Concrete Blonde

Johnette Napolitano is in her home in the Californian desert. Having recently completed building her shed ("I just moved a Moroccan rug out there this morning because I need the floor to be better"), she's now playing with her new dogs ("I wound up getting a brother and sister, two little twin doggies that are so funny and so cute. It's like having a couple of Tribbles rolling around all the time!"). She's not there for long, though, since she has also recently reactivated her band, Concrete Blonde, for a tour to celebrate the 20th anniversary of their breakthrough 1990 album Bloodletting.

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"We weren't planning on touring at all this year, but then everybody started saying, ‘Oh, it's 20 years since Bloodletting,'" she explains. "I mean, who keeps a calendar for things like that? The more people made a deal of it the more we said, 'Well, shit, let's go out and play, see who's out there,' and it was really, really great. There was no pressure: we're only out here because people want us out here."

Such a triumph was hardly a foregone conclusion. The band had been a cultish proposition before they hit paydirt with Bloodletting's lead single ‘Joey', but they've always seemed to shoot themselves in the foot just when the breakthrough was imminent, either for the usual reasons (line-up issues, drugs, record companies, more drugs) or because of the often volatile relationship between Napolitano and co-founder/guitarist James Mankey.

"Oh yeah, we certainly have our moments," she laughs. "The good thing is I can say there's been exactly two of them [on this tour] and I was surprised because it's a different time now. We're a lot older, so it's like: what? Are we going to fight about this? We're both still alive, you know. I lost my dad not long ago and things get real when you realise time is not an infinite thing like it was when you were in your fuck-off twenties and thirties."

She's quick to point out the tour isn't a play-the-album-start-to-finish affair. "We were rehearsing and were like, ‘What shall we do?' And we thought, ‘Well, let's go to YouTube and see what people listen to.' We literally made the setlist off YouTube, from our songs people liked. And it was so fuckin' easy! We're not out here to shove a record down anybody's throat, we're not out here to prove ourselves. We're out here strictly to have a good time with the fans and I cannot say ever in my life that we've ever approached a tour like that before. It's really just been a fucking blast."

And the timing couldn't be better either. Bloodletting is very much of the Zeitgeist, with a prowling title track that's the default go-to number for any promo involving vampires, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer through to Twilight and True Blood...

"Well, that was something too," she laughs. "We were like, ‘Well, we're damned stupid if we don't go out and do this now!"

Hell, why not? Concrete Blonde were there first.

"Hey, a lot of people were there first. I do a lot of things with David J [of Bauhaus and Love & Rockets] – talk about doing it first! And [Interview with the Vampire author] Anne Rice moved from New Orleans and now she lives about 45 minutes away from me in Palm Desert."

She laughs heartily. "There are a million jokes there about vampires never dying and stuff, but they don't. Horror is always cool. People always want their vampires and monsters and swamp things. That's just cool. Always." Andrew P Street