the unstoppable

Dana O’Hara

ILLADELPHIA

PLUS• The colour of music • ross maxwell on golf •

• the nba playoffs • the rise of graffiti •

on pants, drinking and music

How to have fun and make music

(Without taking yourself too seriously)

The Dana O’Hara Way

It’s not until the second of two consecutive sold-out nights that I manage to grab a word with the all-conquering Dana O’Hara.

Soaked in sweat, exhausted but triumphant, the five band mem-bers pile onto a tiny, ruined couch in the backstage dressing room, four beers instantly appearing almost from nowhere.

Only guitarist Scott “Scoosh” Harper isn’t immediately smash-ing down alcohol. “He doesn’t drink,” drummer Jamie Gill explains. “He’s weird like that,” he continues, friendly grin on his face as he downs his own beer.

Frontman Gordon Scott inter-venes, sticking up for Scoosh. “We’re all weird in this band. It’s why it works.”

The band laugh, their easy ca-maraderie clearly a product of almost a half-decade spent in the constant company of each other. Manager Dave Ritchie appears, armed with two crates of beer and a litre of Jack Daniels (with water for Scoosh).

“Got to keep the boys happy,” he tells me, grin threatening to split his face in two. After congratula-tions on another storming show and making sure there are no problems, he’s off.

“The boys can look after them-selves, so I’m off to get shitfaced,” he announces, disappearing out the door to presumably do just so.

And then it’s just me and Dana O’Hara, still covered in sweat but more than happy to be inter-

viewed, crammed as they are on the ridiculously small couch.

There’s so many bands out there these days, but everyone seems to be able to identify D’OH easily. Why is it you’re so recognisable?

GS: We don’t take ourselves any-where nearly as serious as some of these bands do. Some of them act like they’re Iron Maiden; we realize that we’re five mates mak-ing music.

Colin Scott (guitar): That’s true. When we started playing there was so many bands with dudes in them that were just so ridiculously serious. We’re like “lighten up buddy, it’s not that serious.”

JG: Not to say we don’t take the music seriously, ‘cos we definitely

do. We just have fun with it, that’s all. Look at the pants thing.

By pants thing, I’m assuming you mean the deal with Bawbags (Dana have recently become sponsored by purveyors of boxer shorts, Bawbags).

JG: Yeah, the pictures should prove we’re not exactly a band with a certain “look”, you know? None of us look like each other even when we’re dressed!

(That’s true; none of the Dana members look similar to each other, unlike most local bands I’ve seen who seem to agree on a uniform of long hair, black clothes and tattoos. Of the five, only Scoosh fits the classic metalhead look: Dana has one of the most di-verse line-ups I’ve seen in a band.)

James Shearer (bass): Us all dress-ing differently is just a reflection on us and what’s influenced us. Scoosh is classic metal, like Metal-lica and stuff. I’m more into punk, like Black Flag, etcetera. And then Jamie’s the electronic influence on us, with Gord and Colin be-ing quite symphonic I would say. None of us are only into one kind of music and our music reflects that I think.

That’s true: your sound is clearly influenced by loads of different bands and sounds. Is there one that’s like the influence on Dana or are you a melting pot of sounds?

SH: As far as that one major influ-ence, I dunno if we’ve got one. Maybe Sonata Arctica, if only ‘cos we got our name from them. Does that count?

JS: I think melting pot’s a good way to describe us. Everyone brings the music they listen to and

enjoy to the band and we get a little bit from everywhere. There’s no one distinctive sound where we’re like, “that’s our sound.” We’re diverse.

CS: It’s why we put ourselves un-der so many genres on Facebook. It annoys me that we need to be crammed into a specific label, but it does make it easier to attract fans.

Is tonight and yesterday the biggest combined crowd you’ve played with? Some of the crowd I met tonight seemed pretty dedi-cated fans of yours.

JG: I don’t know about biggest, but it’s one of the best. It’s always good when the die-hards come to see you but it’s even better when

you recognise them from previous shows, ‘cos that proves you’re do-ing something right.

GS: Plus it’s not just our friends turning up ‘cos we’ve hassled them to. It’s regular metal fans who’ve heard us before and en-joyed enough to come back. Even the guys here to see Severenth [the band Dana split the bill with tonight] will hopefully have been impressed.

Is it the live show as well as the music that people enjoy, you think?

SH: I like to think they enjoy “Scoosh On A Walking Thing,” the most.

JG: Aw, you would you egomaniac.

Above: Evidence that Dana don’t take themselves “too seriously”

To be fair, I thought that was a highlight. Crowd participation at its finest.

SH: Thank you! It started off as an inside joke but we played it for a group of our friends one day and they loved it so we thought fuck it, let’s do it live.

GS: It’s fun for the audience and it’s fun for us too, ‘cos I get to scream and clap like a maniac.

Is there one group you’ve seen live yourselves that you really draw inspiration for your wild live per-formances from?

JS: I saw Gallows at Download a couple years ago when Frank Carter was still there and that was just mental. Mental. That show’s a huge inspiration for me person-ally, to always be on that level.

SH: Agreed.

JG: Skindred live at Download was amazing for me. Benji Webbe had that crowd eating out of his hand and getting them all to do the metal robot is one of the best things I’ve seen.

GS: I just try to always make sure that both us and the crowd go home exhausted. It isn’t a Lana Del Ray gig they’re at, it’s Dana O’Hara and I want everyone to be ex-hausted, sweaty, sore the next day but saying to themselves, “that was fucking amazing,” and wanting to come see us again.

Well you certainly managed that with me tonight, I’m done in.

CS: You’re very welcome.

What’s in the future of Dana O’Hara? Are there any plans for an album or EP?

GS: We’ve actually recorded an EP not that long ago that we’re go-ing to be finishing mastering very soon and selling at our shows. Other than that, we want to keep playing live shows, keep expand-ing our fanbase and keep build-ing a reputation as a mental band that’s always a good show.

JS: Dave would be raging if we didn’t mention this, but we’re play-ing Lesfest again this year.

GS: Oh yeah, forgot about that. Lesfest is Dave’s festival he put to-gether himself last year. We played last year and we’re playing again this year. That was a fun weekend.

CS: It’s just like a mini-Download idea but for underground bands. There were a couple of pretty big names on the bill last year but it’s more Dave’s way to give bands a chance to be seen by a lot of people.

Any more endorsements like the Bawbags deal in the works?

SH: To quote a great philosopher, “mibby’s ayes, mibby’s naws.” There’s a couple of companies we’re looking at working with but obviously we’re not meant to say anything to anyone about it.

That’s fair enough. I’ll let you enjoy the rest of your night and drink yourself stupid.

JS: The Dana O’Hara way!

Above: “Big Dave in all his glory”

Dana O’Hara merchan-dise continues the theme of making serious music but not taking themselves seriously. See condoms (bottom right) for evi-dence.

In 1988, O’Shea Jackson burst out of south-central Compton, Los Angeles and informed the world that he was a “crazy motherfucker named Ice Cube, from the gang called Niggas Wit Atti-tude”. The world was shocked, white America got scared, and gangsta rap was born.

In 1998, Marshall Mathers burst out of Detroit, Michi-gan and informed the world that he “just [didn’t] give a fuck”. Again, the world was shocked, white America got scared, and rap had a new icon. But what’s the differ-ence between Eminem and Ice Cube? Eminem is white.

This was a largely new phe-nomenon when he burst onto the scene. Rap had previously been almost exclusively a part of black or Latino culture; giving these minorities a way to express the frustrations they felt at the discrimination they received, or the poverty they lived in, largely limited to the east or west coasts of America. Now, here was a white kid from the Midwest expressing the same senti-ments and the audience loved it. Eminem sold 283,000

copies of the Slim Shady LP in America alone during the first week of sales.

It could be claimed that his success with the white main-stream audience was due to his skin colour, but there’s a more simple reason behind it: he rapped about things white kids in the suburbs could relate to, and he rapped about them well. 15 year old white boys living in the suburbs of Minnesota could relate to Eminem’s humorous tales and vivid imagination bet-ter than they could to Biggie Smalls’ rhymes about living in the hood and slinging coke and crack.

The success of Eminem broke rap into the mainstream and a slew of others followed in his footsteps to success, fame and fortune. But he also opened it up to a wider au-dience, with the genre now having dedicated listeners of all races.

It’s true that it’s still a mostly black dominated genre, but artists like Yelawolf, Rittz and Machine Gun Kelly have all come to the forefront in

recent years. And all owe a debt to Marshall Mathers for trailblazing the way for white rappers.

The new generation of rap-pers and fans alike are now more than ever ignorant of the colour of a performer’s skin, as long as they bring skill. One of the hottest crews currently in the scene, Odd Future, have a white member. The Shady 2.0 group counts Eminem and Yelawolf among its members.

Performers in the industry have noticed the shift to a more universal audience as well. Southern rapper Chamillionaire released his 2007 album, Ultimate Vic-tory, without any profan-ity, saying that he had felt “uncomfortable” during his tour in support of his previ-ous album. The source of his discomfort? “Looking out into that crowd and seeing all the white kids rapping along to every word: including the N word.” While he should be applauded for delivering a good album completely profanity free, not everyone was impressed. 50 Cent in

The colour of music:How Eminem broke down barriers and diversified hiphop.By Jordan Bell

particular called him out on it, calling him a “sellout”.

Is he? The way I view it, Ulti-mate Victory was a huge step forward for the genre; the first real time a black artist had released an album that both black and white kids could enjoy without having to worry about offending anyone as they sang along (unless, of course, they were a horrible singer).

There’s still a while to go before hiphop can be con-sidered truly a multicultural genre of music. It still gets a lot of criticism over its lyr-

ics, particularly from white conservatives in the media, which irritates a large num-ber of rappers.

This anger at being made scapegoats is obvious when you hear Tyler, the Creator’s spoken word intro to “Radi-cals”; “random disclaimer! Hey, don’t do anything that I do in this song, ok? It’s fuck-in’ fiction. If anything hap-pens, don’t blame me, white America. Fuck Bill O’Reilly [conservative, white, border-line racist media personal-ity convinced hip-hop is the work of the Devil]”. This isn’t a new phenomenon. Eminem told us way back in

2001 on “Renegade” with Jay-Z that he was “in a position to talk to these kids and they listen”, before going on to say that the media were being “a huge interference, they’re saying you shouldn’t hear it”.

I’m 20. I’ve listened to violent rap almost everyday since I was about 10, and to this day I’ve never raped, stabbed, murdered, shot or robbed anyone. Never got “flagged up” and performed a drive-by on anyone from a different clique or gang. And if I ever did, is “Eminem told me to do it” really going to work as my motive in court? If you

shoot someone because your favourite rapper brags about his life in the ‘hood, you’re an idiot.

On another note, you could say “it’s got a while to go before it’s truly multicultural” about punk, or heavy metal. How many punk or metal bands have a black frontman, other than the likes of Skin-dred and Cerebral Ballzy?

The late, great Notorious B.I.G. taught us that “it was all a dream” for black kids to escape the ghettoes of LA and New York to make fortunes from rap. These days, it’s just as likely to be a white, Latin or Asian kid from Alabama

“The great white hope of hiphop”

or Minnesota who has those same dreams. In my opin-ion, cliché as it might be, the colour of someone’s charac-ter defines them much more than the colour of their skin. It’s the 21st century; surely we can move past skin colours.

If you ask me, Dr. Dre said it best when he summed up his view on Eminem; “I don’t give a fuck if you’re white, black or purple. If you can kick it, I’m working with you”. That’s an attitude that the entire world should share.

In 1980s New York City, graf-fiti was everywhere.

Every train, every wall and every blank space was soon filled up with tags, throw ups and pieces, as kids armed themselves with stolen spray-paint and ink pens, filled with the desire to make themselves famous. They took unimagi-nable risks to get their names noticed, clambering to diz-zying heights and balancing on perilously narrow ledges while they decorated the ur-ban jungle.

Now, graffiti kings from that era like COPE2, Futura 2000 and The Terrible T-Kid are more recognisable to the mainstream public as legiti-mate artists, more likely to hang paintings inside art galleries than spraypaint the walls on the outside.

Shepard Fairey, better known as OBEY, has successfully channelled his style into a clothing line. Marc Ecko is another who travelled the fashion route, with his epon-ymous range of clothes.

It seems that America has embraced this once under-ground culture wholeheart-edly. It’s no longer seen as something that only a few people know about; there’s entire websites set up allow-ing artists from all over the country to see others’ work and post their own.

Graffiti has truly crawled above ground and hit the mainstream in America, but in Britain it’s still a largely underground phenomenon, with the majority of the pub-lic frowning upon it. Could it ever be accepted here in Britain like it has been in the States?

It’s unlikely, given that the UK has yet to produce an artist celebrated by the main-stream, outside of Banksy. And realistically, it can be argued that he’s only as ac-cepted as he is because of his style; being more about stencils and paintings than “getting up” and painting his name. It’s a choice that’s more acceptable to the British public, who have a tendency

SPRAYPAINT and INKPENSto view graffiti as mindless vandalism, nothing else.

It’s easy to see why they would think that, given that a lot of the graffiti they see is mindless vandalism, with young teams and neds mark-ing their turf with spray paint.

In my opinion, it’s also easy to see that if British artists had had the same scene that the Americans benefited from in the 1980s, in terms of opportunities to paint and get their name noticed, it would be a much more mainstream artform today.

Of course, that’s not to say that there isn’t a thriving British scene today. With the advent of the internet, it’s much easier to organise a crew and go painting at any time. Young people have ac-cepted it more than the previ-ous generations did, and as a result there’s still hope that British graffiti artists can go from displaying their work on the outside of buildings to the inside of art galleries.

By Jordan Bell

PICTURE SPECIAL

SPRAYPAINT and INKPENS

Graffiti ranges from simply spraying your name (above) to social commentary (below)

Graffiti murals are often used to pay tribute to those who have passed away...

...as well as being used to make political statements

...as well as being used to make political statements

you were younger? Or did you just realise you had talent at it and pursue it?

I think it was kind of a com-bination, you know? Like, my dad would take me up to play a round on a Saturday or a Sunday when I was just start-ing and he would play me. But I think even if he hadn’t I would’ve wanted to play, just ‘cause I just enjoyed golf. Even before I started to win stuff I just enjoyed playing it.

I see. So you really just played golf at the start because you enjoyed it, without any aim to win as many medals and tro-phies as you eventually did?

Yeah, I never set out think-ing “I’m going to be a world champion golfer” you know? I just wanted to play golf with my pals at the weekend. It was a good way to get out the house for a while.

So when did you realise you

JB :First off, I just want to say that I remember hear-ing your name a lot when we were at school. I was the year below you and every Monday I seemed to hear that you had won or came runner up in another medal or tourna-ment.

RM: Yeah, I used to be quite decent at golf.

Decent is an understatement. You have more trophies and medals for golf here than pretty much anyone I’ve ever seen before. How did it feel when you were winning al-most for fun?

It was great. Golf always seemed to be pretty easy for me, since I started playing. I remember being about seven or eight and beating the boys who were like 12 or 13. I didn’t think much of it ‘cause I was so young, but my mum and dad thought it was in-credible.

Was it them who really got you to take it seriously when

were “quite decent” at it and begin to take it fairly seri-ously?

Probably when I was 10 or 11. I had been playing for about three years by then and it was something I really enjoyed, you know? I thought that this was something I was pretty good at and I might as well try to get something to show that. So I started enter-ing the contests that Holland-bush held, like their Texas Scrambles and stuff.

And you started to win a lot?

Yeah. I would say that there was a point where I was win-ning or coming second in every three or four out of five competitions I entered.

How long did that last? Win-ning the majority of contests and generally doing well?

We sat down with Ross Maxwell to discuss his golf career throughout his junior years. The former regional champion, who represented Scotland in the past, became known more for his drinking capacity than his golf ability, but these days he’s back in golf and happy about it.

At the forefront

‘Til I was about 16 I would say. Probably up until I was 16 was when I was at my best.

And then you started to drink?

Yeah my first proper drink was around that age. And then it all went downhill from there (laughs).

Why did it go “downhill”, to use your word, do you think?

I think it was just ‘cause I was more about drinking than about playing golf at that point. Instead of being on the course on a Saturday or Sunday morning I’d be in my bed, recovering. And I think that definitely was a big rea-son why my game got worse about then.

Because you weren’t playing or practising as much?

Yeah exactly. That definitely played a part anyway.

Do you regret that at all?

Sort of. I mean I would like to have been able to stay as good at it as I was, but at the same time I was hav-ing a great time with my pals, know what I mean? If

I could’ve done both then that would’ve been absolutely perfect (laughs).

I suppose it would have. Are there any memories you have from playing golf you par-ticularly enjoyed more than others?

I’d have to say that playing the Swedish team was bril-liant. It was a great experi-

ence to play them, having them over here then travel-ling to play them over in Sweden. That and playing at St. Andrew’s course are the highlights for me I would say.

You’re back playing golf again. Are you doing it seri-ously or is it just for fun again for you?

It’s just for fun really. It would take me a long time to get anywhere near as good as I would need to be to take it

seriously again. It’s just for fun now, like it was when I was just starting to play.

Sounds like you’re enjoying it again then. Thanks very much for your time. Any final words?

Yeah; Rory McIlroy’s going to dominate golf, he’s the new Tiger.

“There was a point where I was winning or coming second in [everything] I entered

Above: Maxwell tees off in yet another medal competition

At the forefront