‘The hate and contempt are as strong as the love’: alt band Blonde Redhead on their twisted bond
Sit Down for Dinner, a record of deftly anxious songs about loss, is among Blonde Redhead’s finest work. In many respects, this is remarkable, given the new record comes after an absence of almost a decade – and after Kazu Makino thought she had “walked away from the band for ever”.
The experience of self-releasing the band’s 2014 album, Barragán, had left the singer and guitarist “decimated, financially and physically”, while longsimmering tensions between Makino and her bandmates, the twin brothers Amedeo (guitar and vocals) and Simone Pace (drums), had grown intolerable. “I kept asking myself: ‘Do I always have to suffer to make music?’”
But when Amedeo became seriously ill and was hospitalised this summer with Lyme disease and a malaria-like infection called babeosis, Makino “truly panicked – I don’t think I would have a life without him”.
We are talking in July at the hotel in London where Makino is staying. Blonde Redhead were supposed to play this evening, but the gig was cancelled due to Amedeo’s illness. He will soon recover, but Makino has her absent bandmate on her mind. While their connection is impossibly deep, it’s also complex. “The twins are like real family,” she says. “The hate and contempt [between us] are as strong as the love. I can’t even talk to them sometimes.”
They met in New York in the early 90s. Makino had fled Kyoto, specifically her parents’ attempts to “sabotage” her musical ambitions: “I wouldn’t be stopped.” The Pace twins were born and raised in Italy and studied jazz at Berklee College of Music in Boston before relocating to New York, where they held down a regular gig at a restaurant and nightclub.
A mutual friend thought the trio should play together, remembers Amedeo via a video call alongside Simone later in the summer. “But Kazu was worried about being in a band with twins.” Amedeo, meanwhile, was anxious they wouldn’t find common ground. “I loved jazz and wanted to improvise; Simone was immersed in Brazilian music. And Kazu had her own rebel ideas, influenced by My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth. I abandoned everything I learned in school and began playing in alternate tunings.”
Their early squall was indebted to Sonic Youth (whose drummer, Steve Shelley, released Blonde Redhead’s first two albums on his label Smells Like), but the interplay between Makino’s razorwire rasp and Amedeo’s melancholic croon sounded like nothing else. They were outsiders in a scene of outsiders. “Us being Italian, and Kazu Japanese, we felt pretty foreign to everything,” says Amedeo.
Indeed, they spent their early career in fear that they might be deported, a constant anxiety that left its own impression (they had moved to the
US on student visas). “I’m fine now,” Makino says. “I keep hearing about white Americans living in fear, because soon there will be more black people than white people in America. And I want to tell them: it’s really liberating to be a minority. Because when nobody wants you, you are truly free.”
The intensity with which they pursued their music also set them apart. Makino remembers crying in frustration at every rehearsal “because I felt inadequate”, while Amedeo blames their inability to keep a bassist on their failure to find a fourth member who “could stand our chemistry”.
It didn’t help that Amedeo and Makino were lovers; their on/off relationship spanned the group’s first decade or so. “It wasn’t easy for them,” says Simone. “They lived together, so there was no escape. Lots of fights, lots of emotion. We even tried therapy, all three of us, to figure out a healthier way to deal with each other.”
Amedeo adds: “We’d spend so much time together, at practice and at home. It was great for the music, but we’d fight at rehearsal, then come home pissed off and be upset for days.”
This friction bled into Blonde Redhead’s music. Their chaotic and captivating third album, 1997’s Fake Can Be Just As Good, opened with Kazuality, Amedeo’s ode to their all-engulfing relationship (“Timeless fire that burns / Me to you, you to me”), while on stage the pair often seemed on the brink of combat, parrying guitar necks and colliding into each other. “It wasn’t an act,” Makino says. “We fought all the time. It was dreadful.”
They dialled back the aural melee, beginning with 1998’s In an Expression of the Inexpressible, the first of three albums produced by Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto. “Slightly higher budgets meant we could spend more than three days recording an album,” says Simone. “We wanted to use strings, to show more beauty in the music.” They found new power in restraint, broadening their palette with primal influences they had previously “repressed with noise”.
Amedeo says: “I remember our mum playing classical and jazz organ records that affected me a lot. They were dark, sad and very harmonically beautiful.”
Those words perfectly describe 2004’s Misery Is a Butterfly. Its production had been delayed after Makino, a keen equestrian, sustained horrific injuries when she was trampled by her horse. “The accident destroyed my jaw,” she remembers. “I was laid out for so long. My mouth was wired shut – I couldn’t sing. I told Ame: ‘You should sing my songs instead.’” But he refused and, as they waited for her to recover, the album evolved. “We were listening to lots of French music, lots of soundtracks, at the time,” Amedeo says. “What was going on in the music world was very different from what we were doing” – the alt scene was then full of garage rock and dance punk – “but we decided to be true to ourselves.”
“Once it was finished, I hated it,” says Makino, laughing. “It felt like a big stick of butter; it was so rich.” But she soon made her peace with what would become the group’s most acclaimed release. “I hate music that is simply pretty,” she says. “But Serge Gainsbourg wrote insanely beautiful music that was brutal at the same time, because of his suffering.” Blonde Redhead’s new sound was similarly affecting, the cacophony of their earlier records now absent, but their signature longing, introspection and anguish hauntingly intact.
The group continued to explore this sound on the albums that followed, but Makino struggled with her self-worth, doubting whether, hypothetically, she could make music without the twins. After Barragán, though, she recorded a solo album, 2019’s Adult Baby, working with Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier and Ryuichi Sakamoto. “It was liberating for me – I was flying the whole time,” she says. “You can have a lot of fun making music; I proved that to myself. Nobody was competitive with me this time.”
Perhaps it’s surprising, then, that she returned to Blonde Redhead to make Sit Down for Dinner. But the connection between Makino, Amedeo and Simone remains mystical: they can’t explain it, but they trust it implicitly. “We bring out the best in each other,” says Makino. “Amedeo comes alive when we work together, and vice versa. He draws things from me I never knew I could achieve.” Their love affair is long over, but “what we have creatively is a for ever thing”, she says.
Their time apart has bred a respect for what they can achieve alone. Amedeo speaks admiringly of Makino’s “determination” on this album, working solo in the studio as she sheltered with their engineer during lockdown, while Makino praises Amedeo’s craft. “You can hear it on Snowman,” she says, a note of awe in her voice. “He layered that song into an epic masterpiece.”
The result is a suite of melancholy pop that sings of very adult concerns, of problems without easy solutions, with characteristic honesty. The title track was inspired by Makino’s mother’s dementia. “My mother was passing between madness and sanity. She said: ‘I worked so hard all my life; I should be able to choose the way I go.’ All I could tell her was: ‘I’m sorry, Mummy, you’re right, you don’t deserve this.’”
In her creative life, however, the past few years have been validating. She has proved her mettle with her solo album and found a way to make Blonde Redhead work – to make music without suffering. “Music is who I am,” she says. “I don’t know if there’s any other way of feeling like I’m worthy of anything. Blonde Redhead is three passive-aggressives who need an outlet, and making records is not easy. But this time, I laid down the law: ‘I will lose it if we fight making this record.’” She pauses for a moment and smiles. “So we didn’t. And it worked quite well.”
• Sit Down for Dinner is released on 29 September on section1
I kept asking myself: ‘Do I always have to suffer to make music?
Kazu Makino