12 December 2008. The last show on OneRepublic’s 15-month world tour. Backstage at the Grand West Arena, minutes before his band go on, singer Ryan Tedder is clearly relieved.
“All I can say is I’m excited (A) that I’m in Cape Town and (B) that tonight is the last time I have to play these 12 songs together. We’ll always be playing some of them but we’ll never play this many songs off this album after tonight,” he grins a little wearily.
The Killers are not from the Caribbean. Nor are they sadists. So what the hell are those steel drums doing on ‘I Can’t Stay’? A shuffling Calypso track that’s all pink cocktail umbrellas, palm fronds in the breeze, and the hangover from Barry Manilow’s ‘Copacabana’, it just takes the band’s new “anything goes” approach too far.
Sure, there’s nothing wrong with a bit of experimentation — elsewhere on their ’80s-obsessed third album, the Vegas quartet actually get away with ‘Careless Whisper’ saxophones and Howard Jones keyboard fills. But there’s real trouble when the song sounds best in an elevator or on call-waiting.
Robert Smith was freaked out by turning 40. “So the fire is almost out and there’s nothing left to burn,” he lamented on the confessional ’39’, “I’ve run right out of thoughts and I’ve run right out of words.”
Ten years later, he’s still here. Unchanged are the bed-head approach to hairstyling, slashed-with-lipstick style of makeup application, and the music itself: upbeat pop songs, smouldering epics, and feedback-drenched psychedelic freakouts. What’s new though is the intensity; revitalised by guitarist Porl Thompson’s return, Smith and his band have forgotten their ’80s glory days are long gone.
We’ve been conned. In the real world, a car is a comfortable place to sit during rush hour. Or, while waiting behind minibus taxis on the main road, a support structure for a hooter.
But in Hollywood, people know what a car’s really for: spinning on its roof; driving (or flying) into trees; demolishing public property; performing barrel-rolls; transporting bodies; time travelling; or making out. Even when it’s stationary, there’s more going on inside than a guy picking his nose waiting for the lights to change.
U2 go back to where it all began, with expanded reissues of their first three albums, ‘Boy’, ‘October’, and ‘War’, tracking their ascent from playing Dublin’s pubs to headlining Red Rocks Arena.
Fin Greenall is no fake, his visceral, impassioned songs are no cheap tricks.
“I’m not an actor, I’m a music guy,” says the man better known as Fink.
“A lot of these big, big stars they’re actors too, it’s part of the package that they have this song they didn’t write, about an experience they didn’t have, that was produced by someone they’ve never even met, and they’ve got to act like it’s from their heart.
“It feels like a homecoming to some extent,” Speech says of Arrested Development’s return to South Africa after 14 years.
“At that time there was a change going on — Nelson Mandela had become president — and now there’s another change, with you guys having a new president.”
Sounding supremely relaxed, with his dog barking excitedly in the background, it’s clear a lot has changed for the rapper and his group too.
Mario Joyner enjoys his freedom.
“I do only what I want to do and nothing that I don’t. I just work out, eat, sleep, date, tell jokes. That’s all I do really,” the charming – and unsurprisingly very chilled out – comedian tells me in the lounge of a swanky seafront hotel.
“I have such a relaxed life, simply because I have no-one to answer to. I’m 47-years-old, I have no kids, I have no wife, it’s just me. I can go when I want. I can wake up when I want, I have no need for alarm clocks, I have no real job – this is no real job,” he says, somewhat modestly – on 11 November he’ll have been doing standup comedy for 25 years.
Why, apart from being Australian, would two men in their late 30s take off their clothes and play with their genitals in front of a group of complete strangers for an hour?
“Because we can,” shrugs David Friend, as if we’re discussing the weather. Then again, as one half of Puppetry of the Penis, he’s been doing this professionally for a “dickade” – and most of his life before that. It began in the bath as a child, and grew at university, but his genital origami career really climaxed after teaming up with Simon Morley – their debut at 1998’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival was a big hit. Ten years later, they’re still going.
“Political correctness is a crock of shit,” says comedian Kevin Bloody Wilson.
Not exactly surprising words from the Aussie famous for less-than-PC songs like ‘Dilligaf’ (Do I Look Like I Give A F***) and ‘Do You F*** On First Dates?’
“What it does is it really stops people from using common sense,” he continues, as if we’re chatting over a round of beers in the local pub. “In my mind, common sense isn’t all that common anymore and political correctness itself is a contradiction in terms: if it’s political there’s a real good chance it isn’t f***ing correct,” he deadpans.
Nils van der Linden