In stark opposition to what he does as the bluntest, beats-pounding member of The Who, drummer Zak Starkey’s work as a label owner (the dub- and dancehall-favoring Trojan Jamaica) and as a producer and musician with his new ensemble Mantra of the Cosmos is far more spacey, spacious, and fluid. “I just wanted to do something different, and not at all the same,” Starkey says days after The Who returned to the road. Thinking of the Mantra of the Cosmos assemblage he started with his wife and co-producer Sshh Liguz, Starkey wished to create a new band to try its collective hand at something of a revolution—an elastic, frantic sound with no correlation to anything in the present day.
“Everything musically has been AI before AI started, you know?” Starkey says with a smile over a blurry Zoom video. The goals for Mantra of the Cosmos, from the start, was to be, in Starkey’s words, “a modern-day Hawkwind with freak beat poetry and something psychedelic—but, you know, not peace-and-love psychedelia.” Something not only unobvious, stunning, and liquid in its rendition, but stunningly strange in its conception. Who better to both create impromptu freak-beat poetry and aid in upsetting the apple cart of pop’s currency than Shaun Ryder, the vocalist and lyricist who put the “acid” in the acidic, baggy, indie-dance vibe of Manchester post-punk in the mid-1980s with Happy Mondays?
When Ryder jumps onto the Zoom call, it’s literally way more in-your-face than the laid back Starkey as the Madchester icon’s head takes up the full of the screen to discuss the zotzed-out dub funk that is Mantra of the Cosmos and their first single, “Gorilla Guerilla.” Ryder states that when Starkey came to him with the proposition of Mantra of the Cosmos, he leapt at it. “Anything you want, Zak, let’s get it on,” says the singer. “You don’t get the opportunity to join a new-style rock and roll band at the age of 61 that often, so I might as well jump in.”
Starkey and Ryder met around a decade ago when the drummer was playing with Oasis (“Or just Noel,” says the singer. “Or Liam”), and one of the reasons the two chose to work together was that both musicians seemed egoless about the prospect of collaboration. “I’m an old corker, Zak is great, and there’s great vibes all around. I call this band ‘The Dark Side of the Zak,’ as it started out as a rap version of Pink Floyd, in a way.”
“But not,” laughs Starkey.
“We’re too hip for our own fucking good, really,” states Ryder.
“And it’s all very spontaneous, innit?” opines the drummer.
“I just wanted to do something different...a modern-day Hawkwind with freak beat poetry and something psychedelic—but, you know, not peace-and-love psychedelia.” — Zak Starkey
Talking about the process of “Gorilla Guerilla” and the earliest days of their still-recording debut album, Ryder recalls being locked up in a studio for three days by the drummer. “He put me in there and recorded absolutely everything I said and sang, then turned it all into a song.” Starkey reminds those of us on the Zoom call that with Mantra of the Cosmos, a song “just becomes” in an almost organic, naturalistic approach.
As for including Ryder’s longtime Happy Mondays comrade Mark “Bez” Berry as their dancer-percussionist and guitarist Andy Bell (from Oasis and Ride), friendships overrode any personal issues. “The last time I saw Andy was 21 years ago at an Oasis gig, and I thought he was a bit of a twat,” says Ryder. “Twenty-one years later and I think he’s the most brilliant dude in the world…now that we’re all mature men.”
Discussing some of the dub production elements of Mantra—at least as it pertains to the screamadelica of “Gorilla Guerilla”—Starkey draws an ever-so-slight correlation between what he and Liguz do at Trojan Jamaica and through the Cosmos. “That’s our thing: me and Sshh write a lot of the music together and Shaun freestyles over that,” Starkey observes. “Sshh has sort of become a Flavor Flav to everything we do with Cosmos. She’s doing background vocals and some noise generating and dub-centric echoes, especially live.”
“You don’t get the opportunity to join a new-style rock and roll band at the age of 61 that often, so I might as well jump in.” — Shaun Ryder
Most of what is to come on record is something of a secret still (“The element of surprise is key,” says Starkey), but any discussion of Mantra of the Cosmos springs Ryder to life. “I’m walking chaos, you know,” he says loudly. “So I’m kept in line by a very tight band.”
Starkey laughs at the prospect of keeping anyone in line, let alone Ryder. “Though Shaun is clean, what he’s doing on stage is a bit like [Allen] Ginsburg on drugs. Or Jim Morrison on even more drugs.”
“I’m slimmer now than Jim, you know,” yells Ryder in response. “I’ve lost quite a bit of weight. And you never know if I’m going to put my leather kicks on.”
“Just don’t get in the bath,” notes Starkey.
Taking into consideration this two-man tag-team comedy, what Manta of the Cosmos is (and will be, when it happens), beyond deconstructing each member’s own improvisational music of the spheres, is something like curating chaos.
“To be able to organize Shaun’s brand of chaos is great,” says Starkey. “I love it.” FL
