Red Hot Chili Peppers - One Hot Minute (1995)

Fuck Blood Sugar Sex Magik. You wanna hear the best Red Hot Chili Peppers album you go right out and pick up One Hot Minute. Criminally, but possibly thankfully, the only album they recorded with Dave Navarro on guitar, after John Frusciante freaked out in the face of stardom and retreated into a heroin fuelled hibernation. Navarro was made for stardom, styled to within an inch of his life to be rock cool. He fucked and married Carmen Electra for gods sake. And the man can play some mean guitar. Sessions though fruitful were also apparently tense, an atmosphere that seeps into the albums sound. The artwork, a radical departure from the bands earlier covers, left the hyped up party boy image behind, it’s similarity to a children’s book somewhat disguising unease contained within.

Gone was the youthful funk energy of Mothers Milk, the highpoint of their early years that was the perfect culmination of what they’d been doing up until that point, a clearing house of those feelings and those messages and a stage setter for a new period of musical growth. Barely audible was the clean pop sheened funk of Blood Sugar Sex Magik, a semi-masterpiece containing some of the best songs the band had and has written. Navarro introduced a darker edge, metallic riffs and psychedelic overtones. Singer Anthony Keidis’ recurring drug problem had done exactly that and recurred, bringing a jaded, sombre mood to much of the lyrical content. Flea, his bass tone no longer so prominent in the sound thanks to Navarro’s dirty guitar tones (a far departure from the cleaner sound of Frusciante’s Stratocaster punch) shines in well placed bass solo’s such as the furious ending of Coffee Shop and his first lead vocal performance on Pea. Chad smith as always, played drums.

I can still clearly see in my head images from the video for first single and album opener Warped. Keidis dressed like a badly aged Madonna (pretty prophetic too, the current resemblance is uncanny) and then song explodes. Against a bright red background (the signature colour of the album, visually and aurally) the band launch into action, the jarring, almost hyper-speed Sabbath riff driving the song with Keides singing about his own world being warped by his heroin use. The way his words are drawn out to fill out the vocals lines is resonant of Alice In Chains singer Layne Stayley (RIP), heroin the common factor in both. The moment where the band comes in at the start of this song is always guaranteed to make me want to jump around, and stands as one of my favourite album openers of all time.

There’s hardly a weak moment. Aeroplane (another fantastic vocal performance and a great lyric), Deep Kick (darkly psychedelic and for me a real signature of the album) and My Friends are all great tracks. Coffee Shop is one of two towering marriages of the early Chili Peppers funk sound to the metal riffing of Navarro, the other being Shallow Be Thy Game. The aforementioned bass solo is an album highlight, powerful and dominant as the track races in chaos around it. One Big Mob (the first upbeat track of the album), Walkabout (more great performances from everyone) and Tearjerker (doing exactly what it says on the tin) lead into the shuddering, throbbing title track with it’s constant refrain of “am I all alone” and anthemic chorus. Falling In To Grace is as close as the album comes to filler, a killer bass groove and not much else, though it is a killer groove . Shallow Be Thy Game is a scathing indictment of churches and their desecration of old world cultures and traditions, and features the best lyrics Anthony Keides every sang on any song anywhere ever, sung with great passion. This song is, in my humble opinion, the greatest Red Hot Chili Peppers song ever, Flea’s bass playing rumbling along wonderfully and Navarro getting into the funk but doing it his way, with huge metallic slabs throughout. Transcending rounds out the album, written by Flea for friend River Phoenix, a moving tribute particularly with the “like no other, I love you you’re my brother” couplet.

All up, One Hot Minute is one the few albums I can always listen to from start to finish and still be emotionally, mentally and physically moved each time. It evokes memories in me of the time in which it was released, and makes me wonder what else this line up could have come up with, and would it all be so pink and mellow like the work with the returned and revitalised Frusciante.

France to Northcote

* these pieces are from several years ago at university, presented as a way of charting the changes in my writing, and re-evaluating pieces I was very happy with at that stage.


The years travlled together
fall apart to mean nothing.

Your voice from afar
through taught black lines.

No it's not alright,
I'm here and you're not.

Distance between us
becomes infinite.

And in France they
nail your coffin.

Ocean Side

* these pieces are from several years ago at university, presented as a way of charting the changes in my writing, and re-evaluating pieces I was very happy with at that stage.


Moments captured in photographs.
You with a smile
and the sun setting behind you,
casting an eerie redness on everything

such tragedy in serenity
such serenity in tragedy

The waves roling wearily onto the sand
then gently receeding to come back later,
occasionally they come close enough
to lap at the tyres on your car
parked so close to the water.

Seagulls fly overhead with nowhere to go
and nowhere they need to have been.
The windows rolled up tight
and the engine pumping carbon monoxide into your lungs.
Your head slumped across the wheel,
the horn ringing solemnly.

such tragedy in serenity
such serenity in tragedy

untitled

* these pieces are from several years ago at university, presented as a way of charting the changes in my writing, and re-evaluating pieces I was very happy with at that stage.


She is a slut,
whenever we have sex
she pretend's I'm someone else;
The handsom millionaire,
The burly fireman,
The wild rock musician.

I, on the other hand, love to make love to her.
No imagined Playboy bunny
or inflated Baywatch babe.
Just her on the matress on the floor.

My eyes run over her,
perfect imperfections.
I taste her breath
thick with the flavour of ashtray.

Everything she can't see in me
I see in her.

She hates me, but when
she finds herself alone
she runs to me and I
smooth the worry from her hair,
flutter butterfly kisses across her forehead
and she says she loves me.

Her love, like her happiness
is a lie.
In the morning she will fly away,
my heart and wallet go with her
both to return empty.

When I close my eyes
I still see her,
life trickling from her wrists
like that time I found her.

How can I feel so much
for someone who feels so little?
Her suicide would have been painless,
the release she wanted so much.

But mine is agony,
as the steel parts my flesh
I know I'll never see her again
but it's better than the torture of loving her.

Sea of Words

* these pieces are from several years ago at university, presented as a way of charting the changes in my writing, and re-evaluating pieces I was very happy with at that stage.

Drowned and swallowed
phrases and syllables,
only breathing through the
grace of the boyant imagination
of a million writers
draining the sea of it's words,
leaving me only precious few
for my own.
I gathered them together
and fashioned this tale,
promising to return them to
the sea of words
when I was done
so a million others may drown.

By the dying light...

I love smoking on cold nights. Standing on the verandah in the dark, watching the smoke rising against the distant streetlights down the road, there’s something redemptive in the chilled solace, a real dedication to your craft, even if that craft is slowly killing yourself with nicotine. The red embers flaring as you inhale, occasional glowing specks flying off into the darkness, like monkeys shot into space. Smoke rising slowly from the end of the cigarette as it rests in your fingers, like a solid white line as it leaves from just behind the burning tip, billowing out and tracing a million ever changing images and fractions of images mid air as it rises and dissipates. The almost silence of suburban sprawl at 11:30 at night, a lone semi rumbling down the highway snaking through the town, a tapestry of houses and fast food places the driver won’t be able to distinguish from a million other sprawls he’ll slice through in his metal behemoth. Police sirens are calling from the distance, the locals restless from a week of work and only two days to numb themselves to that week’s endless repetition. A dog is barking, car doors opening and closing, an engine reluctantly ticking to life and my cigarette is still radiating. A familiar tiny crimson dot at the front of a house across the road gives evidence of a fellow devotee of slow nocturnal suicide, solidarity in our exile from our own homes for our shared passion for burning and inhaling tobacco. My cigarette dies before I do, crushed under my foot and left broken and dirty like they say one day it will leave me and if I’m half as lucky, I’ll also die after being taken out of someone’s mouth. Even with the deed done, my presence will bring disdain from those inside, the smell of my transgression lingering in my clothes, my skin, my beard. I will wake up tomorrow hacking and coughing vowing one day I’ll be like them, that I won’t be the outcast banished from decent society. Then I’ll step outside, light up, and see if my neighbour is as dedicated to this is I am.