Feature: Kula Shaker • Spiritual Relationships
Kula Shaker (photo: Nicole Frobusch)
“Not dead YET.”
For better or worse, that has become my patented gallows-humored, post-pandemic response to anyone who casually inquires how I’m doing. Based on the hilarious Monty Python Death Cart scene in The Holy Grail, I’ve found it to be a good way of underscoring the gravity of COVID-19 that we have all just endured with a little levity—especially given the stark fact that I HAD nearly snuffed it a few times, courtesy of a recent Parkinson’s diagnosis, even before the lockdown of March 2020 coiled around us, giving me the idea back then that I probably would not survive much longer. Every day was an uphill Sisyphus-taxing slog, and sometimes it was just too daunting, and — in my sixties with a wild four-decades-plus rock journalism career behind me — I wasn’t looking to hitch a ride on that fateful Death Cart. But I’d bought my ticket, just in case. I was steeled and ready.
And now? Miraculously, I’m still here. Not dead yet, as it were, and my own writing was what kept me defiantly alive, as I helped every artist I possibly could with timely how-are-you-coping-with-this-darkness profiles, over 500 to date since then. It turned into the most productive, illuminating period of my life, during which I learned a LOT of truths, not all of them comfortable. All my life, I was never what you would term a ‘sharer.’ I had three credos that guided me — The less other people know about you, the better; Everybody has an agenda, and it rarely includes YOU, so just get used to it; And to the best of my knowledge, no images of myself — still, moving or otherwise — existed anywhere on the Internet. But when lockdown hit, and I started to write every article like it might be my last, I decided to finally open the cobwebbed door on my Tales from the Rock ’N’ Roll Crypt and do some sharing, starting with a literary reflection dubbed “My Back Pages” I penned for this magazine at the time, detailing a good deal of the books I turned stars onto, and ones they turned me onto in exchange. I’m still quite proud of it. But as I began to relate my amazing interactions with musicians like David Bowie, Lou Reed, Neil Young, New Order, Tom Petty, and Bono from U2, I had a cold, hard revelation: Nobody cared. Nobody really gave a single shit about what I’d always believed to be a pretty remarkable and altogether privileged existence — getting to compare thoughts, ideas, and just stories in general with the most incredible creative minds of my generation. Which I never once took for granted. And my ethical assumptions might have been horribly, horribly wrong. So not dead yet. But it started to feel like I might as well have been.
Suddenly, I was no longer granted access from certain publicists to artists I’d helped for years, decades, and the list was insidious and cancel-culture creepy. Eventually, I grew tired of fighting all these thankless Haters and unplugged my Gmail account, walked away from all my publications, and just gave up on a career I used to live for. My good friend Mark Lanegan and I used to share conspiracy theories about technology-enabled privacy invasion and MK ULTRA mind-control experiments, and then overnight; he was tragically gone. I’d had enough grim, unjustified counter-narratives; I’ve covered hundreds, thousands of performers in my 47 years of doing this, and I think time will smile favorably on me once I’m gone. And have I mentioned that I’m not dead yet?
And this serendipitously brings me to Kula Shaker. I hadn’t planned on returning to rock journalism — I’d pretty much considered my race as run, and I was tired of trying to figure out who my often fair-weather friends were from month to month. But my longtime IE editor, John Vernon — God bless the knucklehead — kept insisting that I return and that I actually had a following that cared. I didn’t buy it — told him everybody seemed glad that I was gone, sadly, even though I’d been terribly misjudged in the process. Finally, over the past few months, I agreed to a tentative comeback and spoke to my old Mancunian chum Guy Garvey from Elbow, and it felt great just to hear his personable voice again, even though I’d just talked to him during the pandemic. So I wasn’t completely back in the fold, mind you, but I was confident enough to then agree to once again interview Crispian Mills once when a true-blue publicist friend pitched him and his group’s great new full-length Natural Magick, plus a new double-A-side single “Rational Man”/“Bringing it All Back Home,”, especially since my August 1996 night in London with him and his group celebrating Kula Shaker’s exotic debut disc “K” was one of the craziest, most unbelievable evenings I’ve ever experienced, and I was the only journalist present who tumbled down said surreal rabbit hole. So here’s yet another tale that only I could tell — this all actually happened, and I hope you all enjoy it.
It was one of my first junkets to London, and I took it because I really dug the group’s mystical, far-Eastern-filigreed sound and cerebral, spiritual lyrics. Plus, Mills hailed from showbiz royalty — his mother is renowned actress Hayley Mills, his aunt, actress Juliet Mills, and his grandfather was noted English thespian Sir John Mills, which I thought would lead to a fascinating interview. I was right; It did. Several US writers were flown over by Columbia Records, under the auspices of the delightful Kris Ferraro, the effervescent antitoxin to all the venomous flak vipers I’ve been bitten by over the years — we got the work done, but we had a total blast. Cut to: A London nightclub — the Astoria, I think it was? — and Kula Shaker is onstage, debuting kinetic K material, even a psychedelic cover of Deep Purple’s “Hush,” as I recall. But out in the crowd, some drama was going down. A gaggle of seriously intoxicated Welshmen had sniffed out the presence of us Yanks, and their beetle-browed leader was making his own presence known by repeatedly slamming physically into us, me in particular, and spilling his beer on us with each collision. Finally, I turned to address him with a “WTF, Dude? What’s your problem?” At which point, a wiry, ferret-limbed man slithered between us and held up his hands in a truce gesture. “Whoa, whoa — I must apologize for my friends here,” he said. “I’m their manager, and they just signed a record deal with V2 today. So forgive them if they’re celebrating too hard.” I shrugged, shook beetle-brow’s hand, and congratulated him, and that, I thought, was that.
Not exactly, I soon learned. In Britain, pubs shut down at 11 p.m., and for any alcohol after that curfew, you have to belong to a drinking establishment, such as the famed Groucho Club, where Kula Shaker’s private post-show party had been scheduled, high up in a posh, private, open-bar suite. Mills and his bandmates (bassist Alonza Bevan, keyboardist Jay Darlington, drummer Paul Winter-Hart) were all there, mingling, as were several powerful Sony execs, riding herd. But the label nabobs all gasped collectively as the door flew open and in staggered beetle brows and cohorts, even drunker than before. “How dare those little lager louts show up here,” snarled one exec, and I asked him why he was so angry. “Because for the last few months, WE were trying to sign that band,” he sighed. “So they’re here to gloat about just signing with V2 instead.” Mills himself wasn’t bothered by the kids — he wished them well and invited them to partake of the free spirits, which they did in earnest. As the evening wore on, folks gradually filtered out, leaving just me, the interlopers, and the cleanup crew beginning to dismantle the bar and tables. I liked these guys —- they were total innocents abroad but on big-city cloud Nine and just having a great night out. And that innocence was on display when one member burst in, grabbed beetle brows excitedly, and breathlessly reported, “Jarvis Cocker is in the room next door! Let’s GO!” And it was true. But also on hand alongside him was a virtual who’s-who of the then-meteoric Britpop scene — Emma Anderson from Lush, Alex James from Blur, and Robbie Williams, plus more UK superstars, all quietly playing pool.
I went along because I had, by weird chance, just taken Jarvis across the Golden Gate Bridge and down into Sausalito for a few pints when he was visiting my native San Francisco a couple of weeks earlier; he recognized me immediately, and warmly welcomed me to London. But I backed away as the kids formed an awestruck circle around him — I wanted to give them time to talk to their Pulp idol, even though they were a bit tongue-tied initially. I’d interviewed Emma, Alex, and Robbie a few times before, too, but I’m not sure if they would have remembered me, unlike Jarvis, whom I’d known for years. So he felt free to ask me for a favor that night, and I agreed even before hearing what it was. And in his patented posh accent, he gestured toward his Welsh acolytes and said, “Tom. When my young friends here finally make it to San Francisco, show them the same courtesy you did me and show them the city. Their band, Stereophonics, is going to be HUGE.” I agreed — and DID — to show Kelly the town when he finally arrived, and we’ve done several interviews since as I watched this quick study become an impressive balladeer of the working class and then branch out into screenwriting. But at that magical moment, he and his bandmates were stunned, as this was probably the biggest night of their entire small-town Welsh life up to that point. And as everyone else in the room turned to notice them, they sobered up rather quickly as they virtually sat at the feet of their Britpop Buddha, soaking up every last bit of worldly wisdom he generously proffered. And this was one of the key journalistic lessons I’d learned over the years — you had to be prepared for an interview, or an entire evening, to jump the predictable track in a heartbeat. You were obligated to follow it wherever it might lead like from a potential fistfight at a Kula Shaker concert to an unexpected late-night gathering of English musical cognoscenti that you may never witness again. I just went with it and had an insane evening that I will always fondly remember, courtesy of Mr. Crispian Mills.
And as a songwriter, you have no idea when you’re starting out how long you’ll last or remain relevant years into the future, which was the appeal of talking to Kula Shaker again after all these years. After many fluctuations, its original lineup is back together again in 2024, firing on all six throughout Natural Magick and the latest standalone single, dubbed “Peace Wheel.” Mills’ material is more mystical, his lyrics more sagelike, his psychedelic motifs more ethereal, his vocals more urgent, and his guitar lines much nastier, almost junkyard-dog mean. Utilizing consistent, sharp-hooked cuts like “Gaslighting,” “Kalifornia Blues,” “Happy Birthday,” “Something Dangerous,” “Indian Record Player,” and “Idon’twannapaymytaxes,” Kula Shaker feels totally rejuvenated, as vital as ever, with a thematic through line boomeranging straight back to “K,” a cultural anomaly that had more to do with exotic Indian raga scales and Vedic texts than typical Britpop bombast. Although Mills spun off in 2002 into a more straightforward rock combo called The Jeevas, he never lost sight of the Kula Shaker sound and identity and, in his current interview, is even wiser, and Jack and there are use the piano playing commercials right now is trying to get in there I may have to more astute than he was for our first 1996 chat. Was he aware of all that behind-the-scenes drama at the Groucho Club that night? He answers this and much, much more in the following Q&A….
IE: Have you heard that surreal star-studded story before? I’d never seen so many celebrities hanging out, playing pool, and just getting along with no egos involved. It was quite the peaceable kingdom.
CRISPIAN MILLS: And that’s when you realize you have an entourage — you realize you have an entourage, but I don’t know any of these people. But I went on tour once with Robbie Williams by accident. And so I spent a bit of time with him — I think it was around the year 2000. So I went on tour, just me and a band, and I went on tour by accident. He had an American band that had pulled out; they had a problem, and the room next to this band couldn’t do it, and I was rehearsing in the room next to his band and Guy Chambers — because I knew the support band — said, “Can you guys do it?” And I said, “Yeah. I guess.” And we went on, and we did it, and it was Robbie at his absolute peak — mean, he was doing a week in one city at 15,000-seat venues. So he would do a week and play to 100,000 people, and then he would do a week in Glasgow, then another week in Manchester, then a week in London. So it was interesting to kind of go up to that heady height, where you get as big as you can, being in one country.
IE: Did he talk to you or give you pointers? Warn you away from anything?
CM: Well, we didn’t really have that kind of relationship. I guess he was more…well, he’s been around longer in the music business than I had because, obviously, he’d been in Take That prior to that whole solo career. But I think he was one of those classic examples where there’s nothing more miserable than a pop star at the top of his game. You’ve got everything, and any psychological, emotional, or physical weaknesses that you have will be just absolutely heightened to the max. So I think he was really bobbling ’round that time — he probably wasn’t sure whether he’d be able to do one show to the next.
IE: Like the legendary story of the 18th century, he informs his doctor that he’s suicidally depressed and can’t see any reason to go on. But after the physician offers him two tickets to see Grimaldi, the most famous clown in all of Europe, and a guaranteed pick-me-up, the man is suddenly reduced to tears. “Why are you crying?” He asks the doctor, and the patient replies, “Doctor, I AM Grimaldi.”
CM: Well, look — a good pop star should be some kind of a clown. So I guess that’s the difference between a pop star and a musician.
IE: What lessons have you learned in that department to reach this point?
CM: Oh, my God! How long have you got? Is it gonna be an article or a tomb? Look, to be honest, everything is about relationships — everything stands or falls based on your relationships, and you can be having a good time in terms of success and album sales and income, but if you haven’t got good relationships, then you’re gonna be miserable. And then, the hard times can sometimes be the most memorable, the most fulfilling, the most edifying experiences because you’ve got good relationships, you’ve got people that mean something to you and make your life meaningful. And I guess, ultimately, the most important relationship is the one that you have with yourself. And so from that? Hey — it’s a spiritual thing, man!
IE: How cool was it to have a founding member like Jay Darlington back in the fold?
CM: You know it’s easy to underestimate, or easy to take for granted, the kind of subtle chemistry of a real band. And there is a magic there that you just can’t quantify, where the sum is greater than the individual parts. We had made a few albums on and off over the years because we were all doing other things and having families — I was making films, Alonza was playing with Johnny Marr and producing. It was just life. But we had asked Jay to come back when we started making records again, and he just had this job with Oasis, which was a really good job, and he was having this whole other adventure. And nobody begrudged him that at all — we absolutely understood. So we found somebody to play organ, and we had a good relationship with him, and we did it for almost 15 years. But it wasn’t the same as Jay, and getting Jay back through the hand of fate and being able to get him made us appreciate the magic of people who earned to play together, and share that, and share a sense of humor, and share a view of the world. And I think that’s part of being in a band, being in a gang, is you all kind of get each other, and you understand how it is, your universe, your world. It’s this little enclave of your own private sanity against the madness of the world. That’s one of the great things about being in a band — you’re not alone. I mean, I can remember going on tour with Joan Osborne, and she was a solo artist, and she was having a huge hit with a song called “What If God Was One of Us.” She was No. 1 all over the world, and touring Australia, the Far East, Europe — she was everywhere. I remember seeing her eating her dinner before shows, and she was looking very lonely and very isolated. I remember thinking at the time, “It’s not the same when you’re in a band. Even though I got more pressure as the front man, you’re still sharing that change in your reality.
IE: Thematically, where are you coming from on the new album and single? It’s some pretty heady stuff.
CM: Listen, you find it with filmmakers— and I know, having been a filmmaker and having been around a lot of filmmakers. They’re always wrestling with the reality that every time they make a new movie, at some point, they realize they’re making the same movie again in terms of style, scenes, and characters. I think you’re always trying to work out the same part of the puzzle, the same riddle of your life. So “Natural Magick,” “Rational Man,” “Bringing it Back Home”? It’s all about integrating the spiritual with the material. Or how to stay sane in a mad world – it’s always the same story with us. It doesn’t mean that it’s gotten boring for us. We’re just a bit more aware of our recurring themes.
IE: And the double-A-sided single?
CM: Well, which singles that we pick really don’t mean anything unless you play it at the Super Bowl or as a Ford advert. So, for us, making vinyl and creating the double-A-sided single to represent the two sides of the brain? We’re trying to approach singles as a little bit more of a holistic comfort. Because otherwise…there was a band that we met recently, and they just released ten singles — ten singles from one album, and then they threw out the album, which only had two or three more songs on it, so they’re not really singles at all — it’s just popping up a playlist until it becomes a record so that you can move on to the next one. So these models of singles and albums seem to have gone completely, and I keep going around in the music business, trying to find somebody who knows what the hell is going on, and nobody seems to really know how you do it now, what’s the model. And the record companies all own shares in Spotify, so they’re all happy with this approach, because they still get a big chunk of it. But the approach to how you reach people, how you develop an artist, how you tell a story, and how you go about that between an audience and musicians? It’s just like roulette — it’s crazy.
IE: Well, going into telling a story, the films you wrote and directed, like A Fantastic Fear of Everything and certainly Slaughterhouse Rulez, must have really expanded how you approach character development, right?
CM: I learned two things. I learned that I’ve always been a frustrated filmmaker ever since K. With songwriting and making records, I’ve always been frustrated that I don’t have a screen, as well — you’ve got to create the screen in people’s heads, so albums always feel like you’re going into a dark room, and the curtains are coming up, so it’s that visual sensory experience that you’re trying to create through the music. And the other thing I learned was that movies work on cosmic time cycles. Writing a song and even recording an album, you can do it fairly quickly if you’re organized and you know what you’re doing. But with movies, the gestation and the birthing process is so long, and so many people are involved, so many people trying to interfere, that it’s a whole different type of battle. When you write a song, you’re fighting primarily with yourself, and the battle is just a game to reach an audience. Whereas the battle with a movie is you’ve actually gotta make it yourself; you’ve got to not let anybody turn it into something abominable or dilute or distort it. From committee interference to test screenings, all the horror story stuff, and it’s all true, all the cliches are 100% true. But as with anything in this world, you’ve got to fight to try and make something beautiful, and often, whether it survives or not will always come down to luck.
IE: Slaughterhouse deals with an ancient evil on a boarding school campus. Have you ever stumbled onto anything otherworldly like that in real life?
CM: I think that there’s ancient evil; it’s real, but you know, ancient love is real, too, so what’s left behind is not all bad. So I’m an optimist, and I think that life goes on, even though we’re constantly being told that it’s about to end.
IE: You’ve said you hoped for peace with your new single, but everywhere I look, it seems there’s no peace anywhere.
CM: No, no. But I think there’s something wonderful happening. People are coming together across the world, and all these divisions that have been heightened by the politicization of everything, I feel that these divisions are all getting shattered, to be honest. Because ultimately, I think people are all getting down to their core human values, and as things get bad, people are starting to say, “Well, actually, maybe I have more in common with this person across the road than I thought I did. Maybe we agree on a lot of things, whether it’s just basic human dignity or peace, for instance.’ And these are unifying things, and everything’s cyclical anyway, so when things get bad, they eventually get better, although it sometimes feels like it has to get worse before it gets better. People have got to understand each other a bit more in the midst of all the chaos.
IE: But what about the inexplicable return of Trump?
CM: Well, you know, I don’t want to get into Trump because I’m British, and over here, you don’t really have a popular movement because everyone’s half asleep. So I find that politics is a dead-end street anyway, in terms of talking about those issues. I think what you ultimately wanna do is get down into the human issues — there has to be a point where you have to understand the people who are supposed to be your polar opposite so that you can understand why they think the way they do, and why they feel the way they do and really dig into it, and not allow them to be painted as completely irrational or completely wicked or evil. It’s just that people have got to learn to understand each other because otherwise, there’s no hope. So everyone’s got to start with themselves, really. So that whole thing about the double A-side is that we, ourselves, are two sorts of opposites. I don’t wanna get too Dark Crystal about it all, but we have to reconcile these parts of ourselves. So we are the Skexies, but we’re also those mellow puppets, too — I can’t remember what they were called. So you’ve gotta reconcile and try not to think in terms of left/right and us and them and this and that — you’ve got to get into the human experience to try and understand somebody and empathize. And if you can do it, then maybe someone else can, and on and on and on. So that’s my attitude — you’ve got to reconcile the two sides of your brain.
IE: Are there any crucial books or texts that you can recommend to help people achieve that? What happened
CM: I mean, there are books that have helped ME. I read The Mahabharata when I was 16 and 17 at school. And I remember reading Bob Dylan’s Nobel-prize thing, and it was all just about Moby Dick. But that book was the cast for his worldview — he related to the world through that book and through the accounts that are in that book. And obviously, it’s as close to a spiritual text as any book can be. So, for me, The Mahabharata was the book that changed my life — it gave me a literary story model to understand the world, its complexities and its ambiguities and its tragedies and its heroism, through to its beauty. So that was the one, really. And I think there are quite a few translations, and some of them are very, very abridged, and some of them are certainly longer. But I think quite an old-fashioned one from the ‘40s or the ‘50s, written by an Indian woman, a schoolteacher. But it was very good storytelling and told kind of like a fairytale. And it blew my mind. I blew my mind, so I totally related to that Dylan (Nobel) acceptance speech when he talked about Moby Dick because those books just stay with you your whole life.
IE: And now everyone seems to be micro-dosing psilocybin daily for their mental health. Acid has gone mainstream.
CM: Right. And I think it’s kind of ironic because the first story I heard about micro-dosing was that they were micro-dosing in Silicon Valley and then going to work. And you know the whole grassroots counter-culture was Tune in, Turn on, Drop Out, and now it’s like Micro-dose and Go to Work For the Man. So I was kind of amused by that. But to be honest, I don’t think I ever came down, and I still see the world in that kind of magical, living, breathing view of things. But I have to say that the most psychedelic, mind-expanding, and spiritually uplifting experience that I ever had was completely straight, just spending time with a real spiritual teacher, an older Indian man, and I actually became his formally initiated student. I met with him many times over the years, on and off, but there was one time when I spent ten days with him, and I was as high as I’ve ever been on anything, just in terms of being very conscious and very aware of my third eye opening. The world seemed to be very much alive, and the message I was getting was, ultimately, everything’s gonna be okay.
IE: But that’s what has set you apart — you’ve always been curious. So it must have been awesome being brought up in the Mills household around fellow seekers like Sir John and Hayley. And your mom is still acting! She has a new film coming up called The Trap coming out….
CM: Yeah! I saw the trailer, and it looks awesome. It looks really good, and the story…have you seen the trailer? You should watch the trailer because it’s got a fun little reveal. But it’s M. Night Shyamalan and I like him and the way he works with visuals. But this one looks really cool, and it’s got that fun, Hitchcockian, audience-pleaser-type spirit. But yeah, my family was around a lot, and actually they’re lots of fun to be around. So I was lucky to be around some awesome, famous filmmakers like David Lean and Richard Attenborough. My dad was a filmmaker, too, but I sadly didn’t have as much time growing up with him as a kid. I learned a lot about the struggle of the filmmaker to manifest his or her dreams in the world of business. You kind of need to have, again, two heads, and you’ve gotta reconcile these different parts of your brain. David Lean wasn’t able to do it, and he was crushed when things didn’t work out, or if the critics were cruel, or if the business wasn’t working. He was just crushed emotionally — he was very fragile. Whereas Attenborough had this sort of bulldog center, and he could just open a drawer and deal with all the creative stuff and be immersed in it, and then shut the drawer and open a different one, and deal with the money guys. He had that ability to compartmentalize that made him a survivor. So those were interesting people, and I think that they probably had more of an effect on me than the actors did.
IE: What did you learn from Hayley?
CM: Well, actually, I helped her put together her childhood memoir, which is called Forever Young, so I went through her whole story up until the age of 22 when she left Disney, and she had a very brutal rite of passage into adulthood, where the British taxman took 94% of everything she’d ever earned — it was sort of like being mugged by pirates. But in terms of what fame and success can do to a child, and how that kind of pressure and stress was a lot to take in. But Hey! It made it on the New York Times Bestseller List! So that was a couple of years ago, actually, and it was a good thing to do — it was quite therapeutic for her and for me.
IE: And there had to be moments where you said, “Mom! You never told me about this!”
CM: There was a bit of that. And there was also a bit after the book was finished, as well, where I was like, “Why didn’t you tell me THAT? We should’ve put that in the book!” But she had lunch at the Disney studios with some producers, and some of ‘em was the couple who did Frozen, and they were talking in Walt Disney’s office, which is now like a museum. And she suddenly realized that she was the only person at the table who had known Walt Disney, so it kind of put things into perspective, and I think it was the final push she needed to write it down.
IE: Fast-forward to now. How do you bring up your kids with everything you’ve learned? Is there any special wisdom you’re imparting to them?
CM: The main one is Don’t ruin your hearing, because they’re both musicians. And I’d say being a musician is one thing, but you need a craft, as well. You need to have some kind of craft/trade qualification that you can do, so you can do a bit of work here and there and not exclusively rely on music. Musicians need to be able to do everything now — produce, write, record, play, make the video, even run the record label. So you’ve just got to find out who you are and be yourself.
IE: Final question: What’s next, O Wise One?
CM: Well, apart from reconciling the two parts of our brain, collectively and cosmically….
IE: Uh, that is, if we all survive 2024…
CM: Oh, you’ll be alright. It’ll be fine. Just think of Dark Crystal. It ends alright at the end. But it IS getting a bit Dark Crystal, though. But we’re gonna play at the Brooklyn Bowl on the 25th of July, and we hope to come back to America and just play festivals, really — there’s a culture in America which isn’t prevalent anywhere else, where bands play, and bands are quite spontaneous. But we have a very, very loyal following here in Britain, and people follow us around, and that’s actually quite rare here, rare to have that in Europe. Whereas in America, there are bands that have a whole existence on the road, where they really forge their identity as a live band. And we always wanted to be The Grateful Dead, not necessarily in how we sounded, but in the spirit of what they did, and the fact that it was more than a band — it was more of a way of life, and it was nothing without its audience. The band was only half of it — the other half was this kind of tribe, and we’ve always identified ourselves like that, and once people see us, they kind of get it. We’ve become much more like that as we’ve gotten older, as well, like one of those bands.
-Tom Lanham
