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The Pretty Reckless are playing a tiny London show next week
"LONDON we're coming home! The Pretty Reckless say as they confirm they're playing the Underworld next week ahead of their upcoming Download Festival show.
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The Pretty Reckless: “Music can immortalise people. It’ll exist long after I’m dead, after the people I love are gone, and that’s a really beautiful thing”
As The Pretty Reckless gear up for their fifth album, Dear God, Taylor Momsen is in a reflective mood. Sitting down with Kerrang! in London, the effortlessly cool vocalist looks back on the realities of a life lived in the spotlight, the friends she's lost along the way, and why rock'n'roll will never die...
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“I know it’s cold and I know it’s raining, but I want to see you guys moving!”
It’s June 12, 2011 and The Pretty Reckless are playing the main stage at Download. Having formed in New York only a couple of years prior and releasing their debut album, Light Me Up, less than 12 months earlier, this is a plum placement on the festival bill, sandwiched between sets by pop-punk jesters Bowling For Soup and New Jersey heroes The Gaslight Anthem on a Sunday headlined by Linkin Park.
Conditions during The Pretty Reckless’s set aren’t exactly prime British summer, with skies the colour of pavements and frequent showers meaning there are people in ponchos as far as the eye can see. Taylor Momsen has opted for an altogether different look. Dressed in a long black singlet, deeply slashed on either side, and with pigtails hanging down to her waist like braces, she’s dealing with a combination of inclement weather and technical gremlins. Neither consideration slows her down, though, so the then-17-year-old expects the same kind of resilience from her soggy and rather static audience.
Her suggestion for the soggy bodies to start moving elicits only a smattering of screams and devil horns. Dissatisfied with this paltry response, the singer changes tact, reminding these festival-goers they’re on hallowed ground and that comes with certain responsibilities. “It’s fucking Donington,” she continues, her tone not angry but disappointed. “Our favourite concert is AC/DC live at Donington… and we’re playing Donington!” For Taylor, this is the stuff of dream fulfillment, and this audience needs to pull their weight.
Fifteen years later and The Pretty Reckless – still completed by guitarist Ben Phillips, bassist Mark Damon and drummer Jamie Perkins – are limbering up for another main stage appearance at Download, once again with Linkin Park as headliners. Taylor is now 32, though appears little changed from her 2011 incarnation. Her poise remains graceful, even off stage, with eye sockets still coal-black with make-up, and her hair remains an electrifying platinum-blonde, albeit flowing freely this time.
Sitting in a photo studio in Hackney today, having spent the previous day sightseeing at the Tower Of London, the singer seems more self-assured than she used to be. And we don’t just mean back when TPR were starting out, but even five years ago, when they last released an album, 2021’s Death By Rock And Roll. This is the result, it turns out, of keeping the company of giants – on July 26, it will be the third birthday in a row Taylor has spent on tour with AC/DC.
“If you’d told the 15-year-old me that I’d end up being in a band that would be opening for AC/DC in stadiums across the world for years, I’d have said, ‘No way is that happening’,” she says now, laughing at her own understatement, before extolling the virtues of Live At Donington, the Aussie legends’ live film recorded at 1991’s Monsters Of Rock festival, in front of more than 70,000 people.
Almost three years on the road has transformed Acca Dacca from heroes/study subjects into close pals, allowing Taylor a peek behind the curtain of one of rock’s most notorious bands.
“They're absolutely phenomenal,” she beams, relishing the opportunity to confirm they’re great guys. “They’re so kind. They’re so gracious. They’re so down to earth in the best possible way. Getting to watch an AC/DC show after you’ve played your own show, it doesn’t get any better than that.”
Obviously, traversing the world with the authors of Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, Have A Drink On Me and Rock ‘N’ Roll Damnation raises expectations of some revelrous behaviour. But, apparently, the only beverage binged backstage is tea, and the only yarns spun are of the literal variety.
“I learned to crochet on tour with AC/DC,” Taylor proudly admits. “Someone from AC/DC taught me to.”
Hold the phone… someone from AC/DC’s camp taught you, or someone from AC/DC?!
Taylor thinks for a moment, aware she may be talking out of school.
“They’d kill me if I said who it was,” she laughs. “There is the rule that what happens on the road stays on the road, so let’s just go say someone in their camp… we’ll just go with that.”
Parking, as we must, the mental images of Brian Johnson crocheting himself a new flat cap or Angus Young working up a tie, we focus instead on the lessons touring with a band that’s been doing it for 53 years can teach about longevity.
“Watching masters at work, it confirmed something I’ve always known about rock and roll, which is that it has no expiration date,” says Taylor. “It’s forever… and I hope to be doing this until I physically can’t do it. And even then I’ll still figure out a way, because it’s what I live and breathe, and [AC/DC] are very much the same way. Watching Angus perform every night and him not miss a step is very cool.
“So, too, is seeing, in real time, that my dream is plausible.”
In the five years since the release of The Pretty Reckless’ fourth album, Death By Rock And Roll, Taylor Momsen turned 30. This will come as a wake up call, of course, to those who associate her with her appearance, aged seven, in Dr. Seuss’ How The Grinch Stole Christmas, alongside Jim Carrey. Or as Jenny Humphrey in teen drama Gossip Girl. Not so for the woman herself, though, who has a care-free attitude to the passing of time, especially with regards to the goals she’s achieved on her journey so far.
“I think because I started so young that age has always just been a number to me,” she explains. “When I first started the band, 30 seemed forever away. But now being here, despite being in this band for so long, it feels like yesterday. I’ve never really thought of my life in terms of milestones based on time. I’ve always just had the same goal since I was really little, and that remains the same now, which is to just be better every time, to grow as an artist and as a songwriter, to grow as a singer. I just want to be better than I was before, because if you’re not growing, you’re not changing, so you’re not doing it correctly.”
That being said, Taylor is reluctant to describe her band’s forthcoming fifth album, Dear God, as a more mature offering than what’s come before. Instead, she calls it “a culmination” of everything she and her bandmates have built up to this point, with the very best of their musical characteristics – brooding lyrical ruminations, emotional depth, unashamedly rocking anthems – on display to a more accomplished degree.
“It feels more like… me,” admits Taylor with some hesitation, lest she do a disservice to TPR’s four previous records. “They’re very authentic to where I was at the time, but I’m older and I’ve been through a lot of shit, and all of that from childhood to now has been put into this album. It’s almost ripped from my diary, so there’s a vulnerable brutality to this record that we’ve touched upon on other records, but never to this extent. It’s taking my entire past and present and moving it into my future.”
“This record is taking my entire past and present and moving it into my future”
This was illustrated in March of this year in the video for the single When I Wake Up. The explicit promo, clearly inspired by the equally X-rated one for The Prodigy’s Smack My Bitch Up, chronicles a very debauched night out, complete with binge drinking, fighting, lots of drugs and multiple trysts.
It reflects a period of Taylor’s life when she was attempting to stave off the clutches of her depression with any quick fix she could find, be it drugs or sex, leading to a downward spiral. The video stars Jessica Szohr and Connor Paolo, former co-stars in Gossip Girl, who played Vanessa Abrams and Eric van der Wooden, respectively – not to mention appearances by Foo Fighters Pat Smear and Ilan Rubin, who, it should be noted, are doing nothing naughtier than playing some table football.
Aside from providing a vivid illustration of how far Taylor had fallen during her darkest days, one wonders whether When I Wake Up is more a cautionary tale for listeners or her gazing in the rearview mirror to make peace with her self-destructive past. As it turns out, being so open with listeners is never her initial impulse, but a byproduct of Taylor giving herself over entirely to the lightning rod of creativity.
“I write songs with no intention of anyone else ever hearing them. I write songs because I have something inside of me that I need to get out, through an artform I picked up when I was five years old. Music has just always made sense to me. It’s a language that I understand. My notebook has been my best friend and my solace and my safe space, because it’s the one place that I’m purely and utterly free, and it’s not for anyone other than myself.
“But the music has to come from a place of pure inspiration, and the hardest part is you don’t know when or how that’s going to strike. So the only process that our records have had in common is that I leave myself very, very open to everything. I put my mind in a state where it’s almost Zen-like, where nothing’s off the table. There are no boundaries. ”
In short, then: the catharsis is private, until it isn’t. And in the age of social media, that feels very relatable.
A couple of days after this interview, The Pretty Reckless will step onto the stage of The Underworld in Camden, a 500–capacity basement venue of the scale they haven’t played in a long while. The first club show the band ever played in the capital, at Notting Hill Arts Club back in May 2010, was still three months shy of the release of their debut album. There was no sense of the reception the band would receive, save for the fact the gig’s 218 tickets sold out in a flash.
“We couldn’t get the volume of the band louder than the audience because they were singing so loud,” recalls Taylor of their first of many Beatlemania moments on these shores. “It was like a lightbulb went off that told me I’m doing something that matters to these people. That was such a bonding experience.”
Sometimes, however, the bonding experiences associated with playing intimate venues can be on the scary side. There was a time when Taylor would invite young women in the crowd up on stage, for a moment of empowerment that could sometimes go sideways, as some of the more overzealous and intoxicated guests would try and grab a souvenir of their experience. On one occasion, it was Taylor’s hair – while it was still attached to her head.
“We had to stop doing that. You throw substances into the mix and things get dangerous.”
By comparison, then, a return to Download will, quite literally, be a walk in the park. For Taylor it’s like “band boot camp”, where everyone is thrown into the muck together, hoping your gear turns up and switches on – but with the many moving parts, at peace with the possibility of things going awry.
“It’s like the early stages of being a band. You have your fucking fingers crossed it goes well, but if it doesn’t, you embrace the trainwreck, so that it makes for something fun and adrenaline-filled for the audience.”
You suspect that Taylor’s penchant for chaos, or constant readiness for it, is the result of the losses she’s experienced. There are few lines of questioning today that don’t eventually lead to the topic of death. Death is something Taylor seems to be fixated on, in the same way that anyone who experiences it frequently begins to. She experienced the loss of Chris Cornell in May 2017, while The Pretty Reckless were on tour with Soundgarden. As well as her band’s longtime producer, Kato Khandwala, who died in 2018, aged 47, as the result of injuries sustained in a motorcycle crash.
“Life is beautiful, but death is equally as much part of life as living is. I’ve always toyed with the darker side of things, and it’s always been part of my psyche. When you experience immense loss repeatedly, it changes you – and I didn’t necessarily handle it well.”
“When you experience immense loss repeatedly, it changes you”
If not exactly characterised by loss, then Dear God examines the debilitating toll it can take on those left behind. The album’s title track, which Taylor describes as record’s “opus”, is essentially Taylor’s cry for help to a higher power, asking for guidance out of the situation she found herself in – besieged by loss and depression, and blighted by the coping mechanisms she turned to.
“I was in a purgatory state,” she reveals of how she felt at her worst. “So down, yet I felt there was a light over there, but I couldn’t figure out how to get there. It was a desperate headspace to live in, where I had to make a very conscious choice whether I was going to live or I was going to die. And that’s heavy. That’s a lot. So the song Dear God is the pinnacle of the record that makes all of this make sense to me. I wanted salvation and I wanted out of where I was, but I was trapped in my own mind with depression and substance abuse and everything that comes with grief, for me at least. It was very hard to see that there was hope at the end of that tunnel, but the reality is there is light to be found.”
Later on the record, Devil In Disguise (Michelle’s Song) acknowledges a more recent loss. If the name Taylor Momsen is familiar to you, it’s likely the name Michelle Trachtenberg will be too. Like Taylor, Michelle started out as a child actor, eventually breaking into films with 1996’s Harriet The Spy, though she’s arguably best known for her role as Dawn Summers, the younger sister of Buffy Summers in the Buffy The Vampire Slayer TV series. Michelle and Taylor worked together on Gossip Girl, soon becoming fast friends, despite Michelle being eight years her senior.
Michelle’s death last year, aged 39, from complications relating to diabetes following a liver transplant, understandably hit Taylor hard. ‘She was always in my corner and there to support me whether I was right or wrong’, Taylor posted on Instagram by way of tribute at the time. ‘I will miss you every day my love… I think we truly understood each other and I am so grateful to have had a friend like you in my life for so long’.
“When Michelle passed, it was everything I had felt when I’d previously experienced loss, but the cycle of grief happened so fast,” Taylor recalls now. “So that song was actually written and recorded on the same day. Michelle was the fucking funniest person in the world. She was always such a supporter of me and the band and my vision for art and life, so yeah, it’s hard. With loss and grief, just because you’ve experienced it doesn’t mean you're ever prepared for it. But I look at music as the thing that can immortalise people. It’ll exist long after I’m dead. It’ll exist long after the people I love are gone. And I think that that’s a really beautiful thing.”
A sweet combination of voice and acoustic guitar, Devil In Disguise (Michelle’s Song) features the lyric ‘Happy or sad / Can’t have the good without the bad’, which reflects one of the many juxtapositions that define our existence, being perpetually between states, that continues to inspire Taylor as a writer. In the aftermath of the release of Dear God’s title track, she discussed desperation and that feeling of wanting “something bigger than yourself to pull you out. That space between heaven and hell isn’t a metaphor. It’s somewhere you actually live.”
Despite being raised Catholic and attending a Catholic school, Taylor suggests, with impressive immodesty, that Dear God is actually “grander than religion.”
“I don’t practice any kind of religion at this stage in my life. God, to me on this album, is simply meant to illustrate something bigger than you. The imagery I associate with religion and God is that of Christian faith, because that’s how I was raised and that’s what’s authentic to me. It’s the same thing with heaven and hell. Heaven and hell is an illustration of good and bad, ups and downs, salvation versus pitfalls.”
Taylor has plenty more time to mull these heady topics over, given that her work in earnest on this new era of The Pretty Reckless begins today, and apparently there’s little in the way of let up for a while yet.
“There’s not a day off until 2027,” suggests Taylor, inscrutably, so we’re not sure if she’s joking or not.
Dear God… that is a brutal schedule.
Dear God is released June 26. Get your limited-edition hand-signed album bundle now.
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