Bush's Gavin Rossdale Looks Back on 30 Years of Sixteen Stone

Though it’s a long way from his native London, Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale loves spending time in Texas. He relishes the opportunity to hit a good steakhouse, and he’s got friends in Dallas he looks forward to seeing on the road. But it’s inevitable to make friends all over the world when you’ve got a 30-year tenure of global touring under your belt.

Bush’s rapid and meteoric rise began in 1994 with their debut LP, Sixteen Stone. The album was released about six months after the death of Kurt Cobain, marking the band’s entry to American radio rock as the beginning of a transitory “post-grunge" era. With their combination of punching rhythms and crunching guitar melodies beneath Rossdale’s anguished and guttural baritone vocals, Bush’s launch into the spotlight was steeped in comparisons to Nirvana. You can find shared similarities if you’re looking for them, but this correlation would be a disservice to both bands.

Like Cobain, Rossdale fell in love with punk rock at an early age and cited the genre as a direct influence. But while the former’s sound evoked an outcast’s groan at the banal status quo of American suburbia, Rossdale’s growling snarl through a posh accent is a tarnishing of sophisticated tradition — like discarded scraps of wrought-iron filigree corroding with rust in a rain-soaked London street gutter. Nirvana kicked rocks through the windows of their conservative parents, but Bush stole the glossy magazines from their mailbox to crumple, cut and collage to their own liking.

To celebrate three decades as a band, Bush is currently on the road for “Loaded: The Greatest Hits Tour.” For Rossdale, the feeling that 30 years have passed depends on the day.

“Some days it feels like double that, and some days it feels like it’s just about to start,” he says. “And then other times you feel like, oh my God, it's been so fucking long, what's happening? Where's the rest of the world gone? You know, inside yourself, you don't have a concept of time. It's almost like other people create that, giving this sense of time moving around you.”
But even after all this time, Sixteen Stone still resonates deeply with rock fans — those who were there, and those who found it for themselves. Rossdale is astounded to see such an intergenerational crowd at Bush shows, which he in part attributes to inherited taste and the accessibility of streaming. But ultimately he thinks that it’s the actual songs that determine whether or not an artist experiences longevity.

“I think if you write a great song, it just belongs to everyone. You write a song and then you give it out to the world,” he says. “[Bob] Dylan writes a song and then I listen to 'Idiot Wind' and then I sort of think what I think about it and inherit it. And I think that's what hopefully the best songs do, people inherit them. They put them on like suits of armor and they become part of their DNA, part of their makeup, part of what sort of gives them power and sort of gives them transcendence. And so I think I had to do that.

"I mean, that's obviously me shooting for the moon with the songs because that's the highest goal they could achieve.”

The music industry is a very different beast from what it was in 1994, and it’s changed the way that music is made. Singles are prioritized over albums, internet virality is more coveted than debut chart standings, and strategy is the name of the game in streaming. But Rossdale believes that universal truths of songwriting still hold true and advises younger artists to put the artistry first despite today’s fast-paced industry landscape.

“It's essential to remove all sort of ego-driven expectations of what something you make should do, because you get confused by that,” Rossdale says. “The bottom line is that, you know, it's like if something devastating happens in your life and you feel absolutely like layers of skin have been removed and you feel more vulnerable than you can remember, suddenly you start to pick out the words in your songs and suddenly words mean more than you had realized in previous times when everything was fine. And so there's a magic that goes into writing.”
Rossdale also thinks it’s important to remember that the downsides of modern times don’t necessarily mean the past equated to better days. In the '90s, mental health was still an unspoken taboo, corporations were ripping off consumers behind closed doors without the public accountability of social media and people were generally less connected to each other and to resources.

“It's great to remember the best part of the '90s, but it's also really good to continue to evolve,” he says. “Nostalgia is dangerous. It's like having a love affair. You eulogize a lost lover then you forget the reason why they drove you nuts.”

In terms of newer bands, Rossdale is especially excited by the madcap Bristol post-punk outfit IDLES.

“There's something about him,” he says of IDLES frontman Joe Talbot. “There was a guy when I was a kid that we used to love growing up, Ian Drury, from The Blockheads. [Talbot’s] got that shouty Ian Drury style. I love it. It's really, really great and really fun, cool words. It’s just bright and really good writing. I saw them at the Palladium and it was a really good show.”

It’s important and refreshing for rock stars of Rossdale’s generation to keep their ear to the ground and embrace what modern times offer in terms of music, culture and artistry. Though grunge nostalgia has found a place in the current landscape, '90s alt-rock does not exist in a vacuum. It didn’t then and it doesn’t now. That’s why 30 years later, Rossdale and Bush are still on the road, bringing their unique combination of the gritty and the gorgeous as far and wide as it continues to resonate.

Bush performs on Sunday, Sept. 8, at Dos Equis Pavilion, 1818 First Ave., with Jerry Cantrell, Candlebox and Bones UK.