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PERRY FARRELL Satellite Of Love
He is a renaissance man in the midst of his own revolution. Perry Farrell’s Satellite Party album is released on Saturday, June 2.

Perry Farrell has always been a mixed bag.

An alterna-icon with an old-fashioned showbiz oeuvre that Sting once described as a “cabaret vibe” upon witnessing a Jane’s Addiction show in Los Angeles in 1991, Farrell has infamously lived a life of extremes. He strutted and sniffed through the good and the bad, but these days it all seems to be about love and creativity. It always was, mind you, but the negative elements of yore have been replaced by the odd bottle of fine wine and a soulmate in his wife Etty, a long-time dancer and collaborator.

In 2004, the reformed Jane’s Addiction had again reached a bitter conclusion. Farrell retreated to his home to think, create and simply be. What started as a solo album ended up being an experience of music gathering the friends and musicians Farrell would choose to invite to his own Satellite Party. Enter folks such as John Frusciante and Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas, former Chili Pepper and Pearl Jam drummer Jack Irons, electronic/dance producers Hybrid, and Joy Division/New Order bassist Peter Hook, plus touring band members Nuno Bettencourt (ex-Extreme and husband of Perth’s Suze DeMarchi), Carl Restivo (bass), Kevin Figueiredo (drums) and Etty Lau Farrell herself.

In short the infectious and fun Satellite Party album sounds like a bit of everything Perry Farrell has ever done and was ever likely to do. He hopes that the band will tour Australia next summer.

BY BOB GORDON

I believe that you performed at Coachella recently. You’ve done various club dates over time, was that the first festival date as Perry Farrell’s Satellite Party?

Well we did the Winter X games in Aspen, Colorado. We’re about to start our very first tour, that’s going to be in June and that’s going to be a European tour going through Europe, doing festivals and club dates. And from there we’ll come back into America to do Lollapalooza on August 4-6 and from there we’re going to start our world tour.

I saw your blog about Coachella where it said your set started with about 55 people watching and ended with 20,000. It must have been good watching the dawn of an audience…

Yeah it is, it’s really exciting. I wish that our record could have been out because it would have been even better if they had known the songs, but it was an interesting experiment to see the reactions of people who don’t know the songs yet and how they respond. If they say if it stinks or not... and it stuck.

You wrote that Rosanna Arquette was filming it and she said to you, ‘tell them you’re Perry Farrell!’, but apparently the whole point was not to tell them and let the music speak.

Exactly. I mean it would have been really lame if someone yells ‘I’m Perry Farrell, come on in’ or something like that. I kinda liked the idea that they didn’t know who I was and then they could hear my voice and maybe if they wouldn’t of known I was even in the group, they would have been drawn into it. So that was what the plan was and it worked!

From seeing what you’ve done over the years, it appears that all the musical entities you’ve been involved with have evolved quite organically. There doesn’t seem as though there’s been a lot of premeditation about it. Perhaps that’s why there’s such a charm and a magnetism towards it for such a lot of people. This seems to again be the case for Satellite Party. What was your thinking going into it and how has it become what it became?

Well, you know, you’re very right about how natural and easy it was to reconfigure and reformat what we were doing. I basically started in the garage with one guy, Flea was my pal and we started going surfing in the mornings and then in the afternoons I’d make us a sandwich and we’d go into my garage and we’d play music.

So it went like that. I didn’t know how large it would grow; I was just trying to have a good time. And I think because of that infusion of good time and relaxation and happiness it kind of goes into the sound. It’s not just a stiff kind of corporate thing that I was trying to accomplish and I think that, in the long run, that ended up benefiting me.

Do you feel that when you first start out something that entertains yourself and entertains your friends that it’s these sorts of things that are going to entertain a wider group of people in the long run?

Well, you know, the funny thing that I did have one song that I started to work on again. I’ve had this song for probably eight years now and it’s Ultra Payloaded Satellite Party. I started to just work on that one. And that’s the one song, I will tell you, eight years ago I was told by a record executive, he first laughed at me and said ‘come on, the radio isn’t playing music like this’ and they were trying to push me to do a Top 40 song and I said ‘well I like it I’m going to hang onto it then’ and all these years later I started to bring that song to life.

I started to build round that song because I liked it and I hated Top 40, what can I tell you?

Yes well, you don’t want to aspire to what you hate really, do you?

Exactly (laughs). Not even for the sell-out. So, you know, eight years later I had no one telling me what to write and what to sound like ‘cause I didn’t have a label. And that was the good part - I could take my time to really think about the music that I wanted to make. Nobody was pushing me, no corporatisation. Only my friends, and we were there to have a good time and we were in my garage.

With Jane’s Addiction ending once again, is there a strange energy that comes from that, that you pour into the next thing or do you separate it?

Well, I definitely want to use the best parts of what I learned with Jane’s Addiction. There’s a great deal of energy, enthusiasm and sensuality that was in the sound of Jane’s. It was very dark and underground and I loved it and I embraced the darkness and that was a fantastic experience for me.

But what I want to do now is a global revolution and to do that, you’ve got to be able to reach into the hearts and minds of the entire world. So you want to craft a sound that will be able to accomplish that and so eventually that’s what I began trying to do. I felt that this thing was getting better and better and better so I started imagining.

See, ’cause when I write and when I produce, I imagine the live event. So I started to imagine this great live event, this exciting live event, this world altering live event and that’s how I started to produce my songs.

So it’s more like there’s a theme in your head and that begat the songs rather than the songs moving towards that theme?

Right, because I always visualise the party itself when I’m writing. I visualise dancing. I visualise the crowd reacting. I visualise the lights and that’s important because some people when they write, they don’t realise that one day they’re going to leave the room and it can be kind of boring when you’re in a public situation when you’re talking about a really happening party. If you kind of envision that party while your writing you’ll know how to set people off.

Were there any other songs that kind of showed the way, flew the flag early and helped drift it all forward?

Well, Dog Star was one, that was a song that Hybrid brought to me. That was the first time Hybrid had bought Peter Hook’s bass lines to me. Peter Hook from New Order. And Hybrid is a group that I had worked with them, I would DJ with those guys out at Coachella and we really appreciated each other’s work, but they were writing a record at the time too and they asked if I would like to sing on any of the tracks and they game me all their tracks to listen to and I heard that and the greatest Joy Division fan and New Order. When I heard their tracks and then combined with Peter Hook I just couldn’t believe my luck.

What about where you covered the song Woman In The Window that has vocals from Jim Morrison. I know Satellite Party played at a 40th anniversary show with The Doors, so obviously you know those guys. That’s quite an honour to be bestowed that track, the vocal and the vision - how do you go about using that? Do you have to ‘remove’ the honour from in order to just be creative?

Well you definitely have to consider and honour Jim Morrison and The Doors and be very careful when you start to produce it. But at the same time if I were to approach him and he were alive I would say to him, ‘I want to give you new clothes you know, this is a new millennium and although we want you to surround you with the sound that will allow you to be the shaman and the visionary and the freedom fighter and the rebel crusader that you are. But we also want to have you adapting to the new sounds of the world’.

You know, electronic music has offered us all a chance to hear new sounds that have never been heard before by the human ear and be able to give it a major overhaul to instruments that musicians play. Using the synthesiser, jump programs. These things change you biologically. When you hear these sounds you respond to them, so I wanted all that for Jim Morrison as well as giving him that back setting of the keyboard and the journey and those live elements and real players. But I also wanted him to have jump programs and subsonic frequencies.

With all the people who are playing on it, the actual band and touring line up, it’s echoed again with friends and clearly with family given that Etty (Farrell’s wife) is in the band. To paraphrase Jim Morrison, I guess you ‘love the friends you’ve gathered on this thin raft’…

Well I do think that I love the communities that I’ve put together where I have my family included in this beautiful journey. She and I have been touring partners and working professionally together since 1997. So we have been gypsies all this time, traveling with our family and touring together and performing.

So she knows me and I know her so well. You get to wake up in a warm bed with a gorgeous girl that you love so well and continue to hone the live performance and the recordings and she was the first person to record with me too in Satellite Party with the backing vocals. It’s great ‘cause we’re best friends and it’s someone to share these experiences with that you know, we get to hang real tight. You need at least one person to travel through life with, man.

Your concept of ‘Solutionists’ and the band going out into the world as that is very interesting. Can you describe it?

Well The Solutionists are the many, those that toil for the fortunate few. We feel that in the Revolution Solution the concept of the individual is the most important aspect in generating the revolution. I really think it’s a very realistic viewpoint because it used to be that countries going into other countries was making a global community. It would be countries and religion.

And then it became the multination corporations that went into other countries and the global community got smaller. But now, this next version of the world shrinking the 3.0 version, is one of the individual making the big difference, and it’s through things like blogging and having websites and using the vote of the dollar, the dollar in ones pocket, that is going to create this great revolution. So in staying in touch with all these people and creating an interactive community, that’s going to be what the Revolution Solution is all about and based upon.

With the album, it’s not even out yet but there’s been quite a lot of interesting things written about it. I saw that Classic Rock review that said about Perry’s “found the art at the bottom of the trash can,”. Rolling Stone has said it’s your “strongest body working since (Jane’s Addiction’s) Ritual de lo Habitual.” I know it’s kind of weird when other people say these things, but on the other hand it must be pretty affirming to hear that when you’ve just going about doing your own thing and it meets somewhere in the middle when people are out there and connecting with it.

Well, it does feel good, I worked on the album for a good three years without picking my head up. I just kept my head down and worked on the music because I wanted to create a beautiful piece of art and a piece of music for people to listen to that is an album, not just a song or two on some shitty record that doesn’t have any continuity.

So it does feel fantastic for people to tell you that they love and appreciate your music