The members of Kula Shaker were the misaligned weirdos of the ’90s Britpop wave. Perhaps even weirder, the London band has defied the middle-age sag with two great albums in the past four years, including its latest, 2024’s Natural Magick. With original keyboardist Jay Darlington back in the fold and its classic lineup fully intact, Kula Shaker recently offered a hint of what its next album might bring with the groovy, campy earworm, “Charge Of The Light Brigade.”
It’s been 28 years since MAGNET’s Hobart Rowland last caught up with Kula Shaker for an interview. This time, singer/guitarist Crispian Mills was available and quite talkative.
Kula Shaker has come into its own in the 2020s—late bloomers, so to speak. What do you attribute to the late-career creative surge?
Well, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. All the hard stuff we’ve been through, personally and as a band—raising kids, being broke, facing abuse and sociopaths, fighting the Man—makes you grow and dig deeper into life. The cliché rock star peaks when he’s young, then splits, sells out, ODs, gets assassinated or, worse, ends up in a cheesy reality-TV show, which is arguably what social media has become. The other option is to walk that lonesome valley … to feel one’s pain, make peace with your ancestral trauma, cultivate spiritual life and hope to serve in the cavalry of lightworkers. I think we went for the second option.
How were you able to get everyone back in the fold for your latest release?
Jay, our original Hammond organ player, returned, like Gandalf, in 2022 after his long, lost weekend with the Balrog (Oasis). That gave us all a huge boost. Luck has a lot to do with it, too. Everything has to be in harmony with time and circumstance. Everyone’s career has peaks and valleys, and new opportunities only come along once in a blue moon. Keep an eye on the stars. When the planets align, it’s like catching a wave.
Kula Shaker was initially lumped in with all the extended Britpop hype of the late ’90s. But you guys didn’t quite fit that mold.
We never particularly minded the Britpop label because it helped make our energetic psychedelic stuff stand out from the pack. First and foremost, we’ve always been a live band—which, bizarrely, a lot of those Britpop bands were not. Our first album, K, connected with audiences because it was just an honest bunch of kids on a mad mystical quest, playing hell for leather.
There’s been some seismic changes in the music industry—and in the world in general—since Kula Shaker debuted more than a quarter century ago. But you’ve always thrived as outsiders to an extent. Does the same thing apply today?
Who doesn’t feel like an outsider now? A lot of sane, discerning people out there right now are staring at the world like, “What the actual fuck?” Things have gotten so crazy over the last quarter of a century, but whilst there’s a lot of division, a lot of people are coming together, too. So much of what Kula Shaker was banging on about when we were kids—nonviolence, freedom of thought and expression, meditation, healing, spiritual wellness—that’s all gone popular now. Lots of people are stepping back, taking ownership of their lives, creating sort of “parallel realities” outside of a mainstream culture that’s become so fractured and absurd that it makes no sense to anyone—not even the lunatics. Perhaps it was always this bad, but now it feels like the mask has slipped … and once you’ve seen underneath, it’s very hard to go back to being “normal.” As Hunter S. Thompson said, “When the going gets weird, the weird go pro” … which is pretty damn funny and just about sums it up. Kula Shaker feels much more attuned to today’s climate than the age of Britpop.
From a personal standpoint, how’s it been touring on a global scale for such an extended period of time?
We miss our kids, especially. But they often come out to shows and help out, lifting amplifiers, selling T-shirts and whatever. It’s important for your kids to see you working, if you can call it that … jumping around, making a fool of yourself. That food doesn’t just appear on the table by magic, does it?
See Kula Shaker live.
