Advertise on podcast: Weirder Together with Ben Lee and Ione Skye

We sat down with Shonen Knife in Australia on their current tour, and it was a profoundly rad chat. We talked about sneaking guitars past conservative parents in 80s Osaka, leaving a salary job after “two years and 15 days,” and how a single postal letter from Calvin Johnson at K Records changed everything. We got into the KISS show Naoko saw in 1977 (third row, Gene Simmons right there) the tribute album that introduced them to America before they’d even toured there, and what it means when an audience isn’t just people who like the band, but people for whom Shonen Knife is their favorite band. Naoko’s secret to 45 years in a rock band: “I never look back. I just look a bit future.” Also: tennis. Their new album Let’s Knife Re-Cut, a re-recording of their 1992 classic with the current lineup, is out now, and it sounds more energetic than ever. Dive deeper into our world at https://weirdertogether.substack.com

We’re back from Japan in full, and we’ve got a lot to catch up on. We hadn’t told you about Ghibli Park yet — Ione became a “soft girl” walking through the sets of Howl’s Moving Castle and Kiki’s house, and Ben has thoughts on why Disneyland feels punishing while Ghibli felt nourishing. We saw Shonen Knife live in Tokyo (Ione is still not over it), played a show in Osaka at Flake Records, made a music video with Mophing People, and had a sushi meal in Kyoto where the waitress thought Ione was Nicole Kidman. Back in Sydney, we’ve officially said goodbye to our LA house — a space that held so much more than just our family. That chapter’s closed. On the culture front: we’ve been deep in the Golden Life (the original Real Housewives of New York cast in Palm Beach — a gift), obsessed with Kate Berlant’s HBO special, and playing the Spike F**k album “Evidence” on repeat, which feels like it could have been made in any decade and will always be good. We also get into Kubrick’s Lolita, the art of letting disturbing stories be disturbing, and Ben’s upcoming Inner West Ale Trail — four gigs at four breweries in one afternoon.

We’re back in Sydney from Japan (still mourning the bidets) and we have a special guest in town from LA — our friend Franki Chan, founder of IHEARTCOMIX. Franki started IHEARTCOMIX in 2003 throwing parties with Steve Aoki in the indie sleaze era, with the Cobra Snake taking photos and MySpace making it global. Within a year of that first party, Franki went from living in his car to being a global DJ. He and Steve Aoki had a very public and very competitive split — Cinespace Tuesdays vs. Check Your Ponytail, same night, same scene — “there’s a limited series in it” — but the competition helped make LA one of the most important music scenes of the 2000s. Now 22 years later, IHEARTCOMIX is a creative marketing agency behind campaigns for Marvel, Olivia Rodrigo and Johnny Depp. Franki literally built a park — trees, grass, the whole thing — for Olivia Rodrigo’s album campaign. He’s producing the first US premiere Toho has ever done for Godzilla in 65 years. And he came up on a political DIY punk scene, which is what makes his arc so interesting: the guy who wouldn’t sell out is now working at the biggest scale in entertainment. His take: “As the internet happened, we won. Why are we fighting the old fights?” We also talk about the philosophy of nightlife, how every major relationship Franki has ever made he met by being out, including the time he randomly sat next to a stranger at a South by Southwest after-party who turned out to write all the modern Spider-Man films. Plus: Franki gives us his honest advice on where Weirder Together goes from here — and why being based in Sydney is a bigger advantage than we might think.

We're recording from the Sequence Hotel in Miyashita Park, Shibuya. First time back in Tokyo in over two decades — Ione's mom and our teenager are both along for the trip. Ben wraps the Two Most Annoying People You Love tour with Georgia Maq: why this tour was harder to sell than Awake Is In Your Sleep but a true creative victory, and why he ended the last night in Canberra saying there are only three artists in his career he's ever felt truly safe sharing a stage with for two hours. He also saw Digger in IMAX on the final day of the tour, called Ione afterwards slightly shaken, and is now firmly in the camp that it is a bomb because it's difficult — not because it's bad. Plus: the vintage band shirt economy in Tokyo (Minutemen tees, $400 a pop), Ione's mom being captivated by a radio show broadcast from a Shibuya window, Rick Rubin doing prayer beads at Fred Siegel during Ione's first nausea-free meal of her pregnancy, and why Australian artists should stop chasing LA and start building in Asia. Up next: Ghibli Park in Nagoya, an in-store at Flake Records in Osaka with the Shonen Knife ladies, and a gig with Mophing People.

No guest this week — just Ben and Ione, back from half the Australian leg of the Two Most Annoying People You Love Tour with Georgia Maq. Ben recaps a Melbourne show that stopped the room: Georgia singing "Rearranging Chairs on the Titanic" in front of her family for the first time, breaking down mid-song, her sister calling out from the crowd. Ben describes playing through it like a "Werner Herzog director" — wanting to preserve the moment while also quietly directing traffic. Also this week: Kate gave Ben a signed early edition of Allen Ginsberg's Howl, which sent him down a rabbit hole back to a night at Sean Lennon's house and a poem that became one of his songs. Ben and Ione unpack the viral lesbian bar mask mandate story — and why it might actually be the left's most useful mirror in years. Plus: Sylvester Stallone's surprising New York Times interview, a Bukowski side nobody saw coming, and why going to the MoMA every day when you're broke and lost might be the best advice anyone's ever given. Next episode: coming to you from Tokyo. Dive deeper into our world at https://weirdertogether.substack.com

This week we're joined by Daine — and if you don't know her yet, you will soon. She's the Australian artist who's the darling of the pop underground, and her album drops November 6th. We talk about being 16 and sitting across from a major label exec who told her she was going to be bigger than Billie Eilish. It didn't happen. She's grateful. We talk about what she calls her three-tier music success pyramid — quality at the bottom, tolerance for failure in the middle, and the thing most people won't admit at the top. She explains it better than we could, and we all believe in the best Martin Scorsese quote you've heard in a while. We also get into the album itself, which was made when she and her producer were deeply in love, and is being rolled out now that they're exes. "It's like a child of divorce," she says. "And it's this really pure, beautiful thing." Plus: the nepo baby allegations she cannot shake (her parents are, in her words, "radical Marxist academics"), why being conventionally attractive works against you in indie music, what it was like watching Nina go from first-show friend to Coachella, and Ben's encounter with Russell Crowe at a New York restaurant urinal that changed his life.

This week: the first-ever returning guest on Weirder Together; Georgia Maq is officially in the Two Timers Club. Three years into LA, Georgia talks about why Melbourne’s cool music scene made her feel like a loser with an acoustic guitar, and why a city with no healthcare turns out to produce the most intense friendships. She reads Kelly’s book for the first time, sitting in our house, and finds herself as a central character. Her verdict on the band dynamic: “Camp Cope was an airplane with one pilot seat. Me and Thommo were both fighting to be the pilot. Kelly was in the back taking a Valium and drinking red wine.” Georgia’s dad was the lead singer of Redgum. She talks about the guitar he gave her at 15, the cancer he hid, and how estrogen during treatment turned him into the person she’d always wanted him to be. The guitar she plays today is the one she was ungrateful for at 15. Also: why she’s going all black after rewatching Walk the Line, her plan to play a youth detention centre on this Australian tour, Camp Cope’s Tiny Desk story (they had no idea what Tiny Desk was), and why AI gives us four years and what to do with borrowed time. https://weirdertogether.substack.com

This week: Sydney weather as business class: once you’ve had it, going back to coach is brutal….and the ethics of putting your dog to sleep, covered in the first four minutes. We went to Cybele Malinowski’s photography show “Deep Fake”, portraits of Las Vegas celebrity impersonators, including the story of one MJ impersonator who took a homeless man under his wing and taught him the craft. Plus our Vegas stories: Ione at the Hard Rock Hotel opening in the early 90s with Sofia Coppola, Stephen Dorff and Zoe Cassavetes (the politics of free chips for famous people), and Ben waking up at Lollapalooza 93 to what may be the worst smell in human history. We hung with Fruit Bats’ Eric D. Johnson: his song is going viral on TikTok across American college campuses, and he shared a piece of songwriting wisdom we can’t stop thinking about. Ben is processing his hair transplant fork in the road. We fell down an Etsy witches rabbit hole. And we had a full psychic moment playing Rummy Tiles. Weirder Together is officially calling it: collective Joan Armatrading rediscovery moment incoming.

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This week: nostalgia for Moviefone and Rob Brezny's Dial-a-Horoscope, the Jungian idea that your unconscious is trying to help you, and the one Timothy Leary quote Ben has actually carried with him his whole life — "the goal of life is calm and compassionate gameplay." We saw Greg Araki's new film with Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman (co-written by Slutever's Karly Scortino) — a genuinely sexy movie that also makes you think, which is rarer than it should be. Plus: bumping into Peking Duk outside the Ritz in Randwick on the night their album went to #1 in Australia, ARIA plaques and all. (Randwick: possibly the least rock and roll suburb in Sydney.) A full Australian Traitors deep dive — how secretly Machiavellian Australians are, Dicko's voting block strategy, and the question the show keeps raising: is emotional gameplay still manipulation if the emotion is real? We saw the Bondi Boys at Hollywood Hotel (neon mic stand, expanded set, Gen X energy), Ben smells beer and thinks about his entire touring life, Ione smells Carmex and thinks about Paris 1987, and we're making a fanzine with Kate Dunn (@moonfurhat on Instagram) as merch for the Australia and Japan tour. We end with a challenge: Ione proves she's a better liar than Ben by closing the podcast with a lie. We'll let you decide if she pulled it off.

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This week: moving stuff out of our LA storage and crying over a broccoli pan, Ione’s first visit to Phoenix Central Park, and a young band called Mouseatouille doing something genuinely exciting. We talk about Kelly from Camp Cope’s book “It’s Not For You” — about female musicians in Australia — and what it made us think about fighting for sensitivity in a cutthroat industry. Then a big conversation about masterworks vs. process: is the pressure to make your definitive statement actually just a marketing construct? Why Phoebe Bridgers is a genius of timing, why Fugazi understood something most artists don’t, and our primary argument against AI music. And then there are the Kate Moss stories. Nirvana Unplugged. The airport with Naomi Campbell. The ecstasy at Max Fish with Evan Dando. What Kate actually said. Also big recommendations this week are Johanna Samuels’ album “Sorry Kid” and Whitmer Thomas’ comedy special “Terminal Crew of Dudes”. Plus: Ben’s Australia and Japan tour with Georgia Maq (tickets available now), the condom misunderstanding that nearly destroyed our marriage, and the woman at dinner who had met every celebrity, billionaire and king — and was impressed by none of them. Dive deeper into our world at https://weirdertogether.substack.com

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This week we’re back together after Ione wraps filming her mysterious Melbourne movie. We talk about the impossible position the music industry puts beautiful women in (you need the looks to get in the door, then you get dismissed for them), the incredible 2charm show at the Enmore Theatre — think Pet Shop Boys if they took peptides — and what Stassi Schroeder’s comeback show gets right that Drea de Matteo and Ariel Pink completely missed about their own cancellations. Plus: Ione accidentally texts her friend that her holiday “looks expensive,” and Ben gives a talk at APRA AMCOS about originality and why the “stay in your lane” era is finally over. Dive deeper into our world at https://weirdertogether.substack.com

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