A royal return to grace for Queens of the Stone Age

The third album from Queens of the Stone Age, Lullabies to Paralyze is being hailed as the definition of rock’n’roll.

Management for one of the world's most vital rock bands issued this statement: "Queens of the Stone Age were forced to halt their mini-tour on Tuesday, February 22 after singer Josh Homme began coughing up blood in his Paris hotel room. What doctors in Amsterdam initially diagnosed as the flu was found to be a serious lung infection. This resulted in his immediate return to the United States."

The band's website asserted they did not take cancelling shows lightly, were not "pussies", had previously gigged with "everything from broken ankles to bruised livers", and would be back on the campaign trail soon.

True to his word, the Queens' strapping singer is now holding court in a bar in north London. He looks slightly drawn around his piercing blue eyes, but save for his nicotine patch and the tea he has ordered, his famed lust for stimulants is not in evidence.

Homme's return to London coincides with glowing reviews of his band's third album, Lullabies to Paralyze. "Tough, tuneful, ambitious and sexy as hell", gushed Q.

But for all the talk of Lullabies to Paralyze being "the definition of rock'n'roll in 2005", and Homme as "visionary front man", he won't rest on his laurels. "I want to make sure I'm on my knees before the altar of rock not climbing around on top of it going, 'What the [expletive] is this'?" he says.

"Success is an intricate web of stairs going up, but it's a fireman's pole coming down. If someone really likes what I do, I get a big kid grin then go, 'Let's get out of here'. Psychologically, it would be dangerous to stay."

This reasoned application is what we have come to expect from the workaholic perfectionist. And while most arch hedonists' productivity tends to be nixed by their excesses, this 31-year-old native of Palm Springs, California has remained impressively prolific. He has collaborated with PJ Harvey, UNKLE, Martina Topley-Bird and erstwhile Screaming Trees' band mate, Mark Lanegan, among others.

The plectrum-shaped Eagles Of Death Metal pendant around his neck is a reminder of the side-project outfit, in which he plays drums under the alias Carlo Von Sexron.

Lullabies to Paralyze is particularly impressive, considering Homme wrote it alone. On previous Queens of the Stone Age albums, he collaborated with bassist, co-songwriter and long-term friend, Nick Oliveri, a cackling, goateed berserker with many a crystal-meth high and nude stage performance behind him.

When Homme sacked Oliveri last year amid stories that the bassist's excesses were out of control, some feared that the Queens' potency would diminish.

"Everything Nick did, I understood," he says. "I knew he would get angry and confused and experience disbelief - it's the stages of grief. It took me a couple of years to sack him.

"Anybody who knows me knows I did everything I could to keep him in the band. Some of the things I'm good at are the shittiest things. But I did that to save my relationship with Nick, hoping that after things had cooled down we could have one.

"I took a lot of hits from people who wouldn't have had the balls to do what I did. I feel I made the right choice, but some of it had to do with things that just aren't that great."

From Oliveri's side at least, rapprochement is now a possibility. The NME quoted him as saying, "If anything falls through and you need somebody, you know where your bass player is, dude."

Asked if he will reinstate Oliveri, Homme says: "I never say never. Right now I'm trying to make sense of things. I wanted everyone to know that I can be knocked down, but I'll be the first to get back up. That or I'll be dead."

Quizzed about his background, he calls himself "an American runt". The German in him hails from Stuttgart, but a larger percentile of his genes can be traced to Scotland and Norway. The knuckles of his right hand are tattooed with a heart and the first three letters of his grandfather's name, while his left-hand knuckles pay similar tribute to his grandmother.

Homme's tattoos prove more intriguing still when he declines to talk about his parents. "I try to preserve what's private and precious to me when I'm in the press arena," he explains. "Like Palm Springs, it's a foot in either side: one in shit and the other in gold-dust."

Homme and Oliveri first joined forces in the lauded stoner rock band Kyuss after meeting at school at 11. They made their first Kyuss recordings in their early teens, and by the early 1990s they were playing magic-mushroom-fuelled gigs in the Southern California desert.

Staged in spectacular surrounds, lit by a single halogen light bulb on a raised pole, and sometimes attracting the unwelcome attention of gun-toting gangs, legend holds that these gigs had shamanistic qualities.

"It was a desert epiphany," Homme said. "The desert is a place where you can see forever and you feel small. Mountains in your life get shrunk down to molehills."

Kyuss was over by 1995. "We were trying not to change while not copying ourselves," Homme says. For a time he moved to Seattle to play with Screaming Trees, but soon he was back with Oliveri in a new Californian band called Queens of the Stone Age.

Feel Good Hit of the Summer, a catchy single from 2000's Rated R album, brought Queens to prominence. Next came 2002's Songs for the Deaf, which proved so good the former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl postponed work with his Foo Fighters to drum for Queens live.

"Every night we knew we were the best band these people would ever see," Grohl told Mojo. "It was amazing."

This, then, was the legacy Homme had to live up to with Lullabies To Paralyze. Remarkably, it is the strongest Queens' album to date, its filthy guitar riffs, deceptively sweet melodies and polka-influenced waltzes delivering on the seeming contradiction of its title. Guests include Shirley Manson of Garbage, Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top, and Homme's girlfriend, Brody Dalle, of the Distillers.

When Dalle ditched her husband, Tim Armstrong of Rancid, for Homme it made the rock columns. Homme concedes the new album's stand-out track In My Head was written for Dalle. "It's about when we met and being completely in love."

Elsewhere on Lullabies the Grimm brothers' fairy tales were an inspiration.

"They were read to me as a child, and I love the imagery in them," says Homme. "They don't end with the sun setting and everybody living happily ever after, but I disagree when people say they're inappropriate for children - they're useful warnings wrapped in sugar.

"I'm taking that spirit and adding my own metaphors. It's so much easier for me to say 'burn the witch' than to say what I really mean. This is a dark album, but some of the darkness is nothing more than nightfall.

"On a song like Lullaby we were trying to make the music a catalyst for colours and images. I know some people just listen to music and keep on typing or driving, but I don't.

"Consequently, our music has to work on many levels. On one level, Little Sister is a catchy single, but there are all these micro events on the bass drums."

Gibbons' presence on Lullabies meant a lot to Homme, who has long used the gritty, bone-dry sound of early ZZ Top albums as a reference point and admires the way ZZ have kept the blues alive without being overtly retro or modern.

He wanted an equal, mutually beneficial experience from the collaboration. "What was great was busting Billy's perception of us. We did a cover of ZZ Top's Precious and Grace, then Like a Drug. We recorded in the same room at the same time, which was nerve-racking. I looked over and Gibbons was stark white, frozen.

"Afterwards, he said, 'You know, I haven't recorded like that in 25 years'. I was like, 'Yes!' If you're not careful music can turn you into a bitter old crank, but that was never going to happen to Billy. Now, I go over to his place or meet him at a bar and it's great."

Our time together almost up, Homme and I cut to the chase: What does he think of the notion that drugs can be useful for generating ideas, but are less helpful in executing them?

"I think we are born without any walls into a world that helps to build them immediately," he says. "Drugs break the windows and kick the doors open. But eventually they'll knock the walls down and the roof will fall. Drugs give and they take away."

Was that what happened when he got ill in Paris, then? "Let's just say I've put a lot of stuff inside me. That's not gonna read right, but anyway ... if something's kind of scary, I usually force myself to push on it and go [indignantly] 'So?'

"But in Paris I got really scared and went, 'Stop'. Will what happened make me slow down? Well, I've always liked Churchill's quote, 'Everything in moderation, including moderation'. I'm just gonna do what I would normally do."

So he can't imagine cleaning-up his act and doing a Bob Dylan Saved-type album? "Sure!", he says, laughing. "Do you know where I can score some air? Is that, like, mineral water? I'll take whatever you got."

LOWDOWN

WHO: Queens of the Stone Age, Californian band headed by Josh Homme with drummer Joey Castillo, guitarist Troy Van Leeuween, singer Mark Lanegan, and bass player Alain Johannes.

WHAT: Rock'n'roll that's different.

RELEASES: Queens of the Stone Age (1998), Rated R (2000), Songs For the Deaf (2003), and Lullabies To Paralyze (2005).

TRIVIA: Homme's girlfriend, Brody Dalle from the Distillers, and Shirley Manson from Garbage, add their vocals to the track, You Got A Killer Scene There, Man on the new album.


- INDEPENDENT