The Young Ones
Last modified: 21:11:29 CET on 24 Sep, 2008 |
06th July 2002, Kerrang! (UK)
Many thanks to Máté, for typing it out
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THE RED Hot Chili Peppers playing to 700 people in a North London club is, no matter how jaded the eyes, An Event. On this clammy Friday evening the Highbury Garage is packed like a vacuum-sealed pound of filter coffee; the wiser members of the audience are standing beneath ceiling air vents, the thirsty ones are queuing three-deep at the bar. Outside tickets are changing hands for sums that are not so much outrageous as blasphemous.
But then, this is the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and tonight is an occasion that means all sorts of things. For start, there’s exclusivity; chances are the band will not play a show in such a setting for quite some time. This is a group who, over the years, have crept into the realm of the Truly Famous. For one hour and one hour only, this is an experience to be traded in for serious “I was there” nostalgia points.
Onstage, the Red Hot Chili Peppers might well be the same outfit who have cavorted the boards in various states of undress for almost 20 years now. But this impression only lasts for a second. Yes, the band are still topless, still buffed and holy, still aglow with the vibrancy and can-do dynamics Southern California. But look again; tonight the skin looks older, the lines look thicker. And even from the back of the club, the scars on the guitarist’s arms look livid and deep.
But the Red Hot Chili Peppers are still here. As the bands they once shared stages and sentences with – Jane’s Addiction, Faith No More, Fishbone – have faded into memory or else glided into reverential nostalgia, this most Californian of quartets have stubbornly, unfathomably, refused to fold. And, perhaps as remarkably, have continued to keep looking to the future.
This is the story of how the Red Hot Chili Peppers refused to give it away.
SEVENTY-NINE hours previously, at 2pm on a Tuesday afternoon, it’s press hell in a heavenly West London hotel. The four members of the band – vocalist Anthony Kiedis, bassist Flea, guitarist John Frusciante and drummer Chad Smith – are each sitting in one of four suites on the second floor of the Knightsbridge Mandarin Hotel, overlooking the capital’s Royal Parks, downwind from Harrods. In a separate room are the journalists, waiting and fidgeting, smoking but not talking, as a representative of the band’s management firm, Q-Prime, cues up “By the Way”, the band’s new album – their eighth – on the hotel room stereo. Given that the record is still shrouded in secrecy and security, we’re asked if any of us have our tape recorders switched on. It’s difficult not to laugh and applaud in squeals of delight.
But then again, it’s also difficult not to be struck by at least some sense of occasion, There are few groups around today who are as storied as the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Not only have they made music that has been loved and adored over the years, but they’ve done so very much on their own terms, at their own pace and in their own style. They have almost split on a number of occasions – usually following the departure, or the death, of one guitarist or another – but somehow they never quite made it to the crematorium. Instead they moved on, and they got better. And, as “By The Way” shows, they’re better now than they have ever been.
“There have been some press-worthy moments that people like to get into with our band,” says Anthony Kiedis. “You know, people dying and all of that. But it’s all part of the picture. I can’t say that I’m at all grateful for having lost on of my friends (Hillel Slovak, the band’s original guitarist, who died of a heroin overdose) early on in the career of this band. But in some ways I am grateful for the struggles that we’ve gone through. It was the greatest series of lessons that I could have ever come across.”
THE RED Hot Chili Peppers are, for purposes of time, undertaking separate interviews today. And that time is getting thinner by the man. By the penultimate interview, a scheduled half hour with John Frusciante has been shaved to 15 minutes. When each interview is finished – actually, not so much finished, but all out of time – it’s out of the door and down the gathering room to wait with the other journalists. It’s such fun.
Anthony Kiedis is the first member of the band to open his mouth for you, and in some ways the toughest to unlock. Smaller than you would imagine but smarter then you might think, Kiedis is wittily quizzical – “What constitutes metal?” he wonders, pondering the line-up for the Ozzfest – and slightly Californian. You get the feeling that even though you’ve just introduced yourself he would be hard pressed to remember your name. Because he has no need to. And while he answers every question thrown up, Kiedis does give the air of being nobody’s fool. That is, you can imagine him having an off day, even if this isn’t one of them.
These days Anthony Kiedis begins his morning by walking his dog, Buster, from his home at the top of the Hollywood Hills, two miles down, and then running back to the house in tome for breakfast. It is, he says, good preparation for heading out on tour. You can ask him if he minds you asking the last time he took heroin and he’ll say “not at all”, even though the closest you can pin him is that “it’s been a while”. Then he’ll astonish you with his candour, stating, without prompting, that his sex life is currently “in the doldrums” since his recent split with his “soul mate”, Yohanna.
