Drop-dead gorgeous rock stars who seemingly have it all – they’re just like us! No one is truly going to believe that about Gavin Rossdale, right? Ever since the shadowy, in-and-out-of-focus video for “Everything Zen” first hit airwaves at the beginning of 1995, the Bush frontman has been a poster boy for the modern-day sex symbol. Yet he deals with the same struggles as everyone else.
Currently on the road in support of the two-disc Bush collection Loaded: The Greatest Hits 1994–2023, which stops at Leader Bank Pavilion this Saturday (August 24), Rossdale is trying to raise his children, get a long-gestating cooking show picked up, and manage to get onstage each night and deliver for the fans. We’d been trying to nail him down for weeks to sit down with Vanyaland, but a lingering sickness sapped all his energy.
“I’m back now,” Rossdale says apologetically. “Being sick on tour is just the worst because you’re so miserable. You just want to weep and sleep; you know what I mean? You feel sorry for yourself. It’s awful. So, I’m so happy to not feel like that.”
That’s good, because there’s some stiff competition on the bill with Jerry Cantrell providing support as he takes a solo timeout from Alice in Chains, as well post-grunge luminaries Candlebox determined to go out strong on their “Long Goodbye” farewell tour.
He was in fighting form when Vanyaland finally caught up with Rossdale for a 617 Q&A (Six Questions; One Recommendation; Seven Somethings) ahead of Saturday’s near sold-out show. In fact, many of the metaphors he drew in relation to being creative during the conversation involved combat. Be it making the next Bush album (“I like a challenge and I’m the fighter in the UFC, so we go do a great record.”), going out for acting gigs, or getting into an ice bath daily, the singer envisions life as a battleground of sorts. Whether it’s avoiding the tag of “’90s band,” having to change songs and album covers in the wake of 9/11, or simply making it from day to day, Rossdale is here for it. And he’s up to the task.
:: SIX QUESTIONS
Michael Christopher: You’re touring for the Loaded: The Greatest Hits. One of the things that I really love about the collection is how the first disc is all ‘90s singles and then the second is everything from the 2000s. Was that intentional to kind of show people, “Hey, I know we started in the ‘90s, but we’re not a ‘90s band. We have all these great songs that we did in the 2000s as well.”
Gavin Rossdale: Yeah, I mean, nobody wants to be sort of labeled where they come from. No one says, “I love U2, I love the ‘80s, they were so great.” So, it’s weird because it’s more challenging. In the ‘90s we had a much better mechanism between radio and MTV to dominate, and rock music was more in the culture. It’s been quite difficult to be such a mainstream thing. But we did it chronologically. There’s still four songs we left off that I’ve annoyed we left off because I was being a bit too reticent about it. If you do it chronologically, that does show the progress and the journey kind of thing. The most logical thing was the chronological way, otherwise, you’d be like, “What do you base it on?”
When you’re putting something like that together, do you see and reflect on the growth of yourself both as a musician and as a person?
I don’t know. Music is just so incredible. You can never stop learning and never stop being interesting, and what’s so funny is that if you can find something to sing and find something that comes out naturally, there’s always a series of complaints or observations in your life. Everybody goes through it, and everybody gets hurt in different ways or everybody gets challenged in different ways. And we all have different coping mechanisms, and I just put those to tunes. And so, it keeps it really sort of authentic.
I am sometimes bewildered by… not bewildered… but blown away by the connection that we have with people and the way that people connect with those songs, and I can only surmise that is because I honestly felt those things as I wrote them. And people feel that. They take that honesty, they take that perspective, and they inherit it. That’s the biggest compliment. It’s like, if you paint the Mona Lisa – which I didn’t – but if you paint something, this is one piece of work people have that one thing to gravitate towards. The magic of music for me is that if you write a song and that belongs to that person, that’s an individual artwork. I mean, fuck that moment of all the, you know, NFTs. [laughs] I think songs were the original, sort of [NFT]. You own that. That’s yours and you can see fit to do with it what you want. It’s just logical… it fits to you.
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So I think that’s what sort of struck me the most was how we’ve just had these different songs and I’ve watched people singing them and what doesn’t matter is what I thought about when I first sang them. I’m not thinking about – in Boston – “Oh geez, what was that emotion in, like, 2007? What was I thinking again?” It’s much more present day, just what I feel comes and some prescient subjects in there that everyone’s talking about the whole time; division, inclusivity, challenges, life beating you up, and it’s how we recover.
I mean, I always have a huge amount of hope in the songs. I’ve never written dour, “We’re all on the gangplank, we’re all fucking… That’s it. It’s the fucking gangplank, then we’re going to swim into nothing.” It’s not that. It’s always like, “Yeah, you throw at me what you want, but fuck it, I’m going to figure it out. I’m going to survive.” So I think the people relate to that because, ostensibly, unless you, unfortunately, a lot of people do kill themselves. We’re all survivors. We all have to dust off whatever happened the day before, no matter how big, how small, and get on with the next day and be sort our best selves. And it’s a tribute to everyone. I think that everybody is that old adage that anybody is always going through something major that you don’t know about. And the other side of it is everybody is surviving and dealing with the vagaries of life, which are brutal. Brutal.
This year is the 30th anniversary of Sixteen Stone, but you’re not doing anything – at least yet – to celebrate it. Is that because it came out so late in the year, in December 1994? Are you waiting until next year to do either an expanded edition or play it in full live?
I dunno. I mean, I’m sure there’ll be things mentioned. I don’t know. I mean, yeah, people love the anniversaries. [laughs] And there’s something in it. But yeah, I don’t know. See, Jack White is doing this cool thing of going on tour and just announcing club shows on the day of the shows, wherever he is. Sounds fucking madly chaotic, but he’s brilliant. So, he’d do a great job of it. But maybe something like that – a club show. But even then, I don’t know. I’ll think about it tomorrow. It was hard enough organizing this interview, so I don’t know. [laughs]
Something I’ve always wanted to ask you about is the issues that were surrounding the cover art of the 2001 album Golden State, which was changed after September 11th. Was that something the record company had come and asked you to do? Or after 9/11, you were like, “That cover’s not going to work anymore, we’re going to have to adjust that.”
Well, it was a fantastic cover. I was on Atlantic Records for like five minutes. It was the worst situation I was ever in – terrible label. I didn’t have an artwork guy, [the label] wouldn’t go outside. I worked with this nice guy, in the art department there, Martin [Ogolter], and we worked on the cover. It was beautiful because it was “Golden State,” and I was traveling all the time. It was when I was in a first bit of a serious relationship with my then, whatever… my long-term relationship before I got married. And so, I thought Golden State was a really beautiful title. And then we did the beautiful [cover] of the plane because I was always on planes either working or trying to keep a relationship going from London. So, it was a great cover. And then as soon as [9/11] happened, it was the most obvious thing that it was the worst cover in the world to have. Who knew that a plane from one day to the next [could] become a weapon of destruction? Before September 11, it was generally thought of as getting from A to B in a plane. There’s nothing sinister about a plane. Suddenly a plane took on the sinister edge.
We changed a lyric. “Speed Kills” was the single. That was in England. “Speed kills” is a sign you see on the road. So, it’s a warning, literally a warning. And they were like, “You can’t have anything with the word ‘kills’ on the radio. We can’t.” We understood, but it’s like, “But this is a warning about speed. This is not…” And then we had a lyric in “Head Full of Ghosts” that we had to change. So, it was a bit messy. It was a bit unfortunate, and it is sad because that record actually was probably our quietest record, our worst label, and quietest record. And yet it’s actually got a lot of cool stuff on there.
You mentioned “Speed Kills,” which was changed to “The People That We Love.” It was still put on that so-called “banned list of songs from Clear Channel” where there were certain songs that were pulled from the radio, some of them the most bizarre choices. When did you first hear about that?
Yeah, “Speed Kills.” This warning song was banned, which is a bit ridiculous. It was “Make Love, Not War.” “They said it! They said ‘war!’ We can’t have it.” Hang on, have a listen to what it said. I’d never been in a situation where I didn’t have a label that I could count on, a label that kind of worked with the times and were flexible. I was just with sort of a dumb monolith of the label – they didn’t adapt. There’s this song “Out of This World” on that record, which we’d been playing in these acoustic sets, and it’s so beautiful and it’s so soothing. That would’ve been a great song to play to calm everyone. But it was, like, all rock music.
After Golden State, it was a decade before The Sea of Memories was released. In that time, you put together the band Institute, then released a solo record. Looking back now, do you wish that you had somehow kept Bush going? Or did you feel the need to step back and take some time away from it?
I need to step away for a minute. I wanted to reinvigorate myself and be impressive and do a side project like all the best bands on Matador. “Side projects!” Someone has a quick record here, quick record there. And it was done because I was with Jimmy Iovine on Interscope, and so it was three years to write that record, which was a nightmare. I think I was lost at that time. I’d been in a band that was so incredible. We worked so hard, and we toured so much.
And then, when you get into situation where suddenly, quite understandably, had someone, Nigel [Pulsford], the guitar player, lost him. He felt like he lost time with his kids growing up. The first kid who was growing up and suddenly his daughter was eight or nine and he was like, “Hang on, I haven’t even been there consistently.” So, he decided to stay home. It would’ve helped us to be more consistent. They didn’t want to do it. So ultimately, I had to let the band members fall away that didn’t want to do it and let the ones remain that did, because everyone had the choice.
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You infamously starred as Balthazar in Constantine, but then you didn’t pursue acting as deeply as people might’ve expected. Then in recent years, you’ve been picking up a few more roles. Is acting still a passion of yours or is it something more on the back burner that if a role comes along, it comes along?
A little bit of that. I really enjoyed it. And yeah, at that point I was poised. I had Brian Lourd, the top agent in California, and I thought it would be slightly different, but… I did a few movies, he turned down a few movies. It’s all synchronicity, it’s all how it should be, I don’t believe there are any mistakes. But ultimately, I mean, I love being a musician so much and I get to be the master of my own destiny. I write the songs, I can choose the song orders, I can do the artwork, I can be on stage and it’s me. If you’re an actor, you’re interpretive and it’s incredible. And I really like acting. I just think it’s incredible, incredible talent to be able to be an actor. So, I enjoy it.
But yeah, everything is a fistfight. Everything’s a fistfight. So, I’m probably better at fighting in music. I’m sort of going further up the ranks of the UFC. Clearly in acting, I go out for a role, there’s all these incredible actors taking the same those parts, and so it’s a different kind of thing. And so, it just works out how it should. But I look forward to doing more. There’s another Constantine coming, so…
Have you always been a big fan of cinema? Were movies always important to you?
Yeah, for sure. Because I think that it’s that medium, it’s getting lost. And same thing with music. It’s like movies, music, books, art, painting, sculptures, or buildings. Anything that fires your imagination is I find fascinating. I always just want to get inspired. And I think that when people make great things, they inspire us. It’s like drinking a creative elixir.
What’s the latest on your cooking show? E.A.T. with Gavin Rossdale. It seems like that’s been floating around for years.
Yeah, I’m going to start a company called “Six Years of No.” But, fingers crossed, I’m shooting at the end of this tour. That’s all being worked on and it’s just unbelievable how long that takes. To your point about the acting, it’s just such a fucking grind, whatever you do. It’s a bit [like] getting signed to a record deal, [you] just need that one person. Like Lady Gaga said, you need that one person to believe in you, and to all one entity we have that. We found the entity of people and we’re going to physically go make it. Now it’s for me to not screw up. [laughs]
You’ve got the cooking show, you’ve got your clothing line, the occasional acting gig. Outside of your family and raising your kids though, is music still number one for you?
Oh God, yeah. By a thousand miles. I mean, it’s the greatest. I’ve just written a new record. We have a brand-new record, we just finished before we came on tour, and I guess that’ll be for later in the year or the New Year. And that just feels great. You know what I mean? I’m a songwriter, so I’m a slave to it. I feel like I’m better at life when I’ve written a song. I feel more worked out. I feel more at peace. It’s like that chance to offload stuff. It feels really good to finish a song just because you’ve got a sensibility out, you’ve got a perspective out and it feels good to articulate your feelings sometimes.
I think it’s a really good record. I’m so excited for you to hear it. It’s going to be so fun. So yeah, that’s mostly what I care about. I don’t get the same passion by ringing up UTA [United Talent Agency] and being like, “Could the agents find me a good part? Can I die in a Marvel movie?” It doesn’t have any of the cache. But a human drama with fucking Christian Bale’s looking for a wingman, fucking, in a buddy movie? I’m fucking all over it. Yeah.
:: ONE RECOMMENDATION
Gavin Rossdale: Well, I know it’s a bit of a cliché in the zeitgeist, but I got to tell people that there’s nothing greater I find than an infrared sauna and then an ice bath; about 42 degrees, three minutes. You go in between the two 15 minutes in the sauna, three minutes in the ice bath, 15 minutes of the sauna, three minutes in the ice bath. And it honestly would change your entire body, and day, and ability to deal with the world. It really is an incredible reset, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s extremely addictive in the most positive way. I took an ice bath last night after we played, I was on the river in Cleveland. My son did it as well, my little 10-year-old with me. He did it for like five minutes last night.
People are hearing about it probably on their feeds, or is that just mine? But it’s just a really simple, but incredibly, you can get very inexpensive ice bath. Yeah, it’s brutal. I fucking hate it. I do it every day and I hate the shit out of it. Up until I get out. When I get out, my body’s like, “Thank you.” Because inflammation is the root of all trouble in the body. So, if you get a situation where everything is constricted and everything gathers and there’s no inflammation, you’re in a better place.
:: SEVEN OF SOMETHING
As I mentioned, you were in Constantine, which starred Keanu Reeves. Bush also did a song for John Wick: Chapter 3 with “Bullet Holes.” What are your seven favorite Keanu movies? And you can only pick one Matrix and one John Wick.
The Matrix.
And John Wick.
I think the first one, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. It was ironic because he was seen originally, back in the day, as not being the kind of consummate actor that he’s seen as now. And I always thought that was such a disservice because the guy acted really well in it, that part, and then was seen as that character. And I always thought that was so crazy. I always thought that was crazy.
Point Break. Point Break was fantastic.
Ronin. 47 Ronin.
Well, then, there this love story with “Sandy,” as if you know her. It’s so funny about actors; we know her as Sandra Bullock, but if you’re on the “in,” it’s “Sandy.” [laughs] You know what I mean? Joe Pesci. It’s like, “Joey” or something. You know? Everyone’s like, “My abbreviated…” Anyhow, so, Speed.
My Own Private Idaho. He was…he out-“Baled” Christian Bale in that in terms of being… absolutely. He was like the Daniel Day-Lewis of that movie. I mean, he was really, really, really good. Brutal in that film. Cold and amazing.
Devil’s Advocate. He’s really good [in] that. So, Devil’s Advocate. There you go: Seven. I mean, that was hard. I wouldn’t be able to go to nine, but there, you got me at seven.
BUSH + JERRY CANTRELL + CANDLEBOX + BONES UK :: Saturday, August 24 at Leader Bank Pavilion, 290 Northern Ave. in Boston, MA :: 6 p.m., all ages, $54.35 to $100.45 :: Event info and advance tickets