I’m more than a little nervous about coming face to face with Queens Of The Stone Age frontman Josh Homme. The singer is well over six feet tall and looks like he was moulded out of sheet metal.
Also, he has a reputation for not suffering fools gladly. This interviewer is feeling decidedly foolish in the company of the towering, red-haired singer, whose presence seems to pervade the entire dressing room area at Oxegen (QOTSA are due on stage within the hour).
Homme is looking forward to the show, especially since the band haven’t been able to play in the days following the London bombings, as the big man explains: “Everything went crazy in London so we cancelled our shows out of respect.”
I put it to Homme that being in London at the time must have been a bit scary.
He disagrees: “It wasn’t scary for me because I was safely inside, but I was worried for everyone else. That stuff is gutless cowards with bombs. I’ll play at their hanging. I’ll play at the party when those guys hang ‘cos that’s pussy shit. I don’t like that.
“Whatever happened to the days where you just waged war because you couldn’t stand somebody? I know war is horrible but at least when you go ‘fuck you, man’, at least you got balls.”
Discussing war isn’t as far removed from Homme’s normal life as you might think. The singer seems to be permanently in the headlines, whether it’s his ongoing war of attrition with former QOTSA bassist Nick Oliveri or his recent court appearance over a brawl with Dwarves singer Blag Dahlia, a close friend of Oliveri’s.
Having pleaded ‘no contest’ to charges that he attacked Dahlia, Homme received probation and agreed to undergo anger management.
There certainly has been an awful lot of shit going on in the Queens camp in recent months.
“It’s been fucking endless,” Homme agrees. “I think people get sick of all that. They get tired of it and just don’t want to listen to you at all after a while. So I’d like to just play. If someone else is sick of it, think how sick of it I must be. ‘Cos for the most part, I didn’t do anything. I just tried to play, so you can imagine how shitty it is over here sometimes.”
Is that all behind you now? Is the line-up settled and happy?
“It’s the line-up as long as everyone wants to stay, and it’s all settled in that I don’t want to even talk about it any more. I did everything I can do to try to clear it up. I’ve nothing left to do,” he opines wearily. “Now should just be about what our music sounds like and from where I’m sitting, it sounds pretty good. Let’s get back to that.”
QOTSA are pretty much on the road until the end of the year and it seems as though that’s exactly where Homme wants to be: putting everything aside for 90 minutes while he blows enough gaskets on stage for a metaphysical auto-wrecking shop during the band’s incendiary live set.
“I want to show what all the fuss was about,” he smiles. “It’s high time it just got back to music anyways.
“Since the beginning, there’s always been something else there, and that can make you overlook the fact that we try to play good music. It just so happens that the boys like to have a good time, sometimes too much of a good time and sometimes not enough of a good time. So I’d like to get it to the point where that’s the first thing that comes to mind [when you think of Queens Of The Stone Age].”
In fairness to my noble profession, it’s hard to focus solely on the music when there is so much else going on in the world of QOTSA. Just days before our interview takes place, Homme startled listeners on BBC Radio 1’s Zane Lowe show (and the presenter himself) by revealing why he fired Nick Oliveri from Queens Of The Stone Age in 2004. Homme alleged that he had sacked his longtime friend when he found out that Oliveri had been physically abusive to his girlfriend.
The singer told listeners that he had heard a rumour to that effect a couple of years ago and had confronted Oliveri about it: “I said, ‘If I ever find out that this is true, I can’t know you man.’ Because music and my life are the same thing: there’s no rules until something massive happens.” According to Homme, “something happened again” when Oliveri was in England with fellow former QOTSA member Mark Lanegan, “and he almost didn’t make it out of the country. That’s not music anymore”.
Since the interview, the QOTSA frontman has posted a note on the band’s website, defending his actions in speaking out on the issue: “To set the record straight, Zane Lowe did not push, coerce or manipulate me into speaking the truth about my reasons for firing Nick Oliveri. I alone decided to lift the weight of others’ responsibilities off of my shoulders. I intended to discuss my recent sentencing by the court, but because every situation in life is tethered to another, it became much more.
“When the truth came to light for me, I thought that the immediate firing of Nick would be explanation enough. I was naive. Now my only hope is that the revealing of this situation does not inflict pain the way internalising it has, for all involved. Conspiracy and adjectives be damned. I will never speak of this again.”
When I bring the matter up with Homme, he’s true to his word: “You can just go to the BBC and check that out. It was hard enough to say once. And now everyone can shut the fuck-up, ‘cos I’m going to.”
The singer does admit, however, that the departure of Oliveri will alienate some of the band’s longtime fans: “I knew there would be all sorts of things, like Nick being gone, that would be very divisive. People will take a side one way or the other, so I knew this would be goodbye for some people, so ‘goodbye’.”
He doesn’t feel the bassist’s exit has affected the band’s songwriting quality, however, citing their current opus Lullabies To Paralyse as being “more consistent than any of the other records”.
Homme admits to constantly writing new songs on the road (all of Lullabies was written that way) but, perhaps surprisingly, he never demos any new material: “I figure that I do so much stuff to destroy my brain that I should have to remember all the songs,” he laughs. “I just remember ‘em and I just play ‘em over and over till I get something that I can’t let go of. That way also, I know they pass through the ringer and they’re good, unless my ringer’s fucked up and then it’s too late, no matter if I demo or not.”
So you are your own quality control?
“I set the bar so high that I can barely touch it,” he grins. “And then see if my bar is higher or lower than everyone else’s.”
So what can we expect from the Queens for the rest of 2005 then?
“I fear our story has gotten boring cos it’s just about music, but I’ll take some boring for a while,” he laughs. “I’ve been doing this for 14 years so a touch of boring could be good.”
He is planning more recording, though, around December/January, with another Desert Sessions album in the pipeline, where Homme gets a gang of like-minded souls into the studio and usually creates some kind of wonderful (the last incredible album featured PJ Harvey). When I ask him who’s going to be involved this time around, he has one artist in mind.
“Peaches! That’s my operative word for the year, my default setting. If someone says something wrong to me, I just say ‘Peaches, motherfucker’. No-one’s got more balls than her, to go out all alone in front of whoever, and she’s got the best guitar sound live I’ve ever heard. I’ve toured with her a couple of times and it’s always a true joy. No-one does to them [the audience] what she does to them. It’s much needed.”
Following that, he plans on taking some much needed time out, and even seems to be contemplating early retirement…
“Then maybe I’ll just disappear for a while. Maybe I’ll take my first time off ever,” he says with a wry smile. “Maybe I should go away for a while, a couple of years or something, and see if you miss me. If you do, I’ll come back, and if you don’t, go fuck yourself.”