As Perry Farrell makes his solo debut in London, Ian Winwood charts how the Jane’s Addiction frontman changed live music as we know it 

There aren’t many performers who have in their arsenal a story about emancipating thousands of slaves. 

Perry Farrell did just that. After levying a dollar surcharge on concert tickets for his band Jane’s Addiction, in 2001 the New York born singer travelled to the African country of Sudan with a bag filled with more than a $100,000 – just north of half a million Sudanese pounds – in hard currency and a plan devoid of any official sanction. 

The trip, which was facilitated by the abolitionist group Christian Solidarity International, was filled with risk. Had government forces spotted the bi-plane in which the rescue party flew into southern Sudan, chances were it would have been shot from the sky. Inside, one of the key players of the American alternative rock scene sat tight on a wooden crate, while up front an elderly woman piloted his ride.  

For two weeks, Farrell and delegates from CSI bartered with slave-owners for the freedom of 2,300 people who had been captured and trafficked from the north of the country. This process included the provision of legal documents and safe passage back to the parts of the country from which each person had been stolen. By night, the party slept in tents on the African plains. 

“It was all highly, highly illegal,” says Farrell. 

On the visitor’s last evening in Sudan, a party was thrown.

“It was time to celebrate,” he says. “I had brought a boom box with me, and on it I had some techno music and house music, some great stuff. The box had an attachment onto which you could put a microphone. So while the music was playing, I was rapping and singing. But then I handed the mic off and some of the freed people took turns rapping. They all had rhymes ready to go. 

“It was amazing.”

Throughout a career that is soon to tick over into its fifth decade, Perry Farrell – the name is a play on the word “peripheral” – has regarded music as a unifying force, whether in East Africa or West Bromwich. This week the 60-year old visits London for a pair of concerts at the Box in Central London, in support of his shape-shifting album Kind Heaven, released this spring. The shows will be his first in the United Kingdom as a solo artist. 

More than a return to form, Kind Heaven might just be the finest work to which Farrell has placed his name since the release of Jane’s Addiction’s second LP, Nothing’s Shocking, in 1988. 

Back then, major label rock music had seen nothing of its kind. A strange and beguiling mixture of punk, funk, metal and ambience, Perry Farrell created Jane’s Addiction for the kind of audiences that frequented the seediest clubs in the band’s home city of Los Angeles. 

A full three years before alternative music was coughed onto the mainstream with the arrival of Nirvana’s Nevermind album, in 1988 it was the metal press that paid closest attention to the band’s strange and druggy charms. In a way, this was fitting; while Jane’s Addiction piloted a sound that turned its collar to cliché and convention, its members’ own behaviour mimicked perfectly the kind of carry-on typified by the glam-metal crowd up on the Sunset Strip.

“There was a lot of drug use,” says Farrell, “hard drugs, intravenous drugs. And there were a lot of egos, too. People would study music videos [the band had made] and count the number of close-ups they had. Then they’d complain, ‘Well you had twelve, but I only had six!’”

Although more popular than ever, by 1991 Jane’s Addiction were in a state of ruin so parlous that the band decided to bow out with a final US tour (although, inevitably, it turned out to be nothing of the kind). It was under these dismal circumstances that Perry Farrell hit upon an idea that would change the American concert experience forever. 

Prior to the advent of Lollapalooza, the United States had seen just one outdoor package tour. But whereas 1988’s stadium-bothering Monster Of Rock caravan, headlined by Van Halen, catered to hard rock’s mainstream, Farrell’s brainchild sought to deepen the piqued interests of teenagers who had seen his band, and others like them, on MTV. Along with this, space was also found for acts that had as much chance of landing a spot on Music Television as they had of landing on the moon. 

During its maiden year of 1991, the six-week tour featured music from turns as diverse as Jane’s Addiction, Siouxsie & The Banshees, Nine Inch Nails, Living Colour, Violent Femmes, Butthole Surfers, Fishbone, and more. By the standards of the time, such a bill was the sonic equivalent of opening a zoo in which every animal was housed in just one enclosure. 

It didn’t end there. Come the middle years of the nineties Lollapalooza had expanded to include numerous stages, an array of stalls that advocated for various political and environmental causes, an art gallery, poetry readings, not to mention the Jim Rose Circus Side Show, a performative troupe that hung breeze-blocks from their nipples. 

Not everyone was knocked sideways by all of this. The producer Steve Albini, whose credits include Nirvana’s In Utero album, described Lollapalooza as “the worst example of corporate encroachment into what is supposed to be the underground. It is just a large scale marketing of bands that pretend to be alternative but are in reality just another facet of the mass cultural exploitation scheme… what it really is [is] the most popular bands on MTV that are not heavy metal.”

Were Steve Albini talking about Lollapalooza in its current form, he would have had a point. Today the event appears in just four cities – Chicago, Santiago, Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires – and offers the now commonplace array of expensive corporate packages and hierarchical VIP “experiences”. Perry Farrell is now merely a minority shareholder, and the festival has not toured regularly for more than 20 years. Roughly speaking, these days it’s about as “alternative” as Michael McIntyre’s Big World Tour. 

But in the context of the nineties, the producer’s words sound curmudgeonly.

After all, where else could ticketholders witness a show that featured both Metallica and the Cocteau Twins, not to mention the Ramones? Where else could they see a performance by chanting Tibetan monks, booked at the behest of the Beastie Boys? And where else could one see a chaotic set from L7 just an hour before swooning to the murder ballads of Nick Cave (who hated the experience) while reading a leaflet promoting People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in the breaks between the two?

Lollapalooza was also the perfect place to see underground bands at the very point they became mainstream. With their breakthrough album, Dookie, climbing the chart like Spider-Man, Green Day’s opening slot on the main stage in 1994 got off to a troubled start when singer Billie Joe Armstrong invited thousands of fans in the nosebleeds to gatecrash the empty seats at the front of the stage. The announcement caused hundreds of injuries, and Armstrong did not repeat the mistake again. Despite this, the trio’s chaotic noon appearances gave the event’s security detail nightmares for the rest of the tour. It also gave lifetime bragging-rights to anyone who saw Green Day at this pivotal moment in their development.

At its best Lollapalooza provided entertainment and enlightenment in equal measure. What’s more, it did so for around $30 – a levy that caused outrage at the time. By today’s standards, where supporters of left-field music are gouged in exactly same way as those whose tastes run to Barbra Streisand, this now seems rather quaint. And, anyway, it’s hardly Perry Farrell’s fault that all revolutions eventually eat their young.

Or maybe it is, at least to a degree. Originally all tickets for his appearances at the Box were priced at north of £200, including drinks and dinner (Farrell himself claims not have been aware of this). When this pricing policy proved a bit rich for the blood of many of his constituents, the singer responded to complaints on Twitter by insisting on the release of a selection of cheaper tickets, priced £50.

“When people come and see me play, I want it to be a new experience for them,” says Farrell. “Whether it be Lollapalooza all those years ago, or the shows I’m doing at the moment, which are kind of cabaret, I don’t want people to come and know exactly what to expect. I like to have an element of mystery about what I do.”

In other words, at the Box Perry Farrell promises that he’ll still be thinking outside of it, albeit on a smaller scale. And you never know, maybe part of the ticket money will be used to free a whole new generation of slaves.