It’s Thursday evening in LA, and Butch Vig is pouring himself a well-earned drink. Although his name is already in the history books for producing seminal grunge-era albums from the likes of Nirvana and The Smashing Pumpkins, there’s no sign of the revered producer and musician slowing down.
“I just got home from rehearsals with Garbage, so right now my body is very sore,” he says with a grimace. “We’re in boot camp — we have to beat each other up to get back in fighting form.”
Besides an upcoming Garbage tour that may see them visit Australia by year’s end, there’s also new music on the horizon from his other band 5 Billion in Diamonds, a collective that counts singers Ebbot Lundberg (The Soundtrack of Our Lives) and David Schelzel (The Ocean Blue) as members alongside a core trio of Vig and Brits Andy Jenks and James Grillo.
The latest person to be roped into the 5BID family is New Zealander Bradley Hanan Carter, whose former band Steriogram scored an international hit 20 years ago with “Walkie Talkie Man”, which came with an eye-popping video from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind director Michel Gondry.
“5 Billion in Diamonds went out to [Joshua Tree recording studio] Rancho de la Luna to record a track and I invited Brian Aubert from Silversun Pickups, whose last two albums I produced,” explains Vig. “He invited Bradley to come out. We did this jam with a very loose structure and Bradley goes, ‘Well, I can sing some lyric ideas here’, so we did a couple of takes.
“The next day, James Grillo and I listened back to the track [“Waiting to Land”], and there was something really magical about it. Bradley took a stripped down song and totally transformed and elevated it with this beautiful bittersweet quality that none of us were expecting, and he’s now a member of 5 Billion in Diamonds.”
A US resident for the last two decades, Hanan Carter had been “hiding out in the desert” and working on music for his new project FAUX PRIX when the serendipitous recording session occurred.
“That was definitely not on my bingo card,” he says with a grin. “Brian invited me to hang and it just turned into magic happening. I actually hadn’t been in the studio around people and enjoying it for a while, so for me, this was like a rebirth. To hang out and drink some mezcal was so fun and everyone was just having the best time. I left smiling and thinking ‘that’s what it should always be like in the studio’.”
Despite the challenge of having band members living on different continents, live shows are in the works, but for now the focus is on completing album number three.
“We’re still writing songs, and I think it’s going to be a little bit noisier than the first two records,” says Vig. “We have a bunch of raw ideas and some of those we want to get to Bradley and let him do his thing. We give the artist a lot of leeway and it’s exciting for me as a producer because I have no idea where the song is going to go. It’s pretty cool to start with a thread and then by the time it’s done, it’s often turned into a completely different thing.
“And just to reiterate what Bradley said, it’s so great being in a room where you actually turn everything up fucking loud and play and then just feed off each other. It’s an adrenaline rush.”
5 Billion in Diamonds
“Sometimes it’s almost like you’re a passenger on the ride and you’re just like, ‘What the fuck is going on?’,” adds Hanan Carter. “But it’s like surfing — you paddle out and you never know when you’re gonna get a wave and then when you get that wave, you just take it as long as you can ride it for. And then when you’ve come back in, you’ve got to get back out and go again — otherwise you’re not gonna find those incredible experiences.”
This article features in the September-November 2024 issue of Rolling Stone AU/NZ.
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