Monarchs of the green; As Queens Of The Stone Age prepare to unleash

Sunday Herald, The, Aug 17, 2003 by Stephen Phelan

THESE days, the kids are wearing Ramones and MC5 T-shirts, increasingly suspicious that the music of their parents was louder, heavier, more creative and destructive than anything recorded recently. And that's justified - while you're browsing in Virgin Megastore, your mother is probably at home playing Led Zeppelin's Immigrant Song so loud that the air displacement from the speakers is making her floral-print skirt billow out like a yacht sail. Or, if she's particularly tuned in, she might be listening to Queens Of The Stone Age, the only band currently making it their business to sound like a party at the crack of doom.

And business is fine. They've been touring their most recent, brilliant album Songs For The Deaf around the world for almost a year - a rolling cloud of mood, muscle and electricity - and next Sunday they bring it down at Big Day Out At The Green in Glasgow, arguably the highlight of a bill that includes PJ Harvey, Foo Fighters and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The Queens' distinctive bass player Nick Oliveri - bare skull, young face, sorcerer's evil goatee - attempts, with obscure eloquence, to describe the grim enjoyability of their effect.

"We'll do a screamer song,", he says, "then follow that with a nice vocal and a great melodic hook, then something with a weird time signature and complex dynamics, a really dark f***ing bad-ass thing."

A mental picture may or may not help. "It's like we're inviting people to come with us for a singalong, we're having fun, we're having this rad party down at the cliff, and everybody comes and you jump off and die and everybody claps and goes 'yaaay' because we had such form on the way down. The best and last dive you've ever seen."

Oliveri is amused and wound up by this vision that just came to him. He has served me three bottles of Corona beer from the band's travel chest, but he's drinking Coors Light himself.

"It's the calorie thing," he says. "Rock is not kind to the fat man."

This semi-prudence makes a kind of sense, since Oliveri is widely feared and respected for playing buck naked through the heavy sonic weather of Queens Of The Stone Age live shows.

"I haven't done that for a while, man. We don't depend on fire in our act, so I don't see why we should depend on an ugly nude dude. I'm sure I'll do it again, because I enjoy being unclothed, it's comfortable. But maybe not at Glasgow. Gotta think of the little ones. [Adopts baby voice] 'Mommy, that clown has a balloon in the shape of a small rocket!'"

Oliveri is a serious musician. It's all he does, and when he comes up with a song that he knows "isn't right for Queens Of The Stone Age", he just finds a place for it somewhere else. Since the band was first put together from the broken pieces of the early-1990s rock cabal Kyuss, it's taken various nebulous shapes - members have separate histories and other projects, and they've been free to come and go.

Singer Josh Homme records his intense Desert Sessions with dissimilar players like PJ Harvey. Astounding co-vocalist Mark Lanegan brings in his grave-deep ghost-wail from his hallowed, troubled past as a solo artist and leader of the Screaming Trees. Busy professionals like Dave Grohl and Dean Ween make part-time contributions to the albums, while Oliveri himself has moonlighted with Dwarves, Masters of Reality and Mondo Generator - his own wild outlet "for screaming and yelling" - who have just released a second album.

"They're just other avenues, man," he says, "and you need to have them. But Queens is our main love now. We've all made the shift in priorities to commit to this band, because this is what allows us to do everything else."

For the first time, there's a fixed membership - drummer Joey Castillo and guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen are in for good. "That's an excellent thing for our chemistry, being a real unit at last. This band is a real single beast motherf***er now."

Chemistry is an element, all right. Serious musicians tend to be ambivalent about the blur between their bad habits and their work habits, even if it's indelible and productive. Queens Of The Stone Age give off a mystique that's as much a part of their music as their image, a sense of uncompromising fun and dark experience that bleeds into the songs.

Their biggest hit, Feelgood Hit Of The Summer, is a shopping list of drugs, but it sounds more a big loud amoral shrug than a rock lifestyle boast. The myth is that Queens make music by going out into the desert with a sack of peyote, some amplifiers and a notebook. I suggest this as a joke, but Oliveri nods earnestly.

"Some of our albums have been made that way, man. But you can't be f***ed up all the time. I drink water sometimes, sleep, take vitamins, all that good shit. Not in Scotland though, you guys get me drunk."