Monster Magnet
Get ready for a real mindf**k of a live show.
Frontman Dave Wyndorf looks ahead to the latest British tour from the New Jersey stoner rockers, which is preceded by a Sunday night headline set at London’s Desertfest weekender.
A couple of years back you told Classic Rock you didn’t feel like writing new material, and that another Monster Magnet album would need to be “something special”.
Eventually some shorter songs started to come along and they made me think: “The guys in the band are playing so well, I should write again.” And that’s what I did.
Classic Rock called Mindfucker “the first MM album since Powertrip [in 1998] to truly deliver the goods”. Listen, I know we’re a strange band that makes very different types of records. Obviously, people will have their favourites.
It’s among the best the band has done. Absolutely – but if I disagreed with that, I’d have to shoot myself in the head, wouldn’t I?
There are no prizes whatsoever for subtlety when it comes to that title. The inner Beavis & Butt‑head in me dictated that I had to release a record called Mindfucker. Not to have done so would have been shirking a duty.
Why include a cover of Ejection by late Hawkwind singer Robert Calvert?
I can’t leave Calvert’s album Captain Lockheed And The Starfighters alone. It’s full of classic songs that have hardly ever been covered – and they need to be. It was so easy to do. It was going to be a B‑side, but I liked it so much it went on the record.
You’re going to be sharing a stage with Hawkwind at Desertfest.
As a fourteen‑year‑old who saw their Space Ritual show at the Academy Of Music in New York City [in 1973], that’s just unbelievable. Lemmy and Stacia were there, and the saxophonist [Nik Turner] played solos through a papier mâché frog’s head. It was a glorious, hellacious, pre‑punk noise.
Did you hand-pick the tour’s support act, Birmingham trio Table Scraps? Yeah, Table Scraps are awesome. They’re like a punk‑rock version of Hawkwind. When I first heard them I flipped out.
The tour ends in Dublin on June 3.