Amanda Palmer’s press release for her upcoming U.K. & Ireland tour describes her as an “International performing artist, musician, activist, blogger, New York Times best-selling author”, but to her fans she is much more; she is a role model, a mentor, a counselor, and a friend. She is famous for a self-sufficient, independent career that is simultaneously reliant on the community spirit of friends, fans, and well- wishers the world over.

Amanda first found fame as one half of the Dresden Dolls, a punk cabaret act from Boston, Massachusetts. Drummer Brain Viglione, now with Violent Femmes, partnered her expressive piano playing and theatrical vocals. A falling out with the record company ultimately halted the Dolls rise and it took years to disentangle herself from the contract with the label.

Since her emancipation Amanda Palmer has worked ceaselessly in various media. Along with her solo work, there is her band; The Grand Theft Orchestra, and collaborations with other musicians and writers.    

In 2012, she launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise $100,000 towards the production of her Theatre Is Evil album. The campaign was a runaway success and fans pledged $1.2 million. Amanda hit the headlines and was invited to give a T.E.D. talk about her career and about crowd-funding. More than 10 million people have since viewed the 14 minute talk on YouTube and, on the back of it, Amanda secured a book deal.

The next few weeks will see Amanda's first solo tour in these parts without either of her bands, although she did play in Dublin without the band in 2010 when her colleagues were stranded following the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland.

This tour is unusual in that it is a concert tour in support of a book, rather than an album. The show, titled An Evening With Amanda Palmer, is billed as an “intimate mix of original songs, spoken word pieces, cover tunes, audience Q & As and more”. Musos' Guide caught up with Amanda on the eve of her first U.K. performances since 2013.

Musos' Guide- You and Neil Gaiman are guest-editing the New Statesman. How did that come about? Are you enjoying the process? Are you getting flashbacks of the final weeks of writing The Art Of Asking?

Amanda Palmer- Ha! Yes, I am. I just stayed up until 4am actually, finishing off my piece for the issue. I’m really, really proud of what we’ve done and the friends we’ve roped into this undertaking. It’s a great combination of writers and art. I think we may be the first magazine to feature a former Archbishop of Canterbury and a feminist porn star both discussing the issues they care about.

MG- Motherhood is almost on you, and touring and performing will likely be on hold for a wee while, have you anything planned for your period of maternity leave to vent your creative urge?

AP- I am literally planning NOTHING. I think it took impending motherhood to finally, for the first time in fifteen years, to actually clear six months of total freedom into my schedule. I know I won’t be free, I’m not crazy. I’ll be a milk vendor and a diaper-changer. But I also plan to do some reading, while I feed this baby. As someone who loves love, I’m expecting it to be quite a love triangle between me, this kid, and the crazy dad. 

MG- You’ve had to curtail the amount of time you spend with fans after shows, signing sessions etc. You’ve adapted your live show too. From my own experience of seeing you live, there is no such thing as a ‘typical’ AFP gig. What can we in Dublin expect from your new live show?

AP- Well, since I got pregnant my live shows have felt like quite the community-fest - these people know me so well from years of touring and online communication. I’ll have a piano with me, and my ukulele, and I’ll probably read a bit from the book and might share some new poems and stories. I have really grown to love completely winging it, which is something I can’t do when I tour with The Dresden Dolls or the Grand Theft Orchestra. I’m also getting ready for my opening gig for Morrissey. So I may bust out some Smiths covers.

MG- You have a close, intense, and often personal, relationship with your core audience. They participate in, and enable your work. For each of those there are more still who fund your work through Kickstarter, Patreon, etc. And more again, who follow your career from a distance though social media. You live your life in the public eye and you have embraced that. Being Amanda Fucking Palmer seems to be a full time job, even aside from performing and recording. Do you get the chance to clock out at the end of the day and enjoy your private time? Or would you even want that?

AP- You know, I love being alone, but I almost never turn off the Twitter faucet, because it’s often when I’m alone and reflecting that I feel most like chatting with people. There are all these cliché maxims about introverts and extroverts and solitude and re-charging but I think we’re all so, so different. I love being in bars and cafes, sitting alone at a table with a journal. That thought makes a lot of people feel lonely. I hate being in the middle of nowhere in nature, with no hum of humanity around, whereas that really blows a lot of other peoples dresses up. There’s just no accounting for taste. What I’ve found is that I love being alone among people, which is why my spiritual feeding time and “recharging” usually happens when I’m alone and talking at my own pace on twitter, or in a room full of people practicing yoga together, or on a week-long silent meditation retreat. It’s not even the communicating I love - it’s the sense of being “among” people. I’m really curious to see what this baby brings into my life. I have a feeling that it’s going to get really interesting. Do they let you bring babies to silent mediation retreats? Forget I asked, actually.

MG- You recently had a one-off Dresden Dolls reunion which was successfully webcast and lapped up by fans. Was it easy to slip back in to band mode? I can imagine a Dresden Dolls tour blazing across the world somewhere down the line, is that something you can envision happening?

AP- The Dresden Dolls will never die. As long as Brian and I exist, I can’t imagine that we won’t love making, writing and playing music with each other. Whether or not we want to live in a tour bus for two years together is another matter. Let me pop out the kid first. Then ask me about a reunion. Brian would actually make a great uncle. He’s so fully tuned into the universe that he’s really amazing with kids.

Amanda Palmer's tour continues as follows:-

May

Thu 28 London Hackney Empire

Fri 29 Bristol St. George’s

Sat 30 Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival   

June

Mon 01 Edinburgh Queens Hall

Wed 03 Manchester RNCM

Fri 05 Leeds City Varieties

Mon 08 London Union Chapel

Tue 09 London Union Chapel

Sat 13 Dublin Dalkey Book Festival (day) / Dublin Academy (evening)

Sun 14 Belfast Limelight

The Airborne Toxic Event have recently been on tour in support of their two album releases from 2015 - the acoustic Songs Of God And Whiskey and the more synth oriented Dope Machines. Julia Stryj caught up with the band in Glasgow to bring back images from the show there.

Songs Of God And Whiskey is available from amazon and iTunes.

Dope Machines is also available from amazon and iTunes.

Further images from the show can be found here.

Currently on tour in support of their second album The Race For Space Public Service Broadcasting were on stage in Bristol last week and Greg Shingler was on hand for Musos' Guide to photograph the show. 

The UK leg of the tour continues until May 7 (full details here) before the band head off to Europe and then festival dates see them back in the UK over the Summer.

The Race For Space is available from amazon & iTunes.

A Place To Bury Strangers are currently on tour on support of their new album Transfixiation Pedro Garcia caught up with them in London prior to their final UK show at Oslo & then again at their in-store show at Rough Trade the following day and put a few questions to the band in the process.

PG: Would you agree that A Place To Bury Strangers' sound is Pop Noise?

Dion: To me pop music is usually a melody, kind of a driven music that the message usually can be related to because it’s a hook, memorable and familiar in a way and I do think some of our songs have that pop element, especially in the vocal line. Pop noise music I would say is accurate.

PG: How do you feel when people compare your music with that of the Jesus & Mary Chain?           

Dion: I get so fucking bored, you know?

Oliver: When I grew up and first started to play guitar I was really into Jesus & Mary Chain and other bands so, I can see in some way is where we all are coming from. But we’re exited to hear feedback. And I think at the time when I was reading magazines, saw concert footage or live tapes, they sounded like they were chaotic and super fucked up, rebellious and dangerous. Now it’s kind of cool. But I don’t think we sound that chaotic.

Dion: I’m a 39 year old man who has done my own thing and shape myself to who I’m, and when you get compared time and time again to other people it’s just like, I would say frustrating. And I do like the band, it’s a great band no doubt, but they don’t shape who I’m. I think our live show is a vault, it’s quite a lot heavier than Jesus & Mary Chain and we are taking it to a place where other bands haven’t taken it.

PG: How would you further describe your live show?

Robi: Our show is more like a new experience and no band has done that before. A Place To Bury Strangers transforms the place to a scary place, especially visually, sonically, just everything, except maybe the smell. The equilibrium of the echoes and the heavy sounds makes the show dense and hypnotic. People usually is there right in front staring at us.

PG: Tours and private life, how do you manage that?

Dion: Well, we’re not desperate to be famous or anything like that. We are interested in other things and are just enjoying what we like to do. We push ourselves but we try not to push ourselves in certain ways like non-stop touring without days off.

PG: On a scale from one to ten how tiring can touring be?

Dion: This tour we are doing right now is pretty easy.

Oliver: It’s like you kind of show up, you play music, hang out with your friends having a good time. It’s a blast really. We of course have to do heavy lifting; I mean it is hard work but not the same kind of hard work that you have to do sometimes.

PG: How do you choose songs that are going to be in the album, how you deal with that? Who has the final say?

Oliver: We decided together, but then I made the final decision.

Dion:  Yeah, he does it which is good because someone has to make a decision, you know?

Oliver: We try to work together as much as possible because we come from different backgrounds. And everyone has awesome ideas. Not one person can come up with something that is as great as something that many people can. 

I used to write all the music all on my own and before the other members joined I would remove and replace songs. At the moment we’re trying to take all these songs to a new place introducing new drums or bass and this and that something I wouldn’t have been able to do on my own.

PG: New technology is quickly introduced and rapidly becomes part of music these days. How does this impact A Place To Bury Strangers and your music?

Oliver: As much as we embrace new technology, we don’t make use of it often. We always play with electric guitars because that what it is in our hearts. We don’t play with keyboards or anything like that. At the core, we are a punk band and we are going stay that way to the end. But we built a lot of different technologies to get the sound that you want to create.

Dion: We’re always looking around and trying to keep our minds open. A lot of musicians have this thing where they don’t embrace technology because they feel it’s impure. I can understand that. We have some elements of that but generally we don’t close ourselves in that way.

PG: What has been the most unexpected thing that happened to you during your live touring?

Oliver: One time I smashed my head really hard on the speaker and a lot of snot starts to pour out my noise. It was crazy because I was like where is all this water dripping down from my face. It was wild! I though it was brain fluid.

Dion: I think the weirdest thing that happened to me it was one of the last shows we played in London. It was in a very small venue and we used our own special lights. The other lights in the venue was turned off and when our lights went off, it became completely black. None of us could see more than a few inches as there was dense smoke everywhere. To me that was a very weird experience because I was on stage and couldn’t move. I mean, I didn’t know if I was on the edge of the stage. I virtually lost all sense of space and with the music and everything, it was like being in a depravation tank except for our music – it was kind of psychedelic you know, it was really crazy.

A Place To Bury Strangers continue their tour throughout April in Europe (dates here) and Transfixiation is available from amazon & iTunes.