Greg Dulli

The Afghan Whigs mainman releases his first ever solo album, but he says it isn’t the end of the Whigs.

Greg Dulli has just pulled up a photo on his phone. It shows an open door and beyond it a glorious desert panorama bathed in bright sunlight: Joshua Tree National Park in California. “This was my view every morning,” says Dulli, the frontman with cult US outfit the Afghan Whigs. It was in Joshua Tree that he recorded Random Desire, his debut solo album, which takes the Whigs’ soulburnished template and daubs it with all manner of colours and textures.

Why has it taken you more than thirty years to make a solo album? Really, it’s because I needed something to do. Everyone else was busy having kids or going back to college.

How many of the instruments on the record did you play yourself? Most of ’em. I can play drums but I’m not a drummer, I can play bass but I’m not a bassist, I’m a decent guitarist but I’m not a virtuoso.

Your former collaborator Shawn Smith died in 2019. How did that affect you? I hadn’t seen him in eight years when he passed away. Shawn and I had a very strange friendship. We were the best of friends for seven years, then there was a stretch of ten years where I didn’t see him at all, then we reconnected and did a couple of shows together, and then he disappeared again. So I felt his loss, but in a lot of ways he had already been gone from my life twice already.

Did you part on good terms? We hadn’t parted on bad terms. It just sort of… stopped. He was the disappearer, not me. Really beautiful cat. Incredible artist. Wrote some of the best songs I’ve ever heard. But he had some demons. Like we all do.

Afghan Whigs guitarist Dave Rosser also died a month after the last Whigs record, 2017’s In Spades, was released. Does death inform your album? For sure. I can’t go: “This song’s about Dave”, or “This song’s about Shawn”, but they are in there. It’s not obvious – there’s no Tears In Heaven. It’s kind of all in the abstract. I’m not an on-the-nose kind of guy. But it’s a positive album. I think it’s beautiful. There’s whimsical moments, even – the first song, Pantomima, it’s like a show tune. Try and find the darkness in that.

“It’s a positive album. There’s

whimsical moments, even.”

The Whigs split in 1999 and reunited in 2013. Does you making a solo album mean the end of the band again? No. I love those guys. Two of the Whigs are touring with me in the solo band, and the drummer was our lighting guy.

The Whigs never broke through to the same level as some of your earlynineties peers. Are you happy being that ‘cult’ artist? Absolutely. At one point I did want to be that. But when the lights got a little bright around [the Afghan Whigs’ 1993 album] Gentlemen, I was like: “Oh, I’m not sure I like this” – doing things you don’t want to do, meeting people you don’t want to meet. And then with [1998’s] 1965, I thought: “Now I’ve got songs that will get on the radio.” And they didn’t. After that it was, like: “I’m just gonna do what I want.”

And how’s that working out for you? Oh man, it’s working out just great. DE

Random Desire is out on February 21 via Royal Cream/BMG.