The 2013 song Josh Homme thought nobody should ever hear: “Really difficult personally”
The 2010s may seem like a rather innocuous musical decade for the average person. Generally speaking, it was pretty crap. Caught between indie sleaze and post punk, alternative music was a state of flux while pop was giving the mainstream a genuinely terrible name, with hyper-saturated EDM flooding the charts.
But for me, as someone born in the mid-1990s, it had moments of unforgettable brilliance that oddly make it one of my most treasured eras of music. I remember 2013, in particular, being a real doozy thanks to one rock and roll band from the Steel City.
Arctic Monkeys went stratospheric that year, releasing what many would consider their magnum opus AM, and backing it up with a career-defining headline slot at Glastonbury Festival. People outside their close circle of fans wondered how they became the band they did in that year, whereas those with their finger on the rock and roll pulse knew it was sourced in California, and more specifically, Joshua Tree.
The band camped out with their trusted mentor, Josh Homme, who was very much the secret sauce of this new chart-topping record. His brooding brand of desert rock dripped all over AM, and really, he was the unsung hero of its success.
But did the success of the Monkeys’ record come at his own? Because, as we talk about 2013 as a musical year, over a decade on, we talk about AM and Josh Homme’s involvement in it way more than we do in the involvement of his own record, Queen Of The Stone Age’s …Like Clockwork.
It was by no means a dud; in fact, it was one of their best albums and had iconic tracks littered all over it, ones that would exist in the Queens setlist for years to come. But really, it supported their legacy rather than defining it in the way AM did for the Monkeys.
But for Homme personally, it seemed as though he used all his creative juice on the Sheffield band, because …Like Clockwork for him represents some of the worst ideas he ever put to paper.
He picked out one song in particular, explaining, “‘The Vampyre of Time and Memory’ was really difficult, personally. I had that song at the house before these guys had heard anything. I never do demos because I’d rather us guys just do them together and work them out together. And do it once.”
“But with this, I did three or four demos,” he added. “I don’t think all of them made it onto the record but that was the first song and I thought, ‘who the fuck would want to hear this?’ So it was about getting past that hurdle, because I don’t want to be melodramatic.”
His experience producing records for the likes of Arctic Monkeys had taken Homme outside of himself and had him viewing his own songs through a much sharper critical lens. Because the truth was, a whole host of Queens Of The Stone Age fans wanted to hear that song, along with the rest of the album, which may not have been AM, but it was the American band close to their best.
