Where For Art, Art Thou Juliette

So here’s the pitch. There’s this once-upon-a-time movie starlet and Oscar nominee who, after ten years of working with directors like Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen and Oliver Stone, not to mention acting opposite De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio, gets browned off with Hollywood machinations and dedicates herself to the rather more immediate pleasures of rock ‘n’ roll. She puts together a band, calls it Juliette & The Licks, does a no-frills stint on the Warped tour in the summer of '04, co-writes a few tunes with Linda Perry and releases a swiftly recorded EP entitled Like A Bolt Of Lightning.
Having completed most of the work on the band's first full-length album, provisionally titled You’re Speaking My Language, she flies to Europe, using her name to crowbar her way into various music biz awards ceremonies, which in turn subsidise shows at entry-level clubs. On arriving in Ireland, she pinballs from Dublin to Galway to Limerick, eventually fetching up at the Meteor Awards in The Point, rubbing shoulders with truant Rolling Stones and Snoop Doggs.
That’s the premise. Now let us consult the dailies…

Cut to Sunday February 20, the Voodoo Lounge, north quay of the Liffey, Dublin 1. Your standard rock n’ roll club ambience, dark-lit, glowing orange beer signs, Halloween decorations behind the bar, a freezing wind coming in from the beer garden cum smoking enclosure. Inside is standing room only, longhairs and leatherheads, grunge refugees, curious film geeks, a smattering of fanboys and riot girls all nursing confused post-teenage crushes. By the time the band come onstage the walls are dripping.
The Licks are good and tight, workmanlike at times but pros to a fault. Lewis herself is an utterly assured performer, dressed like the cover of Horses, throwing her whiplash body around the limited stage space, crowd surfing, white Cuban heels kicking at the air. Unbiased A&R eyes might clock this lot as a promising act with a real firecracker of a singer and a handful of sturdy tunes. They play 45 minutes, cover Van Halen for an encore, then the PA spurts ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’ as the customers file out making colour-me-impressed noises.
And so, to bed.
Early next morning, the teletext says Hunter S. Thompson turned a gun on himself during the night. As the news sinks in, one of his more apposite quotes comes to mind:
“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.”
While the testimonials roll, I bat e-mails and phone calls back and forth to The Licks’ publicist Juliana, trying to finalise the details of our planned interview. I’m thinking an old-fashioned on-the-bus fly-on-the-wall job, just like the days before whole teams of spin doctors and bottle-washers were employed to act antsy if you overran your allotted 20 minutes in a plush hotel room. Juliana says that sounds like fun – only problem is, they don’t have a bus.
Band and crew are travelling by van, and all the seats are taken. Plus, Juliette’s down with flu, and there are probably enough germs incubating in that enclosed space to arm a modest bio-chemical terrorist cell. This, and the first substantial fall of snow in Ireland in years. In the end, we broker a compromise. I’ll catch up with the band in Limerick and we’ll talk there.

Cut again, to the last Wednesday in February, and the sky over Limerick city doesn’t know whether to spit or go hailing, blue skies giving way to impenetrable snow clouds. Grabbing lunch in a cheap and cheerful café up the road from Jury's, I clock Ms Lewis on the front cover of the Limerick Event Guide, all vamped up in a blood red body suit. There's a short piece plugging tonight's show in Dolan's Warehouse, situated on Dock Road, where the traffic pounds westward along the banks of the Shannon.
I get there early and embed myself at the bar.
The first member of the Licks’ entourage to arrive is a young woman swaddled up in a long pea green coat, old lady’s scarf, grey pants and pink trainers. Average height, clutching a bottle of Volvic. This is Juliette Lewis in energy conservation mode. We say our hellos and I introduce myself to her sister and manager Brandy, who, being with child to the tune of some six months, will not be boarding transatlantic flights for much longer. We decide to get the interview out of the way while the band load-in. Squirreled away in an upstairs lounge, we take a seat each. I begin by suggesting it’s a smart move for any actress cutting her teeth in the music biz to start at the bottom and build from there.
"It’s very important that we do everything that any new band would," Lewis says. "We get opportunities that a new band might not, but I feel I’ve worked in film for 15 years; I’ve earned an audience. So if they want to show up ’cos they’re curious or what have you, it’s our job to put on a for-real live rock ‘n’ roll show, ’cos they’re not gonna stay. We try to find opportunities cos we’re on a little independent label. Jay, who runs the label is also our tour manager, so everything is very, very small and communal and we’re putting all our resources together to try to push this thing forward.”
While Juliette grew up under the spell of musicals like Fame and Flashdance, the first inkling many of us would’ve had that she could sing was performing a couple of PJ Harvey tunes in Strange Days, wearing a fishnet number slightly less substantial than a handkerchief. Which takes some balls.
“Well, thanks for saying that. She’s the queen. She’s just such an artist of the higher kind, where they take risks.”
Talk turns to one of the more intriguing tunes on the EP, a rowdy piece of jet-trash entitled ‘Shelter Your Needs’, which rails against all kinds of 21st Century ills: corporate dick-suckers, cosmetic surgery and prescription drugs. In an interview with JT Leroy, Lewis once expressed concern and revulsion at the drug industry’s hard sell of products aimed at hyperactive children. Which is interesting, given that so many rock ‘n’ rollers who came of age in the 70s – Henry Rollins, Courtney Love, Eddie Vedder, Dave Grohl – were Ritalin kids. In this regard, Lewis’s attitude is tangentially aligned with hardcore straight edge bands. In other words, there’s nothing counterculture about taking drugs anymore; it’s about the most conformist and consumerist thing you can do.
“You know, you can use rock ‘n’ roll for so many purposes,” she responds. “One is for your own catharsis and joy, and then to sort of rabble-rouse, and I love this notion of people questioning authority, and that means your government, your police, your doctors. And one thing that’s become an insane epidemic is happy-pills. And because I know cases of six year olds being prescribed that, that’s my biggest concern, because they don’t have a voice.
“I had friends of mine who, when they were 19 and they stopped the drugs, they had all these side effects. Doctors don’t tell you that. I think a law just recently got passed in the States where they have to label it, that it produces suicidal and aggressive behaviour. It’s the consumer generation and the quick fix society. And because I did drugs, like, ten years ago, I still have remnants of fear and get anxious in crowds and things, but I want to come out with a kind of power and confrontation to defy that fear, to defy the awkwardness.
“To be radical to me in this day and age is to actually take care of oneself, take care of your friends, to try to do something in the community. The whole nihilism, ‘Aw fuck it, I don’t care about anything’, that mentality is really short-lived. I suppose somebody somewhere could call me preachy, but I have a developed a point of view due to my experiences, and that point of view is going to be in my music.”
So who are the kind of performers she admires? One would imagine Iggy is in there somewhere…
“Believe it or not I’ve only seen Iggy once live. I’m inspired very much by Blondie, Grace Jones, she’s very performance art. My job always, even acting, is to tap into my own gifts. Each song to me is a character and has a personality to it. And of course, rhythm, you just move, it’s gorgeous, and when I’m in love with some of these drumbeats that Jason has cooked up, it’s pretty exciting. I really like showmanship, this idea to put on the kind of show that I would go see. Someday the shows will get longer, maybe an hour, an hour and a half, but for right now it’s a half hour, 40 minutes, so it’s just releasing a torrent of energy, with little peaks and valleys and then you leave people uplifted. That’s my hope.
I’m into music as a real primal energy, and because I’m small and female, I like the illusion of supernatural strength, like the gods. Like Hercules! Or wrestlers! I’m being The Hulk! That’s why when people comment on sexuality… I understand I’m a slight female, but there is sexuality in anything. It’s like an exorcism of whatever ails you. I love this notion. It’s very caveman.”
And what’s the state of her film career at the moment?
“I still do it, it’s my livelihood, and I still have goals there that I imagine might occur. There’s just so many different filmmakers that come out every year, that’s what makes film special, the filmmaker and the writers. There’s always another story to tell, but it’s in a totally different way, one where I’m hired and I help another person and that collaboration is fulfilling, but nothing like what I put into the music. I’m already thinking about the next record. I feel like you don’t know what could occur unless you put everything into it, not half-ass it.
“I got nominated (for an Oscar) when I was 19 but I still had to prove myself, still had people not wanting to hire me because I’m too strange or different. My relationships in film have been with filmmakers, never the businessmen. They like safe, predictable, familiar females in Hollywood. It’s whatever gets popular that defines you. But the characters in Natural Born Killers and Kalifornia were polar opposites, cos to me Adele was like a stunted nine year old. They’re both southern – bad southern accents at that – but I’m glad people think it was good, and Natural Born Killers to me is almost a farce, a cartoon, but genuine emotion always. It has nice things in it visually, artistically.
"But right after Natural Born Killers I did a comedy with Steve Martin. It just went to video. Had it been successful it would have been brilliant. But I took a year and a half off when I was 22 and then I did this movie called The Other Sister. That was one of the most special experiences. I wanted to get out of the trap which is an image or some movie grossing thing that you generate and have to uphold, which I don’t have now, I feel like I have freedom. I’m used to being an underdog kinda.”
We’ve been talking for about half an hour when Juliette’s called downstairs for soundcheck duties. I sit in as the band jam their way through a new tune, their improvising in the upper registers. “I found my falsetto in Limerick,” she quips when it finishes. Upstairs on the balcony, a couple of guys with a film camera and boom mic are recording the proceedings. There’s a documentary in progress. For a while there, one of the major US networks was hinting at a reality TV show but backed off when it became apparent there was no dirt to dish. I learn this later on from Licks bassist Paul Ill – nicknamed ‘The Professor’ on account of an encyclopaedic knowledge of rock ‘n’ roll, politics and pop culture – a veteran of the LA scene who once played in a Max’s/Rodney Bingenheimer type revue that was the place to be “for about a minute”. Over pre-gig chowder in the restaurant, the conversation skids across the thin ice of IRA history, the use of LSD in CIA psy-ops, (he’s an army brat), and somehow ends up with his revealing the bizarre but rather ingenious plot for the sci-fi novel he’s working on.
As we’re talking, the rest of the band file in: drummer Jason Morris, diminutive and dapper, ex-H20 guitarist Todd Morse, raffish and friendly, guitarist Kemble Walters, ex of The Rise, the kind of spacey dreamboat all the girls crush to the front to get a closer look at. I leave them to get ready and head back to the hotel, where Sky News is hyping the announcement that the jury’s been selected for the Michael Jackson trial – eight women, four men; three Hispanics, one Asian, no African Americans.
Nobody I speak to seems to be able to make their mind up whether this is a good, bad or indifferent outcome for the Prince of Pop.
An hour later, as the crowds file into Dolan’s, Juliette, now wearing a Cossack Fargo hat, disembarks from the van and collars me at the door, wanting to set something straight.
“In the interview, I was giving a shout out to straight edge,” she says. “But we’re not straight edge. I mean, we don’t do drugs, but we do have a drink…”
The gig is a good one, the crowd supportive to the point of partisan, the band in flying form. With a little eyeliner and hair tousling, Juliette’s transformed herself from snuffling urchin into a supervixen clad in white skin-tight Public Servant top over blue jeans, flexing her muscles, pushing her butt up against Kemble like a frisky cat. A couple of tunes stand out, most notably the bolshy opener ‘You’re Speaking My Language’ and the Motels-like slowie ‘This I Know’. Again, the band keep it tight and punchy, don’t overstay their welcome.
Upstairs afterwards, in a homely dressing room laden with bottled water and cold cuts, the singer changes into her civvies and begins receiving visitors. All is relaxed and informal until the camera crew start filming and everybody gets self-conscious, feeling like extras from In Bed With Madonna.
One by one, band and crew trickle upstairs, load-out completed. The Licks touring operation is a tight ship, double-jobbing being the norm. Brandy deputises as merchandising saleswoman during the shows, watching the t-shirt stand while Jay takes care of backline. After the show, the musicians are more likely to be found humping their own gear than skinny-fit Lolitas. Where possible, they’re opting for overnight drives rather than booking hotels.
By midnight, Dublin’s Four Seasons hotel, paid for with Meteor money, beckons. Tomorrow there’s an eleven o’ clock call for rehearsals in The Point, where the band are scheduled to play a tune and Juliette’s slated to present an award.
Time, as Uncle Henry might say, to get in the van.

‘Did you want to do the red carpet with the band?’ says Brandy Lewis.
We’re in The Licks’ dressing room in The Point – wall to wall mirrors bordered with bright light bulbs, baskets of gratuities, nibbles, soft drinks. The musicians are preparing to do their grand entry out front, flashbulbs, cameras, mics with TV station emblems, the whole bit.
As for joining them, it’s not like I’m not tempted. I mean, imagine sauntering up that red rag, cheesy grin dripping from your chops, clocking the looks of incomprehension and what-the-fuck-is-he-playing-at on the faces of acquaintances in the press corps. Or the juvenile but still gratifying pleasure of flipping the bird to all those heavy-handed clipboard Nazis who’ve bounced your unkempt carcass out of their velvet roped enclaves over the last ten years.
But in the end I’m just too chicken.
‘Thanks for asking,’ I say. ‘But no.’
I’d met with the band again a couple of hours earlier in the lobby of the Four Seasons. The musicians arrived down looking pretty suave considering they’d all had about four hours’ sleep and were feeling gypped because some bright spark told them they’d get from Limerick to Dublin in two hours flat, when the reality was closer to four. Mafia hit man chic is the theme, apart from Juliette, who’s donned a sort of spangly gold lame suit over white shirt unbuttoned to the breastbone. After a hastily organised HP photo shoot, the assembly shuffles out into the drizzle to be ferried by car to The Point. On learning of my acute lack of accreditation, tour manager Jay fishes his employer’s access-all-areas pass from his pocket.
“Here,” he says, assuming fairy godmother status – if a fairy godmother ever wore a diagonally patterned tie over vertical pinstripes.
“This for me?”
“Yep.”
“Thanks. What about Juliette?”
Jay takes a look at the glittering apparition in the lobby, deadpans, "Nobody’s gonna stop her going in…”
But even so, backstage at The Point on Meteor night, it’s clear there are pecking orders within pecking orders, and tonight Snoop is top Dogg. The hallway outside his dressing room is impacted with maybe a dozen brick shithouses of men whose sole purpose is ostensibly to block the Dogg pound and mutter lewdly appreciative remarks at passers-by of the female persuasion, including both Lewis sisters. Later on, Snoop himself will leer at a passing female string section with the facial expression of a Bunclody farmer coveting his neighbour’s livestock on market day. Later again, he’ll hold court at a tiny table in Renard’s club like some kind of Pharaoh surrounded by a harem of skinny white beeotches and burly bodyguards, a rather incongruous sight in such cramped confines.
But back at The Point, red carpet duties completed, Juliette is going over her presentation speech for Best Irish Male award. Ronnie Wood pops in, scarecrow haired, dripping designer gear and sucking on a cyber-cigarette substitute device that gives him the look of a demented inventor, his wife Jo in tow. Ronnie wisecracks something about why the drummers are always the best dressed in the band and suggests that Juliette cameo at a forthcoming London show where he’s due to reassemble his mid-70s touring band.
The next hour seems to stretch out of all proportion as everyone kills time waiting to go on, breaking the monotony by trouping out front to watch Wood guest with The Thrills on ‘Maggie May’, making last minute checks on the gear, which has been set up on a side stage riser. The documentary makers have been given the night off, mainly ’cos the band are afraid the presence of their own camera crew will make them look like jerks in front of most of the Irish music industry.
After presenting Paddy Casey with his award, Juliette changes into an electric blue shirt, white tie and white pants. Redoing her eyeliner in the mirror, multiple surfaces reflecting her image off into infinity, she remembers something that happened as she was signing autographs after the Limerick show.
“This young kid,” she says, “a real film fan, he was asking me all these questions, like, ‘What’s Tarantino like to work with – is he really crazy about kung fu?’ And I say, ‘Well, yeah, he really is’. And the kid says, ‘And what’s Harvey Keitel like?’ And I said, ‘Well, he’s kind of intense’. ‘Intense? Really?’ ‘Yeah, but he’s really nice’. It was so sweet. Any little thing I said, he was taking it all in and telling it to his friends…”
Showtime is approaching. Juliette sings snatches of Tom Petty songs to warm up her voice. The band join in, and the ruckus attracts Joe Elliot, who drops in to pay his respects. Then it’s time to go, and they’re all being led down the hall and into the cavernous blackness of backstage, headsets crackling all around, banks of mixing desks, monitor screens flickering with onstage action, then up the steps, into the wings and they’re on, doing ‘Got Love To Kill’, a chugging tune with a fine shouty chorus and Moroder-era Blondie feel. The sound is mixed-for-TV trebly, but the band sound confident. That is, until about a minute in, and just as the camera zooms on Todd, his guitar amp goes dead, and he’s left standing there quite literally yanking his wire. Things get wobbly for about eight seconds before they pull the song out of the toilet, Juliette clawing back momentum by working the front rows.
Backstage, Todd’s normally affable demeanour is black with aggravation. Turns out one of the cameramen tripped over his lead and cut his power. He’s trying not to let it get to him. He asks how it sounded. Nervy, I tell him. But a couple of glitches are preferable to lip-synching any day.
After the band and crew have packed up the gear, they reconvene in the backstage bar for a round of baby Guinnesses and an end of tour toast. Tomorrow morning’s another early call: Dublin to Heathrow, then onto LA. I give up the search for a closing paragraph and say my goodbyes. But a couple of days later, trawling through the tape of the Limerick interview, I find the quote from Juliette I was looking for:
“I can’t decide which business is more heartbreaking, movies or music,” she’d said. “But my heart hasn’t been broken yet. It has scar tissue enough for anybody, but it’s full and pumping, so I’m alright…”

The Like A Bolt Of Lightning EP is out now on Hassle Records. You’re Speaking My Language will be released in May.