 |
Articles de presse |  |
 |
Articles de presse
LAUNCH.com exclusive :
Red Hot Chili Peppers
Extrait du "MSN Entertainment Channel" (Août 1999).
Well darn if Anthony Kiedis hasn't gone and turned into Iggy Pop. Which is fine by me - Iggy Pop having turned into Tom Waits judging by his upcoming album - but it does throw you just a bit when you're expecting a long-haired, muscular L.A. surf bum and you get a short-haired, sinewy, peroxide-dipped urban Iggy circa 1974. And it doesn't help when Kiedis's band gets up onstage and covers "Search And Destroy"...
You join us at the Camden Palace in London. For non-Londoners hitting this site, we should explain that the Camden Palace is a funky club in, not surprisingly, Camden, an area declared by God Himself to be the coolest place in the universe. Both Noel and Liam of Oasis are locals. A cinema-turned-punk joint best known these days as a dance club, the Palace is not the place you'd expect to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers play - stonking great rock festivals is what you'd expect, and indeed that's what they'll be doing all summer. No, this is a "secret" gig, one of a handful of small shows set up around Europe, more to alleviate the boredom of doing interviews than to break in their new guitarist, since their new guitarist is in fact their old guitarist, John Frusciante, and therefore needs no breaking in.
John, who played on the band's breakthrough albums Mother's Milk and BloodSugarSexMagik before leaving to make way for ex-Jane's Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro, has now replaced his replacement - that's him up there stage right with the long slacker hairdo, cozying up to Flea and playing intense, melodic guitar that could break your heart. John is delighted to be back, Flea, Chad, and Anthony are delighted to have him back, and with a tough new album Californication that they're all delighted with ("it's not about fornicating, it's about the way that the California culture ends up reaching its tentacles to the far corners of the globe"), this is the best state the Chili Peppers have been in for over four years now. Since their last album, in fact.
Oh, and Iggy - er, I mean Anthony - is in love...
"Listen to that first track - it's a straight-up love song ! It says in the chorus, 'You say hello and I say I do.' It's a marriage reference ! There's three or four of them on the record."
I was saying that I'd been talking to friends about the new record and the girls were all saying it was a guy record, and the guys all seemed to agree. Except Anthony, that is. "Well, my female friends have all been calling me up in the States and they really like it. I think it's a romantic record. I fell in love with my girlfriend two or three months before we recorded this record, and certainly swimming around in my heart were the feelings of love." And are they still ? "Yes," he laughs, "I'm still in love." Married ? "Well, nobody's really married in the band" - except, as they say, "to each other."
The period following 1995's One Hot Minute was not one of band togetherness : constant rumors of work on a new album being started and abandoned; Anthony in rehab battling drink and drugs; Anthony's motorcycle accident; Chad's motorcycle accident; Dave Navarro leaving to rejoin Jane's Addiction, taking Flea with him, and when Jane's Addiction re-disbanded leaving and forming a band with Chad, then just leaving. The Chili Peppers had either split, or were going to split, after one last album, if they could ever get around to making it. What was going on ?
"I don't think that drugs are why there was a long wait for the album. I've been to a few rehabs in my life, yes, but I also got a lot of work done in between that time. I don't even look at it as four years between records. To me, we started working on this record just a little over a year ago, so to me this record took about a year to write, rehearse, arrange, and record, and those three years prior it was something completely different." Like what ? "Just life, you know ? I don't think that people who are in bands should feel obligated to turn music out as a product, just because of the record company schedule. It was important for us to grow as people and actually go through everything we did to get to this point."
Things like splitting with Dave Navarro last year and bringing back John Frusciante - who for a while there looked like he'd join original, late Chili Pepper guitarist Hillel Slovak six feet under with heroin clogging up his veins. For the seven-odd years between being quitting and re-joining, Frusciante went through drug hell, and it looked like if he and Anthony were to get together again, that's where it would be.
"John went off to experience what he had to experience, same with me, same with the rest of the people in the band - and as troubling as it could be when it was happening, in the end it was all kind of perfect. Now that we're together again it makes perfect sense that we all had to go through some difficulties, some learning, some changing. Now we're all very close friends and in love with what we're doing, whereas when John quit the band we weren't so friendly with one another and we had stopped enjoying what we were doing together. Right now it's just so good I can't really bum out on the past or worry about what's gonna happen next.
"You know, drug addiction is a bizarre and cunning enemy and it doesn't really plug into logical reason. You can't just go, 'Okay, this is bad, this kills, this hurts people and makes life miserable,' when you're kinda in the throes of it; it's not how your mind is thinking. All I can say is I have no desire to go back to that way of life or that altered state of mind, and it feels really good to not have that urge inside of me right now, and I think the same goes for John. Whenever I talk to John about it, he's completely without interest in being loaded. He is just as happy as can be right now listening to music, playing music, watching old movies, reading detective stories and doing yoga and just being with us. That was a part of our rollercoaster but it's not today." So Anthony's okay now? "Yes, I haven't actually used drugs for a long time."
So what actually caused the guitarist-swap ?
"It's just that chemistry to this particular band is a must, and that chemistry exists with John, and for him not to be there - granted, we got a beautiful person and a wonderful musician in Dave Navarro, but the chemistry was different and it wasn't really the right chemistry for us. That's no slight towards Dave because I feel real lucky to have played with him during that time - in some strange way it kept us together during that period.
"We'd never actually broken up, but I'm sure there were times when everybody thought to themselves, 'How can this carry on ? It seems like it's not happening anymore.' When we realized that it wasn't working with Dave anymore, and I think Dave realized that probably around the same time that we did, we just decided to go our separate ways. A few days later I went over to Flea's house to discuss what do we want to do, and he said, 'What do you think about playing with John ?' I said, 'That would be a dream come true, but it seems very unlikely.' And he said, 'Well, I don't know, I have a funny feeling about this,' and he called John up. And John having sort of come full circle himself, we just carried right on.
"Flea had more contact with him than anybody else - I ran into him a total of three times during that period and it was always kinda strained and difficult for us to communicate. It was just a case of praying for him all the time - when I was well enough myself to be praying for anybody else." And how was it when they got back together ? "You know what ? It was beautiful. At first I thought, 'Oh God, we're going to have to talk about the past, and that could be uncomfortable,' but we just looked at each other and realized that none of that really needed to be discussed because we loved each other, so we just said, 'Let's go play.' And from the second they plugged in it was the perfect fit. And every time we play live, no matter whatever kind of mood I'm in or jetlag or whatever, I'm totally inspired and look forward to just hearing them play.
"The most important thing I've learned," continues Anthony, "was expect the unexpected. There were times in my most despondent periods when I couldn't see it getting better. I was so wrong. You can never predict what's going to happen, so you've just got to keep the faith."
par Sylvie Simmons
