How are you today?
I’m alright man, been out in LA for about a month just catching up on some work and trying to plot the year out. My life’s a juggle for sure (laughs).
Reading up on your biography, it’s certainly something. Take us through your near death from the bombing of your elementary school by Ronald Reagan during Gaddafi’s reign in Libya?
That was a bit of artistic licencing that one. I was in Tripoli when that happened so it’s not like I was near it or saw the bomb go of or anything like that. At the time I was going to school out there we had stop, drop and roll bomb practices in the mornings because America was bombing Libya at the time, so that was like an everyday part of things.
You’re no stranger to sleeping rough. In particular, how was your stay on the church floor in Louisiana with the Red Cross?
I took a two day train when I was staying in LA to go and visit some friends and on the train you know, we didn’t have any idea about the storm that was coming because back then you didn’t get much news on the train and then when I got off the train, my friend picked me up and said hey man just so you know there’s a storm coming in and we may all have to get out of here. That was Friday, and then we woke up on Saturday and we were just looking at the CNN news and they were giving us a satellite view of the storm and it was as big as the Caribbean, and it was coming straight at us. So we were just like wow. I then helped my friend evacuate- we nailed all the windows shut, we cleared out all the photos and birth certificates and packed them in the car and then we drove out 60 miles west of New Orleans. We had hotel rooms booked there but the thing that happens out there a lot, is especially when its disaster related, a lot of these less scrupulous hotels will start gouging the price because they know that you’ll probably pay, because you’re frantic and that’s what happened to us. We got there and there was like 40 rooms in a motel and they were all empty but the people at the desk were trying to kick the prices up and so there was a whole lot of angry people who left that hotel and ended up sleeping on the floor at this church recreation center which was right across the street. It turned into about three days we were there, there was about three hundred of us sleeping in the main auditorium area and washing up in the hand basins and stuff, and the Red Cross were coming to serve us food and after three or four days New Orleans got on the TV and they weren’t gonna let anyone come back, which was what everyone was waiting for. We were all waiting on the idea that we could go back but they said no way, so we just got in the car and drove to LA which took us about two days.
You gave up your home and possessions in 2012 to travel until “something enormous happens”. Has that something happened or are you still waiting?
Nah it hasn’t happened yet. It is starting to, I mean Great Expectations did alright, I think it should have done two million times better but it did alright and more importantly I’ve got momentum now. I’ve been around the world in the last two years. I’ve started musical projects in Namibia and in Italy and I’ve established some works in south east Asia and I’m gonna leave in April to do it all over again. Going to go back to all those spots, finish this album with Becoming Phil in Namibia and release that and then hit a few other spots along the way and this is the lifestyle that I want. This is the path that I’m trying to carve for my career and it’s just one of constant travelling and collaboration with people around the world.
Is Storm Chaser of your album Great Expectations the most personal song to you then seeing as it is your life story?
Yeah, that one’s a life story in a nutshell but it’s also about the way we don’t really have as much control over our lives as we think we do sometimes. I mean, talking about so many Mexicans in California, drugs are almost in their bloodline. No matter what these guys end up doing, so many of them just end up playing some kind of role in the drug trade, whether it’s selling it or using it, one way or another, and it’s the drug wars which sent them to LA. Similarly it’s the oil wars which sent all the Iranians to LA and it’s the oil wars that scattered my whole family and as much I like to think that I’ve got control over things, and I do to an extent, but it’s factors like these; political, financial, world factors that we don’t have any control over that roll us like a storm. We’re like boats floating in the tide, you know.
So through your music you’re almost trying to take back that control?
Yeah, I guess so. I mean when I started doing it was just because I loved it and I still mostly do it because I love it because there haven’t really been many rewards a part from that yet, a part from the travelling aspect and all the people I’ve met and being able to express myself and all that stuff is great, but now I’ve been doing it for about 20 years it’s like anything you do long enough. People start respecting you after a while. After sitting around and not really going anywhere, people start to wake up to you a bit.
We noticed that you run an interesting exhibition on Iran before the Chador. Could you tell us a little more about that?
Yeah, the pictures there are all family members of mine and that’s only about 10 pictures out of the hundreds that I have scanned. The exhibition went a little bit viral and different places picked it up- the BBC, TBS, and once that happened I got approached by a couple of agents about making a book, so right now part of the reason that I’m in LA is to finish up the book. It’s going to be a combination of photos, all with interviews that I have held with my family to shed some light on the circumstances of those photos.
Would you say then that effects of the Islamic Revolution have had a major impact on your own life?
Well sure I mean I wouldn’t be a rapper otherwise. I only came to LA because my whole Iranian side of my family was here and they’re only here because of the revolution. Before the revolution they were living great lives with nice cars and good jobs, but after the revolution there was nothing so they came to America. So definitely if it wasn’t for the Iranian revolution I wouldn’t even be rapping now.
How’s your clothing company Heverly Bills coming along?
It’s coming along pretty crap right now; I mean I haven’t really put too much effort into it. It’s like a lot of things that I do, I come up with an idea that I like and want to see what it looks like and I like the shirts and you know, I’ve sold a few but basically I think it’s the kind of thing that will catch on momentum as my career in general catches momentum. Every artist needs to have some shirts and I got mine so there it is.
What’s the story behind the name?
(Laughs), well yeah some people get and some people don’t. It’s basically for when your bills, a.k.a your money is more than heavy- it’s heverly (laughs). It’s funny though because some people go ‘oh, so you mean your bills are heavy’, some people will think that it means you’re saying that you’re rich which was the originally intended reason, but other people go ‘oh so it seems that I’ve got a lot of bills’, and I’m like yeah well you know that could work too (laughs).
On the Heverly Bills Website it says, ‘We’re not terrorists, we’re businessmen’. Have you ever been accused of being a terrorist and is that why you felt the need to add this statement to the website?
I’ve never directly been accused of being a terrorist. Since I’m half English (my dad’s from Devon and I spent a few years in England) my name is British, so I don’t get much flak about being half Iranian unless I’m at the airport. I wrote that statement more as a nod to the fact that most Americans automatically think about terrorists when they think about Iranians when in fact most of us are much more business-minded than we are religious.
We’re interested to know how you met your best friend, who is on Amnesty International’s most wanted list is he not?
(Laughs), that’s probably the only little lie in the whole bio, as in he’s not my best friend but he’s a cool guy, we’re not up in the middle of night talking to each other or anything like that but he’s a cool guy. We were down in Belize City a few years ago and we were staying in this hotel and we wanted to look around the island, well I mean around the country because Belize has an Island but it’s more of a country on the Central American mainland but you need protection. You can’t just go walking around Belize cause you’d get robbed so in the lobby of the hotel Josh was one of the guys that wanted to offer his services and we struck up a conversation and it turned out that he was an off duty Police cop who was with the K-9 Unit, and we ended up rolling around with this guy for a few weeks. Then when we came home we googled him and the Amnesty International thing came up about him beating up prisoners and I think we could imagine that knowing the guy.
Then we arrive at the bombing of a McDonalds you were at by a group of rebels in Thailand. Explain?
There’s a DJ from Birmingham called DJ Squigz who we had connected with over the internet and I was living in Malaysia at the time and Squigz had moved a couple of years ago from Birmingham to Southern Thailand and he told me that I should come up there and say hi to him, so I did. I went up to Hat Yai where he lived and there was a McDonalds in the middle of town that had just been re-built and it had metal detectors at the door which you had to walk through to get into the McDonalds, and the reason is, is because it’s a very busy McDonalds and as a result the Thai Muslim Militia had bombed it and a bunch of people had died. I wasn’t actually around when the bomb went off though, I arrived shortly after and when I was taking the bus into Hat Yai the bus drivers were really worried that we were going to get hijacked because they had been doing a lot of fighting around the borders, but we were lucky and got through.
Did you ever find your favorite hat which you lost there?
Nah, (laughs), Squigz picked me up from the bus station and he picked me up on a motorbike and you know, I held onto the back of the motorbike and I forgot to take the hat off. I don’t like bikes much so I don’t really think about these things, that your hats gonna fly of when this thing gets over 30 mph and that’s exactly what happened, but I did find the exact same hat when I got back to LA so all is well.
You describe your album Great Expectations as being the single thing you’re proudest of. How do you think you and the world will see the album 20 years from now?
It’s a little too close to me right now to tell, I mean I know that attitudes towards it have changed a lot since it was first released. When it was first released it was kinda quiet over here, I mean it was getting some good reviews and all of that but it’s not a very likable album, you know. It’s kind of jagged you know, it’s not really trying to bring you pleasure necessarily. I think that I am masterful and skillful in the way that I’m presenting things but I think that what I am presenting is not the kinda thing that most people really wanna hear about. It’s my version of the truth and my version of the truth is not very soothing, and so I think it has suffered as a result of that. I think it is overlooked as a result of that unfairly but at the same time I knew what I was getting into when I did it, I knew that’s what was going to happen but you know, what can you do. That’s the art that you make, it came together in my mind and made sense, from the album cover to the order of the songs to what it was going to be about and so it had to be made, no matter if it wasn’t going to be the most well received thing, and so I’m more proud of that album than anything I’ve done in my life.
So is the message that you promote in Great Expectations something that you’re going to take to the end and always focus on, musically speaking?
I think that there’s always gonna be an element of that but I think that Great Expectations is my world view more or less, and my world view is that we’re alone out here and no one’s going to save us, there’s nobody to rely on, there’s no religion or belief or nationality or financial state that is going to give us a break from the daily terror of life. Everyone’s looking for a way to ease the burden on themselves but I don’t think that’s possible, I think it’s part of life. I don’t think that I’m going to be extreme about it from here on out because my life is getting better as a result of this album and as a result of throwing all my stuff away and travelling and I think that as my life gets better I’m going to be more positive.
So It’s definitely an album which reflects were you were at in your life when you started writing it?
Yeah, I mean basically it’s about a moment that I had were I realised that romantically, musically, financially and personally I hadn’t lived up to much of any of my goals and I was 33. People have always said that my expectations are too high for myself and for life but I don’t believe that, I mean there are nineteen year old millionaires running around here and young people with extraordinary minds and I don’t see any handicap that I have or that any of my friends have that should mean that we can’t expect that from ourselves, but for one reason or another it hasn’t happened yet, and I felt it was way past time and it depressed me and so I went to drastic measures to try and put myself in the kind of position where I could make something enormous happen.
Any last things you want to share with our readers?
You can now buy the CD, we made physical copies so you can go to malkovichmusic.bandcamp.com and order the CD and if you send me a note, I’ll throw some extra goodies in there for you.
