All Shook Up

"I'm a little bit anti-concrete," declares Kula Shaker frontman Crispian Mills apropos of nothing in particular as he sits crosslegged on a comfortable couch in his manager's North London office, absentmindedly doodling in crayon on a drawing pad while he talks.

"Er, how do you mean?" I probe, mystified.

"Well, I'm into all things magical and mystical and unconventional," he replies in his rather monotone Home Counties accent. "It's not really a part of our culture anymore—it used to be—and I think the more concrete we use the less magic we've got in our culture. So I'm a little bit anti-concrete."

"Em . . . fair enough," I say, "but I still don't see quite what concrete has to do with it."

"Don't you? Well, the more we live in cities the less connected to Nature we are. The less connected to Nature we are, the less connected to magic we are. See."

"Oh, right," I say, before turning to Shaker organist Jay Darlington and asking where he stands on the whole concrete/magic thing.

"Spam," he replies thoughtfully, running his hand through a mane of heavy metal hair. "Vegetarian spam."

A long awkward pause follows. And then, mainly because it's a weird moment and I can't think of much else to say anyway, I enquire as to whether the band are vegetarians or not.

"Cows are great!" Crispian suddenly exclaims enthusiastically. "We love all animals but especially cows! They're big and furry! They're so big and they give milk! You know, cows just wander around and eat grass and then we take their milk. We shouldn't think that we have the right to do that. Humans aren't as important a species as we think we are. I think that's quite a reasonable way to look at it and that's why I don't eat meat anymore. You see, the thing about cows is . . . " (continues).

Hmmm. Nobody ever said this was gonna be easy.

I had actually been warned about the difficulties of interviewing Kula Shaker well in advance of this encounter. Mills was, by all accounts, an eccentric interviewee, one who would easily fulfil his required quote quota but perhaps not make a whole lot of sense in the process. Apparently, his anti-concrete stance extended to most of his arguments as well as to the grey sludgy stuff the Mafia use to make boots. Or to use the words of Stuart Clark, a veteran of two previous Kula interviews: "The bloke's a complete plonker. He talks a load of twaddle. And, anyway, his name's Crispian."

As it happens, after a few minutes in his company, I don't think Crispian's a plonker. Still, I can see why others might. You see, the boy don't really give a shit. He just doesn't seem overly concerned with making any kind of impression on the press, one way or the other. Neither he nor Jay are rude, they're just relaxed to the point of being almost bored, probably aware that most of the journalists interviewing them on the eve of the release of their long-awaited second album Peasants, Pigs And Astronauts will portray them as a pair of hippy space cadets no matter what they say. In fact, they are a pair of hippy space cadets. It's just that, unlike most of their interviewers, they don't see anything wrong with that. At times they remind me of a couple of slippery schoolkids in the headmaster's office—harder to get a straight answer out of than a pair of Irish politicians.

But then their pisstake attitude is hardly surprising. Kula Shaker—or Kula Faker as they're known in certain quarters—have always had a rather frosty relationship with the music press, who mostly accuse them of being unoriginal psychedelic rockers who've spent far too much time in India (they're even named after a ninth century Indian king). Bad reviews didn't stop their 1996 debut K from shifting well over a million copies but, as it happens, the tabloids haven't been particularly Kula-friendly either. Two years ago, an off the cuff comment by Crispian about the Nazi's subversion of the ancient swastika symbol resulted in front page headlines accusing the singer of fascism—so now he was anti-Semitic as well as anti-cement. Although he was immediately forced to apologise, he still maintains that he was stitched up and that what he actually said was twisted and taken completely out of context.

"What a load of bollocks that was!" he laughs when I remind him of it. "It was one of those things where people jump on a story and then he takes this bit and he takes that bit and suddenly it's this really big thing. If you're singing about Krishna or love or positive human evolution and then suddenly all people wanna talk about is that shit—it's just irresponsible. It's actually very sinister."

"We are actually very funny," adds Jay. "A lot of people missed that last time."

Still, they're somewhat philosophical about dealing with the mendacious media by now. "Oh, it's all good character building stuff really," Crispian shrugs. "What can I say? It's like you get to a point where you want to be a musician and you want to do music and it's all you ever wanted to do, and then suddenly it's what you're all about, but then you're forced into a situation where you have to constantly justify why you're making music. Why you sang that song in Hindi. Why you sang that song in Sanskrit. What you meant by that lyric. And it all just gets to a point later on where you go, oh fuck it, I'm not gonna justify my music anymore. And you don't have to. You just let the music take over and I think that's the main thing."

Although Peasants, Pigs And Astronauts is undoubtedly superior to its predecessor, it doesn't mark any radical changes in the band's musical style. Given the nasty reception pop songs about love, higher cosmic consciousness and karmic awareness received the last time around, are they worried about the album's imminent reviews?

"Not really," laughs Jay. "Don't read them, that's the answer. Get your girlfriend to read them first and if they're any good then pass them on. If they're bad just throw them out."

"Anybody who does well in this business has to be able to deal with it," says Crispian. "There'll always be good and bad. A lot of people write all this stuff to pay their rent so you can expect all sorts of stuff to be thrown at you. You know, we've got high personal standards and once we meet those ourselves we don't really care what the critics say."

Of course, coming from a family of famous thespians (his mother is acclaimed actress Hayley Mills), Crispian has always been well aware of the fickle nature of fame and the vulgar vagaries of the press. However, he maintains that it's still somewhat different for pop stars.

"It's a different kind of fame with acting," he points out. "Unless you're someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Danny DeVito. And fame I think is quite a headfuck for the kids cos they all get sent to these fucked-up kids schools for the children of famous people . . . "

"Did you have any of that?"

"No, not really. I had a British acting family which is a little bit more reign-ey and English and it's not quite so glitzy. Fame was just a thing that went with the job, it wasn't this weird unattainable thing. I could see that it was attractive, but from my upbringing I never thought of it as something I couldn't get. It was a bit different for my mum though. It was pretty demanding on her because she was acting since she was 12 and she didn't even wanna be. Someone cast her in a film and she was like, oh yeah cool, a film, but then suddenly it all blew up. Then Disney signed her up and made her a massive star and she was going, why is this happening to me? She felt guilty that it was happening to her. But then she found out about karma and she realised, 'Oh well, what can I do? I can't stop my karma'."

"So do you think your success is somehow karmic as well?"

"I don't know," he avers. "I think Isaac Newton was the first scientist to come up with a proper theory for it—every action has an equal and opposite reaction. So we see it in this life. Whether there's more than one life is the big debate I suppose."

"And what do you think you were in a previous life?"

"To be dealing with the British press in this one?" he smiles. "Dunno, but I must have been a real bastard!"

According to the press release which accompanied my advance copy of Peasants, Pigs And Astronauts, the second Kula Shaker album is "an expanded, radiant work which takes them deeper into the journey begun with their million selling debut K and throws an arc over some of the strangest and most magical inaugural years generated by any band." To my own ears, it was a fairly energetic collection of twelve tight, competent, pop songs, dripping with Indian influences, cosmic guitars and bursts of psychedelic organ. Accomplished but not quite as mindblowing as it's seemingly trying to be. But do the band themselves regard it as a, erm, con. . .

"Concept album?" Crispian interjects. "You mean, is there a concept? Go on, it's all right you can say it! I think we wanted the album to be able to work as a whole piece and then obviously the tracks have gotta stand up on their own at the same time. But it does definitely work best from beginning to end, no doubt about that."

"But what's the intended overall message?"

"It says lots of different things. I mean, we've got this album with lots of different moods and lots of different characters. Some of it is comical—'SOS' is very comical. And then you've got stuff like 'I'm Still Here' which is pretty introspective. And then you've got something like 'Radhe Radhe', which was the first thing we recorded. We really enjoyed making it. And that was a good start for the LP."

"But the whole album is, you know. It's em . . . you know . . . We're all productive when we're alive and we all express it in different ways. So it's a lot of pressure on people out there to have a good time all the time. If you're not having a good time all the time then something's wrong with your life. And I think that that's making people a little bit more introspective and you get a lot more angsty music as a result of it . . . Yeah, it's just interesting because there's a lot of expectation this year . . . "

"So you're saying it's about pre-millennium angst?"

"Well, I'm kind of anti-millennium actually," he says. "I'm actually more interested in the full solar eclipse happening at the end of the year. A full solar eclipse travelling the whole way across Northern Europe and the Holy Land and Israel and then all the way down to India and by the East Coast of India. So that's quite an event. Certainly it's something that you'll never see again in your lifetime. Especially because it happens at the end of the Christian calendar, I think it'll be very good."

"Any particular plans made for next December 31st?"

"Where are we gonna be?" asks Jay. "I'm not sure. There's a lot of pressure on people to have an invitation to the best party in the world, but no-one's gonna have a party capable of living up to that. So I guess you've just gotta be with someone you love."

"Yeah, love, man," Crispian jokingly coos from the couch. "This is an album made with lots of love."

Ah, yes. But love, as we all know, hurts. Did you suffer any difficult second album symptoms?

"No, no," he says, shaking his head. "Not difficult—more fun. Much more fun. I mean, we had a bit of time getting started, we didn't rush into it although there was a bit of pressure on us to get on with it. Actually, I think the original date that they were asking was October '97. And it was just like (pulls face). We weren't quite sure what the team was going to be when we're in the studio—it's like a family vibe—so we wouldn't just do it with any old person. We just took time to put it together and feel happy with it. And then you sit on it for four or five months until the time seems right to release it."

"You're not at all worried that your fan base might have cooled off in the meantime?"

"I'm not worried really," says Jay. "I mean we released 'Sound Of Drums' as a single last year and it showed that people were still there, they were still buying our records. It got to Number 3, you know. And that sort of opened my eyes a bit."

"I think that even though we're musically quite different from most people we still really fit into our time, you know," Crispian adds. "There's lots of different styles of music that people are into these days. Some people will have an Oasis album and a Prodigy album and a Des O'Connor record on the same shelf. Oasis, Prodigy, Des O'Connor and Ken Dodd! And everybody's got their own ways of expressing themselves creatively and, you know, I think we very much fit into our time. I mean, we're experiencing every day just like everybody else is so those same influences and experiences or whatever is around us is all gonna come out in the music."

As Crispian sees it, Kula Shaker are coming straight from the heart. "Whatever you do you have to try and make that a reflection of what's in your heart," he explains. "So if you're a creative person, whether you're writing or playing music or just a conversationalist then what's in your heart has to come out. We're just, like, we're into the love of magic really. And I don't mean sex magic or all that—I just mean magic as kind of ideas of things to aim for. You see, to me, magic is . . . "

At that moment, as if by magic, my tape recorder clicks off loudly. I take it as a cosmic sign, make my excuses and leave. These Kula's ain't no fakers. But they should really let their music do all the talking . . .

Kula Shaker's Peasants, Pigs And Astronauts is out now on Columbia