Auf herr rocker

Sure, we can all look back and have a good laugh about it now. Now we can clutch records by the Queens and The Mars Volta and SOAD and the rejuvenated Marilyn Manson to our heaving bosoms and breathe a sigh of relief. But for a while there around the turn of the millennium, something was grievously rotten in the state of hard rock.

Two words, people: hormone imbalance. The playground got overrun with pubescent monkeys in crusted short trousers unable to control their premature sonic ejaculations. Limp Bizkit, Papa Roach, Puddle Of Mudd – don’t make me go on. The problem was not excess of testosterone so much as not enough oestrogen to keep the body in balance. The Rock got trapped in a locker room reeking of unwashed jock straps and fart jokes and crude pencil drawings of private parts.
But… the balance has now been redressed, not least by the return of queen Courtney, plus new bloods like Peaches and The Distillers. And now comes the (almost) eponymous first album from former Hole/Smashing Pumpkins bassist Melissa Auf Der Maur, a record whose closest equivalent might be so-unhip-it’s-hip artefacts like Deloused In The Comatorium. Auf Der Maur, recorded over an extended period in a variety of locations by a floating stellar cast, is an unashamedly widescreen fusion of metal muscle and gothick-ethereal. In other words, Led/Belly.

Melissa Auf Der Maur was born in Montreal on Saint Patrick’s Day 1972 to a politician father and music journalist mother, the latter overseeing her initiation into the school of rock as well as taking her on several global childhood sojourns. By the early 90s she had learned bass and founded a band called Tinker, and after a support slot on the Montreal date of the Smashing Pumpkins Siamese Dream tour, Auf Der Maur struck up a friendship with Billy Corgan which resulted in her getting the gig with Hole following the death by overdose of Kristen Pfaff.
Five tumultuous years later (her father died of cancer in 1998), at the end of her Hole tenure, she too was bemoaning “the loss of romance and vulnerability and femininity” in rock ‘n’ roll. Following a year-long stint on the Pumpkins farewell tour, where she proved an able replacement for the equally cat-like D’Arcy Wretzky, Auf Der Maur set about conceiving a music that was unabashed in its mountainous scope.
“That’s my favourite thing in music,” she says, kicking back in her Glasgow hotel room, conserving energies for the evening’s support slot with A Perfect Circle. “The vastness you can create with sound. Sound supposedly only hits one sense, but the beauty of music I really believe communicates on the deepest, most profound (level). I feel like the bigger you make it the more you’re utilising that tool.”
She was, one suspects, like Tori Amos, the kind of winsome teenaged girl who kept a journal filled with romantic verse but also got off on Viking fantasies of sweating horses and Robert Plant with his shirt open to the navel.
“I don’t know much about Tori Amos, but I get her thing, like a red headed witch-y person,” she laughs. “I kind of tap into that mode too. I’m not surprised she said that. My fantasies in my bedroom were like, Danzig, or anything that seemed so masculine. Y’know, Danzig is maybe a little kitsch in certain ways, but for a 17, 18 year old it seemed like the power of male mythology thing; I sort of didn’t know whether I wanted to kiss him or be him. And being in the bands I was in, throughout the different world tours and eccentric people and hedonism and all that, allowed me the finding of myself.”
It’s this reconciliation of big sounds and self-revelatory introspection that makes Auf Der Maur smarter than your average new (as opposed to ‘nu’) metal mutha. She met her first and now current musical partner Steve Durand at a philosophy class, where they bonded over mutual fascination with the word ‘gnosis’. No surprise then that the album’s ideological thrust – especially tunes like the mighty ‘Taste You’ – derives from decidedly Gnostic notions of accessing the spirit through the self.
“That’s the most heart-on-my-sleeve personal one I guess,” she says. “It was a breakthrough when I wrote that on my acoustic guitar, it was very honest, straight out of my diary, just me admitting there’s a longing that is desperately trying to be cured, and I’m grabbing at a straw, trying to fill a void that cannot be filled. You could try to fill it with a man or a drug but the message at the end of the record is that I end up filling it with me and my songs and my fantasies of things.
“‘Taste You’ is obviously using the lust that comes up, which I often think is just this hunger that we have eternally of trying to make sense of why we’re here, and wanting to connect with people, sexually or musically or whatever. And I think the day I wrote those lyrics, when I was about 24, and I realised, ‘I’m desperate!’ (laughs) was a big day for me, to try and embrace and admit that rather than being repulsed by it. And the truth is I’m a very open person anyway, if I met you at a bar and you were a total stranger I’d tell you my entire life story if you asked and it was relevant.”

The credits on Auf Der Maur bear out its creator’s wish to create a community from the pool of musicians she’s worked with over the last decade. The album was produced by Master Of Reality Chris Goss, who worked such magic with QOTSA and is currently labouring over the new 80s Matchbox B-Line Disaster opus. And that roll call of players reads like a who’s who of post-metal luminaries: Eric from Hole, James from the Pumpkins, Josh and Nick from the Queens, Mark Lanegan, Billy Corgan, Paz from Zwan, Twiggy Ramirez from Marilyn Manson, plus various Helmet, Kyuss and Rocket From The Crypt personnel.
Did she find it a challenge to adapt to the role of musical director after functioning as sidekick for so long?
“My family calls me ‘Mouse’, don’t ask why, and so Chris Goss caught wind of hearing my mother or little brother calling that, and so I became ‘General Mouse’ in the studio. And y’know, I’m not a pot smoker, especially when I’m running a ship or something, I’m pretty uppity-uppity. Everybody was just freely coming in and out, and I was creating spaces for people: ‘Alright, here James, this song, I need one signature James Iha E-bow track. Thank you!’ It was a joy to share what could have been a very isolated solo experience, which I didn’t want it to be.”
Which leads us to inquire what she learned from watching characters as single-minded – if not bloody-minded – as Billy Corgan and Courtney Love at work.
“Well, my year with the Pumpkins, I was such an outsider, I was basically a big Pumpkins fan living out a dream and playing in their band for a year. Billy was someone I’d known already. What I like to take from people is the positive stuff, and what I take from Billy is he’s the hardest worker I know, and the most committed in music, so that inspired me a lot. And knowing it was ending, I had a lot of admiration for how far and how long he’d been able to sustain that band as well as how many great albums he had put out.
“With Courtney, I’m very thankful that she took a chance on me, an unknown person, and really created a space for me in her band in a very real way. There was no real reason why she had to create this big space to her right of the stage, and I felt very proud to be her team member on her one particular mission, which was putting a female face on a male dominated landscape. But obviously, even within my own life, let alone talking to you, I don’t really like to criticise any of it ’cos that would just be whiney of me. No matter whether you’re in an office job or at home with your family or whatever, there’s always hard times and you just get through them.”
One thing worth mentioning, especially with regard to recent reviews of America’s Sweetheart: when Celebrity Skin came out in 1998 it was damned with faint praise and all but buried by the record label. Now though, the same jackdaws that pecked out its Prometheus liver have done a complete U-turn, retro-effectively pronouncing it Love’s masterpiece. It looks like history repeating: America’s Sweetheart is a ragged, uncomfortable, caterwauling but frequently brilliant piece of work, just as Celebrity Skin was an epic ode to California whose scope encompassed Chandler’s lipstick-slashed morphine heroines, The Black Dahlia, Stevie Nicks’ white witchery, X, The Runaways and The Crystals.
“I know, it was the wrong time for that record, it was Limp Bizkit time as we were saying earlier,” says Auf Der Maur. “I’m so proud of that, I worked harder on that record, maybe even harder than my own record to be quite honest. It was two and a half years, and I was there for every single minute of it and put in everything I could as a co-writer, bass player, melody maker and background vocalist, and I’m so proud of my work and Courtney’s and Eric’s. And y’know, Michael Beinhorn was a totally different kind of producer than Chris Goss but a real teacher and a real perfectionist, and it is amazing, I just saw that today or yesterday, about how it’s her masterpiece. Of course it was, listen to it.”
For sure, it’s rare that a record’s execution so perfectly bears out its conceptualisation.
“And who better to do it than her, Miss California, unique, strange person. I’m a north-east Canadian girl, I know nothing about any of that, but it was very interesting to be around for the ride.”

Auf Der Maur is out now on EMI