Monster Children #33 is out now, for which I chased down and interviewed famed Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn [cover above] and Jamie Hewlett of Gorillaz [cover below].
You can buy it online from Colette!
LINDA PERHACS — OYSTER #96
No one has a story quite like that of psychedelic-folk artist Linda Perhacs. Born with synaesthesia, she sees swirling masses of multi-coloured light in her mind’s eye that twist, writhe and geometrise to music. In the early seventies, through her work as a periodontist in Hollywood, she met cinematic composer Leonard Rosenberg, who helped her to record her first and only album, Parallelograms. While the initial response to her music was underwhelming, it has gained a cult following in the higher echelons of the music industry, with her fans now including Daft Punk and Sonic Youth.
Zac Bayly: What were the seventies like for you?
Linda Perhacs: The seventies… Look, there was less concern with ‘me and I’ and more concern with ‘we and all of us’. I never heard the word ‘licensing’ in the seventies; I’d never even heard that word until, like, 2003 or 2005, when I became aware that my music was being used in movies. Like, the Daft Punk people used some of my music and they credited the wrong person.
Are you a Daft Punk fan?
Well, it was a patient who told me about the movie thing — a guy in the industry, whose teeth I’d helped save. He had really bad problems… It happens to a lot of guys in the film and music industries who do the mixing. They work all day and night, and sleep a couple of hours in the studio. Some of them lose track of the fact that they’re getting into their fifties and need to take care of their bodies.
So, what did he say?
His name was Ron Schwartz and he said, “You need to wake up! Your song is in a movie!” I was like, “What?” He said, “I watched Daft Punk’s movie Electroma, and there was your song ‘If You Were My Man’, and they gave the credit to the wrong person.” So, I had to make some phone calls to get everything sorted out, but that was the first time I’d heard the word ‘licensing’. By the way, Daft Punk were as shocked as I was. They’re dear friends now. Everything’s cool. Oh, that’s nice. So you didn’t worry about licensing in the seventies? It was so different back then. In the seventies, we would write songs and hand them over to people as a gift from our heart. We would go and play somewhere and we’d do it for free, because we wanted to help our community and the world. The spirit of the time was so present everywhere. Fame, beauty, licensing, age… it didn’t matter. We didn’t want baggage getting in the way.
So, I’m curious to know whether you feel or see the same things when working at the clinic that you do when you’re making music.
Oh, yes. It’s all the same energy. When you have cats, dogs or birds around you, they perceive energy that we often aren’t feeling, and they swim within that realm. I go there; I live there. Come and find me!
That’s where you spend your time?
Yeah, totally. And all the musicians that I’ve started working with in the past couple of years [such as We Are The World, Devendra Banhart and Julia Holter] have become my musical family — now we’re all doing shows together, you know? It’s amazing. I can’t describe the enjoyment of sharing this with young people. It’s the closest that I’ve ever come to the excitement that I used to feel in the seventies.
Linda, I get the impression that you could talk all day.
Oh, yes! Definitely, but… right now I’m looking for my glasses, in case I need to read anything [laughs]. Oh, you’re interested in the energies, right?
Yep.
Well, when I started reading Annie Bessant, I decided I had to ‘come out of the closet’, but I didn’t do it right away — we are living in a time when people are much more open to these sorts of things, and they don’t think it’s as weird. A few years ago, I went to the Museum of Modern Art, or something like that — the big one in LA — for a visual music exhibition, and I was looking at all these displays. Suddenly, in the middle of everything, I see Annie Bessant’s little book Thought Forms, and they have it under glass at the centre of the exhibit, because she can see music in its wavelength form! I’d been hiding that book for years, and they had it in the middle of this very prestigious place, so I decided that it was time to talk about this thing in my life.
So, you hadn’t told people that you had synesthesia before that?
No, because in the seventies — and this is something that people really don’t understand, even though they think they love the sixties and seventies — there was a very distinct difference between the ‘straight’ world and all those experimenting with ways to understand energy and different… different everything. But the straight world was where you were earning your money, so this other world was what you kept quiet and didn’t document, because it could mean your job.
Right. People might assume you were on stuff.
Yes — and that wasn’t it at all! I have seen these patterns in my mind since I was a little girl. I would see dancing patterns whenever I went to sleep. I’ve even heard things — sometimes they come through as strong as voices. I thought, “Their advice sounds logical and it sounds wise, so I better just do what I’ve heard and not ask questions.”
Can you tell me what colours you see with certain sounds?
Well, a high flute note will have a yellow tone and a distinct form that matches it. A deep, bass-y guitar will have a deep blue or a green colour, because the wavelength is slower. It’s just physics. If we could all see them, we’d probably really enjoy it. We would want to clear our own minds so that we could heighten the experience.
So, how did the song ‘Parallelograms’ come about?
I saw that song before I heard the music. I saw it as clear as day, like moving lights or a rainbow in the sky. I was like, “Am I imagining this?” It was very late at night, you see. I was driving back from Leonard Rosenberg’s house, heading towards Topanga Canyon. I think I’d maybe had a sip of wine — but mostly coffee — and it was pitch black when I pulled over. Finally, I said to myself, “Linda — that’s music.” I had to scrawl what I was seeing on bits of notepad.
How did you communicate what you’d seen to the other musicians?
Well, it was tricky. When I realised that I was going to be recording this with a full set of musicians at Universal Studios, I drew what I’d seen onto the scroll and made timing notations, but they’d never seen anything like it.
And they were into it?
Yes. Totally. They were such accomplished musicians that they’d get a little bored sometimes. But Leonard gave me a little bit of advice: he said, “Linda, if you see the black-suited executives come in behind the glass to check up on our progress, stop doing this song immediately — they’ll never understand it. Switch immediately to something simple that they’ll understand.” We had to keep it
undercover! And then, during the internet explosion of the mid-nineties, people started copying and copying my music. I was down here and didn’t even know this was going on. It culminated with a performance at REDCAT Gallery in 2009, where all these musicians [over 100] came to perform their own interpretations of my music.
Did Leonard get to see you achieving success?
No. He had no idea. I called and tried to tell him once, but I could tell that his memory had lapsed and that something was wrong. He didn’t recall who I was, and it’s not like he shouldn’t have remembered the album — partly because his first wife died right about the time the album was released, so… She was a lovely woman, as pretty as day. His wife of 20 years came to the REDCAT show, and she explained that he was far more limited in his ability to remember things in his old age. I never asked directly what it was… I’m sorry, Zac. I’m a little tired, and we’ve been speaking for a long time. Thank you so much for
the interview.
DAISY LOWE — OYSTER #96
On the day of my interview with Daisy Lowe, I’ve pretty much lost my voice thanks to a bout of the flu. My housemate warns me that I sound like a chain-smoking trannie, and I thank her for the encouraging words before stepping out into one of the bleakest days I’ve seen since arriving in the Motherland. Standing out front of her publicist’s HQ, I’m cold, tired, kind of sweaty and feel like I’ve swallowed sandpaper. Thankfully, the reception is warm: Lowe strides up to me with a huge smile — covering half the room in a few long steps — before planting two big kisses on each of my cheeks and introducing me to her adorable little Maltese puppy, Monty, who’s zipping around the floor. “I really love Oyster,” she gushes. “Oh, and by the way, thanks for getting me to play with snakes!” She admits that she didn’t sleep a wink the night before the shoot — even with the shaman-blessed, negative-thought-deterring crystals beside her bed, her mind was filled with images of snakes constricting her body before swallowing it whole. “But once I got there, there was no point in being afraid,” she adds, matter-of-factly. “So I just went there and played with them, and it was FUN — until they brought out the creepy albino one with the red eyes.”
Despite what you may be thinking at this point, Lowe’s no babbling, over-the-top airhead. She is certainly vivacious and, quite frankly, hilarious, but she’s also smart and self-aware — not exactly traits I might initially have associated with a Playboy centrefold. In fact, Lowe doesn’t embody any of the model stereotypes that you might have stored in your head. For instance, she tells me that when she was younger, she wanted to be a drycleaner. She grins, fully aware of the irony in the statement. “Are you fucking kidding me?” I say. “Look at you!” She laughs loudly and slaps her knee. “Well, look, I wanted to be a lot of things,” she explains, while picking up the fidgety mop of white hair she calls a dog and patting him lovingly. She rattles off a list that covers everything from archaeologist to marine biologist, and even “Psy-cho-an-a-ly-tics — anything to do with the brain, really.” Although she loved conducting “crazy experiments” and achieved above-average grades at school, fate had other plans for Lowe. At 15 she was discovered and signed to Select, and at 22 she’s uncharacteristically grounded despite her success in the modelling industry, having worked with star photographers like Terry Richardson and Steven Klein.
While Lowe was comfortable getting her gear off for the aforementioned Playboy cover shoot (which, incidentally, nearly crashed Oyster’s servers when we published the images online), Lowe’s not some attention-starved exhibitionist. “It Girl — that term’s horrendous!” she exclaims. “Like, the It Girls in the sixties were cool, but I hate what that word means today. I’m not like Paris Hilton, you know? I’m not keen to get my face into the papers or to be famous for doing nothing. I work hard — I’ve been paying rent and supporting myself since I was 17. I’m not like that at all.” If she’s not as attention-seeking as one might imagine someone who loves stripping down to next-to-nothing must be, what’s the appeal in modeling for men’s magazines? “It’s fun,” she explains with a shrug. “I’ve always enjoyed dancing around in my underwear, ever since the word ‘go' when my modelling career started with that work for Agent Provocateur. When it comes to modelling, that’s probably where I’m most comfortable, honestly, because I get to be silly and ridiculous and not worry about messing the clothes up.’”
No surprise, then, that she counts her shoots with Richardson amongst her favourites. “Terry Richardson is one of the most fun people in the industry,” she says. “When we did the Pirelli Calendar [in 2010], there were eleven of us running around on this island, and me and Rosie [Huntington-Whiteley] got to bunk up. We were really cute. It was really hot, and we got to roll around in this amazing underwear for about a week. There were so many of us that when one of us was off shooting, the rest of us just got to hang out and chill and gossip and drink margaritas. OK… So that didn’t reeeally feel like work!” Considering Richardson’s reputation and the scandals that have surrounded his highly-sexualised shoots over the years, I ask for the scoop on what he’s really like to work with. “He’s so not like that,” she says, shaking her head. “Really, he’s so much fun. He just exudes this sexual energy, so he doesn’t need to ask girls to take off their clothes. Honestly, they just do it! He’s got the funniest stories as well, and he’s such a mummy’s boy that he likes women that are really sweet to him. And while we were there, he didn’t sleep — he just took pictures of all of us. I swear that camera’s glued to his hand. He was like, ‘Why would I sleep? I’ve got eleven of you here, and you’re all getting into your underwear for me!’”
In that case, it’s easy to see why he and Lowe get along. She’s super sexy and a whole lotta fun — in fact, as she candidly chats away, I wonder whether her willingness to spill her guts over a cup of tea has got her into trouble in the past. In a nutshell, Daisy’s been prime media-fodder ever since she burst onto the modelling scene. At the age of 19 she starred in Class of 2008, a fly-on-the-wall reality TV show chronicling the trials and tribulations of aspiring young London creatives — naively unaware of the dangerous power that the editors had over her public image. “When they approached me, I thought it’d be cool to get paid to hang out with my boyfriend at the time [Will Cameron of Blondelle],” she explains — and honestly, what 19-year-old would have thought differently? “It just crashed and burned horrendously, though. I just remember that whole thing with me and Will saying that we really loved each other with Mark’s [Ronson, her next boyfriend] music playing over it — that was terrible!” Would she ever do it again? “Hell no!”
After such an experience it would make sense for Lowe to want to protect herself, so does she ever feel like she needs to put on an act? “I try to be myself as much as I possibly can,” she replies, a little coyly. “If I notice that I’m acting in a way that isn’t true to me, I realise that I’m surrounding myself with the wrong people at that particular time, and I go, ‘You know what? This isn’t who I am.’ I think it’s important to just be yourself.” She’s been doing Fashion Week since she was 17, but explains that it took her a good four years to start dealing with all of the insecurities that being a model and “being compared to all those tiny sticks” can give you. “I think it’s important to love your flaws, so I’m going to say ‘nothing’,” she says, when I ask her what she’d change about herself if given the chance. “I’ve learned this through modelling, and it’s an important lesson for everyone: you’ve got to love the bits you hate. And in answer to your question about what I love most about myself, I would have to say that I like how I look after the people around me that I care about. I like looking after people; it feels good. But I do have some annoying habits that I’m sure people must get tired of.”
As for those habits, it seems her fastidious cleaning regime leaves her friends and family a little irritated. “I am really difficult to get out of the door. My OCD means that I can’t leave my house until it’s spotless. My boyfriend [actor Matt Smith, who currently plays the eleventh incarnation of Doctor Who] gets so cross, because it takes me sooooo long to leave the house.” Her publicist, Liz Matthews, interjects: “I asked her the other day on the phone whether her OCD ever gets annoying, and she said, ‘No, because otherwise my house wouldn’t be so clean!’” Lowe continues, “In fact, I had a really interesting conversation with Lucy Liu at an airport about our OCD. I met her when we were both being escorted to the plane on our way to New York, and she’s almost as bad as me! She packs everything just so, like I do. We were sharing packing stories and swapping techniques — that’s an exciting story, right?”
MCQUEEN FURNITURE
Holy shit — how good is this McQueen x Hudson Furniture collaboration?
I want EVERYTHING.
I want EVERYTHING.
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