The Gutter Twins

Dulli and Lanegan bring their righteous rock 'n' soul to Irish shores

Amongst discerning rock fans, the most exciting new band on the planet is The Gutter Twins – two men conjuring up some dark ju-ju on their debut album ‘Saturnalia’.

Except that it’s not strictly a debut, for the twins in question are Mark Lanegan and Greg Dulli, two men who should need little introduction following their work with Screaming Trees, Queens of the Stone Age and Soulsavers (Lanegan), The Afghan Whigs (Dulli) and The Twilight Singers (both). ‘Saturnalia’ has been five long years in the making, and with fans’ appetites whetted by several stunning collaborations on The Twilight Singers’ albums, expectations were nearly at fever pitch.

“Other’s expectations, we can do nothing about,” says Mr Dulli down the phone from New York. “All we can be concerned about are our own, which were to simply make the best record that we could. To me, it has a very organic feel, a document of songs we wrote together.”

Dulli denies that they set out with a specific plan for the record: “There wasn’t a whole lot of thinking going on! We both agreed that we were channelling something that is already there and just needed a place to come through. You just get in a room with some instruments and say, ‘What can this produce today?’”

Saturnalia is a brave, questing record that channels spirits both malevolent (the satanic majesty of ‘Idle Hands’) and divine (the angelic ‘Who Will Lead Us Now’), starkly unafraid to ask big questions about life and death, love and hate, heaven and hell and all that good stuff.

“The first songs we did together were gospel songs,” recalls Greg. “I love that stuff and the fact that Mark is so steeped in it too made it easy for me to go back there. It felt very sincere.

“I actually came from a more religious background than he did; I’m Irish Catholic. I turned on it when I got into music, my songs tending to be a bit more lascivious than Mark’s, but I would say that he took the lead. That made it easy for me to go back in that direction.”

Indeed, in a past life, Greg served time as an altar boy, an image a world away from the “lascivious” nature of the his work with the Afghan Whigs. Did any of the music he heard in church influence his future musical vision?

“I liked the majesty in the spectacle of it,” says Greg, “ but it was only when I went to Pentecostal churches that I felt the joy of it. I mean, Catholic church music is very austere, and no less beautiful for it, but it’s very controlled and very overly serious, whereas you go into the Black churches and it’s a celebration. There’s a soulful feeling, and that’s where a lot of the tenets of rock and roll come from.”

Dulli and Lanegan have two of the most distinctive voices in modern rock. They fit together naturally on ‘Saturnalia’, each taking turns to be centre stage or play support. Was it difficult to find the right balance?

“The songs that we wrote together, we wrote the lyrics together,” Greg explains. “A lot of things I wrote personally, I gave to him, and anything he wrote personally, he gave to me. It was very much each guy writing for the other and that made it really simple. Anything I came up with, I was like, ‘you do it’ and he was like, ‘no you do it’. So he would do it and it would start tilting his way and he would make sure it was tilting back mine. That’s what brothers do!

“The melody is the hardest part, figuring how the song is going to be sung. I wish sometimes that we could leave in the more ‘bathroom’ lyrics that we started with because those were enormously funny, especially for such serious material. Some of them were very dirty.”

Continue to page 2

Issue #51 - I Told You This Would Be A Good Issue

Featuring Biffy Clyro, Of Montreal, Duke Special, Frightened Rabbit, Cold War Kids, Jay Reatard, Pat Mills, and more.