In Björn's head, you suspect Benny is still "the cool one."

Benny recalls the writing of Money Money Money: "It was originally called Been And Gone And Done It. I said, 'Do you think this is really the best you can do?' " Björn seems both embarrassed and flattered that Benny remembers the episode. Björn's second abiding ABBA memory focuses on their co-operation, too: "It has to be the day Benny and I were working on two separate song fragments. I was playing guitar and he was at the piano, just like we always were. Then we realised that if we slightly changed one of them, they formed a complete song. That was such a kick! I'll never forget it. That was when we got the melody to The Winner Takes It All."

"The songs became something of an obsession for us," admits Björn."Each song had to be different, because in the 60s, that's what the Beatles had done. The challenge was to not do another Mamma Mia or Waterloo," says Benny. From SOS ("Our first really exceptional song," says Björn), it was something that seemed to come incredibly easily to them. Not only had they mastered what people refer to as the ABBA sound, they were writing songs especially for it. Björn: "Agnetha is a soprano and Frida is a mezzo-soprano, and that choral sense of tension you get with them is what happens when they harmonise."

Björn eventually took sole responsibility for the lyrics. "It wasn't really a job I enjoyed," he recalls. "I wrote a few stinkers." Benny: "I've told the record company that instead of releasing ABBA Gold, they should put out ABBA Wood. . .but, you know, they're not so keen on it. I don't know why."

"I'd like to nominate Dum Dum Diddle for ABBA Wood," smiles Björn, referring to the infamous album track in which Agnetha bemoans playing, um, second fiddle to someone who is "only smilin'/ When you play your violin". Ouch. "I'd been working all night trying to come up with a decent lyric. And I thought, 'Well, I'd better take in something to prove that I've been working.' I showed them this song, thinking they'd say, 'Oh, no! We can't do that!'"

Benny: "And we said, 'Whatever - that's fine.'" He was improving, though. Also featured on 1976's Arrival album was Dancing Queen. Five years ago, when the Sex Pistols' 20th anniversary reunion tour came to London, John Lydon decided that the band should enter to the strains of Dancing Queen - the plan being to remind us how terrible music had become when the Sex Pistols came along. The idea backfired. On instant recognition of that piano flourish, the entire audience cheered and broke into spontaneous dancing.

Here are three wonderful yet ultimately trivial facts about Dancing Queen: (i) Benny and Björn were inspired to write it by the rhythm to George McCrae's smooth anthem Rock Your Baby; (ii) It bore the working title of Boogaloo, and for days no one in the group could work out a satisfying intro - at the last minute, Benny and Björn hit upon the idea of starting it halfway through the chorus "for maximum impact"; (iii) It is the most perfect pop song ever.

Björn: "The day that Benny and I finished mixing the instrumental track of Dancing Queen, I was so excited, I just could not rest. Agnetha was asleep and I just had to share it with someone, so I drove all over Stockholm looking for someone to play it to. Finally I ended up at my sister's house. I played it over and over again to her. We couldn't believe how good it sounded."

Benny: "It's nice if you can like a backing track, you know? But by the time it appears on vinyl, it's gone. It's over. You have no connection with it. You know that it's you, but you don't sit around thinking, 'Oh boy! Am I good or what?' It's not like that."

Björn has gone uncharacteristically silent. For him, I suspect it was a bit like that.

It's impossible to talk about ABBA without talking about the darkness that gradually pervaded Björn's writing from 1977. It's in the Bergmanesque shadow-world of I Have A Dream, a world in which believing in angels might be our best hope for accepting an uncertain future. It's in Knowing Me, Knowing You, in which two estranged lovers survey the debris of their relationship. At this point, Björn must have had an inkling that family life was not altogether compatible with ABBA. "We all hated touring," he says, "and we were always careful never to be away from Linda and Christian [their daughter and son] for more than a few days. But for Agnetha, it was really hard."

That became clear to all on the 1977 Australian tour, when the group was greeted with adulation of Beatles proportions. "If you look at ABBA - The Movie [the film shot on that tour], you'll see that she was never quite able to let go on stage. She was always a bit fearful - whereas Frida is clearly having a whale of a time," Benny recalls. In her 1997 co-authored autobiography, As I Am, Agnetha writes, "Sometimes it was awful. I felt as if [the fans] would get hold of me and I'd never get away again. It was as if I was going to be crushed. No one who has experienced facing a screaming, boiling, hysterical crowd could avoid feeling shivers up and down their spine. It's a thin line between ecstatic celebration and menace."

The year the ABBA movie came out, 1978, was also the year Benny and Frida finally married. Three months later, Björn and Agnetha divorced. Björn is keen to emphasise that "mine and Agnetha's divorce was never acrimonious. We just felt that we had grown apart." Agnetha is more elliptical. Referring to their marriage as "destructive", she says, "We all know that there is no such thing as a happy divorce. The reason behind our separation is one of those things I definitely don't want to go into."

A week after the couple spent their last family Christmas together, Björn met his current wife, Lena Källersjö, at a party. "I think," he avers, "that divorce can produce a very positive creative energy."

Most people, I tell him, find it hard to imagine why the group wanted to continue in such circumstances. "Well, I agree, it was odd in the beginning. I would come into the studio and I didn't know what she had been up to for the last two weeks, that kind of thing. But we were very professional about it. "

Did you not ask her what she had been up to?

"Hah-hah! No, I didn't ask her that!"

Abba's final two albums portrayed a man buried deep in the doubts and recriminations of his own interior world. Happy New Year, from 1980's Super Trouper album, was set at the end of a party where the "dreams we had before are all dead/ like confetti on the floor". On The Winner Takes It All, Björn wrote the lines, "But tell me does she kiss/Like I used to kiss you?/Does it feel the same/When she calls your name?" Then, in one of the greatest acts of sadism in the history of pop, he got his ex-wife to sing them. "I wrote that one very quickly," he says.

The way the song begins - "I don't want to talk" - it's like the slurred beginning of a drunken speech.

Björn: "Yes. I wanted it to be a bit like that.

Benny: "It's bloody clever."

"As a matter of fact," admits Björn, "I was quite drunk. And that's unusual, too, because it never works. Whenever you write drunk, whether it's music or lyrics, you look at it the next day and it's bullshit. But that was a good one. I remember presenting it to the girls, and there were tears, you know?"

Even the album's ostensibly cheerful title track began with the line, "I was sick and tired of everything/When I called you last night from Glasgow."

"I was especially proud of that one," beams Björn. "We had already finished the album, but we needed one more song. So I thought about those big spotlights that you get on stage. They're called super troupers, you see." He leaves a pause for effect. "But, you know, I also like the fact that the song could be about someone who is a super trouper."

As Frida's new punky haircut confirmed, her marriage to Benny was now on the rocks. Writing sessions at the group's summer retreat were yielding worrying results. The Piper saw Björn imagining the rise of some charismatic dictator in a distant land - with Agnetha and Frida's harmonies on the chorus treated to a sound like a procession of Nazi oompah-loompahs beating tin drums.

"I guess we were in a strange place," says Björn.

By the time the group's final album, The Visitors, appeared at the end of 1981, they had given up trying to pretend everything was rosy. Frida and Benny had by then divorced. Slipping Through My Fingers articulated Björn's regret at having prioritised work over Linda and Christian's early years. The title track sounded like Joy Division, and described the plight of "a Russian dissident slowly going crazy whilst waiting for that knock on the door. Somehow these were the characters I was empathising with." In terms of mood and psychosis, these songs were on a par with Pink Floyd's Animals or Radiohead's OK Computer. The sleeve showed them photographed in the reception room of some stately home, dwarfed by huge paintings of angels. All four members of the group are bathed in orange light; each is looking in a different direction.

"The sleeve designer," says Björn "was a close friend who saw what had happened in our lives."

"I thought he just liked the room," suggests Benny disingenuously.

Björn: "Yes, but it really reflects what was happening. Basically, we'd had enough."

At the time of Abba's demise, the extent of their legacy was unclear. The group never formally split - the public didn't care enough for it to warrant a formal announcement. They released a masterful farewell single, The Day Before You Came, and promoted it in Britain with a couple of glum TV appearances. Benny and Björn, of course, started hanging out with Tim Rice and decided that by using the tactical high tension of a chess tournament in the Cold War as a metaphor for failing relationships (heaven knows where they got that idea from), they might attain some of the critical acclaim owed to them.

In the 1980s, Björn and Lena moved to Henley-on-Thames and sent their children to a nearby public school. Benny remarried, developed a passion for breeding racehorses and released two albums of instrumental folk music. He and his wife also had two children. "This time," he says, "I was ready for it. It felt more relevant."

Imagining ABBA would gradually fade into insignificance, they licensed their back catalogue to a host of budget price record labels "for next to nothing". Throughout the 1980s, you could buy ABBA compilations at petrol stations and newsagents for loose change. "That was it as far as we were concerned."

For a decade, only postmodernists and pranksters seemed to ally themselves to the group's music. On their 1987 What The Fuck's Going On? album, the KLF, in their early guise as The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu, sampled the entire intro and chorus to Dancing Queen for their track The Queen And I. When ordered to destroy all copies by Abba's publishers, they drove to Sweden in an attempt to find Benny and Björn. This, it transpires, is the first they've heard about it.

Björn: "Why did they do this?"

Um, they were making a statement about the nature of copyright.

"Were they stopped?"

Well, they came to Sweden, trailed by the NME, in order to explain their actions to you, but they couldn't find you. So they put all the remaining copies of their album on a bonfire.

"That's good," notes Benny flatly. Understandably, Benny and Björn seem sensitive to the derision of others. Their first reaction to the success of tribute bands like Björn Again was annoyance. "I thought I was being sent up at the beginning. I felt that talking in these funny accents in between songs was a little too much. But when bands like U2 get in touch with you and ask you to appear on stage with them, you realise that it's just degrees of affection. I think it took us a while to come to terms with that."

Surely, though, tribute bands and the success of Mamma Mia! is about people wanting an excuse to go crazy in a public place to ABBA songs.

"I think it's kind of sad, actually," ponders Benny. "When you hear those songs being covered by young pop groups. I mean, hasn't anything happened in the last 20 years?"

"What I like," says Björn, ever the diplomat, "is when you hear it in a new song."

Max Martin, the Swedish writer-producer who penned Britney Spears' biggest hits, seems to be a case in point. The strange hymnal harmonies of Oops! I Did It Again and Hit Me Baby One More Time have Abba's DNA all over them.

"Well, some of those hits were produced in our studio, you know. Take away the production and it's actually quite a folky quality. That's why it sounds unusual to English ears. It's Swedish music with an American production."

These days, it's unadorned Swedish music that forms the basis of Benny and Björn's work. They're currently working on an English version of Kristina Of Duvemåla, their three-hour musical based on Vilhelm Moberg's 2,000-page epic about Swedish emigrants in the early 20th century. "It would be nice," says Björn, "if we could take it to London, but we're not sure at the moment." He doesn't say so, but you get the impression that backers might not be falling over themselves to invest in such a project. The problem is, I tell him, that post-Mamma Mia! musicals based on the back catalogues of established pop groups are all the rage.

Björn Ulvaeus smiles. "Ironic, isn't it? But you either accept it or give in to it. And for me, that's not what life's about. You know, last year an American promoter offered one billion dollars to reform for an ABBA tour. When an offer like that comes along, you have to seriously consider it, because for that kind of money you can build hospitals. But then the four of us ended up thinking what kind of a year that would be - all the stress of disappointing people night after night. I could imagine the looks on the faces in the audience as they realised we had grown old." He shivers at the thought. "Really, there's no amount of money in the world that could persuade me to do that."