Josh Homme was at one of the lowest points in his life when he descended into the Paris Catacombs last year.
The hulking lead singer and former high-school football star had suffered a health scare touring Europe with his band Queens of the Stone Age. His mind was abuzz with pain and with trepidation about the life-saving surgery he was about to undergo. But before that he wanted to fulfil the ambition of a lifetime: to stage a concert in the macabre network of tunnels beneath the French capital.
Who knew if he’d have a chance to go to the catacombs again? Who knew if he’d have the chance to do anything again?
“There were two moments where I was, like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t do it – I’m going to quit,” he says of the performance, which is captured on Queens of the Stone Age’s new vinyl release, Alive in the Catacombs. “I walked off. I was, like, ‘I need a minute.’”
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He stood in the semi-darkness alone with his thoughts, surrounded by the bones of some of the estimated six million Parisians buried in the Roman-era catacombs. “The view of the long hallway, all the bones, the light, and the silence – I went over and put my hand on this sculpture, and I was, like, ‘Of course I can do this. Of course I’m not going to quit.’”
Taking the easy route is one thing Queens of the Stone Age, who formed in 1996, have never done across a career littered with love, death, joy, sadness and brain-shreddingly heavy rock. Albums such as Rated R and Songs for the Deaf blend the bittersweet melodicism of indie pop, the aggression of grunge and the muscularity of metal – all refracted through the psychedelic prism that is a legacy of Homme’s upbringing in the California desert.
They’re ridiculously well-connected to boot, having worked with everyone from Dave Grohl (a floating member of the line-up) to Arctic Monkeys (whose best LP, Humbug, from 2009, Homme produced) and Iggy Pop. Yet, for all their success, Homme isn’t quite a rock star. Backstage in Dublin on the day of their gig at Royal Hospital Kilmainham, he doesn’t preen or strut, and, rather than revel in his accomplishments, he frets about them. Under the spotlights, he says, there are moments when he wonders what he’s doing there.
“Up there, there are times I can feel myself outside of myself. There are times when I’m, like, what did I just do?” he says over a glass of liquor. “What happened? I don’t always understand how that works. It makes me feel stupid.”
In the catacombs all those doubts melted away. He didn’t feel peaceful, precisely – there was too much pain for that. But Homme has been through a lot; in times of crisis he falls back on his core beliefs that everything happens for a reason and that an interesting life makes for better art.
He invests those emotions on Alive in the Catacombs, which draws from across his career but returns again and again to a message of defiance. “I won’t die,” he sings on a new version of I Never Came, originally from the band’s 2005 album, Lullabies to Paralyze, his voice low and raw, the song stripped of its familiar stoner-metal tumult.
It’s an extraordinary performance, largely because it isn’t a performance at all. Homme was obviously hopeful about making it through his health crisis (the details of which he’d rather keep private). But the doctors had been upfront: the worst-case scenario was bleak. There was little point putting on airs or playing the big, bad rock star. So he didn’t.
“The next day I was in surgery,” he says. “Fair enough – doctors, to brace you for the possibility, they definitely tell you the worst-case scenario. And then if it’s better [than what they tell you] you’re excited and they look good.
“I get the sentiment. But it was not great. I guess I spent a little bit feeling sorry for myself. But what good is there? There’s nothing good there. I was surrounded by people” – family, bandmates, crew – “who were really loving and were saying, ‘We’re here for you.’ That makes you understand you’re a rich man ... A couple of days later I thought, This might be the best thing that ever happened to me.”
Homme had already been through the wars, being treated for cancer in 2022 and going through an unpleasant legal battle with his ex-wife, Brody Dalle, of The Distillers, over the custody of their two children.
He chronicled those traumas on In Times New Roman..., the band’s extraordinary 2023 LP – imagine a death-metal David Bowie at the height of his powers.
The lesson he learned as he descended into the Paris Catacombs was that health scares don’t follow album-release cycles. “Sometimes rough times are bigger than you think,” he says, shrugging. “But fair enough.”
After the surgery he spent seven months recovering. He is philosophical about it all. Whatever he goes through he can pour into his music.
“I’ve turned my life over to the art form of music and its adjacent relatives, because I’m admitting that life will do what it needs to do to me and with me. And I’m here for that.”
In a short film that accompanies Alive in the Catacombs, Homme expresses the fear that he might come across as a bit “woo-woo” and Californian in front of chic Parisians. But there isn’t much of the LA juice bar or tai-chi session about him.
He is, instead, a child of the deep desert. Born in Palm Springs, close to the vast, arid expanse of the Coachella Valley, he formed his first band, Kyuss, at Palm Desert High School with his friend Nick Oliveri; they would play off-the-grid gigs out in the wastes, bringing their own generators and performing to an audience that would, in some cases, drive hundreds of kilometres to see them.
After Kyuss split, in 1995, Homme decided his future lay outside of music. He enrolled at college in Seattle – not because of its associations with grunge but despite them. Kurt Cobain, of Nirvana, had died the previous year, and the Seattle scene had faded with him, which is why Homme moved across the United States, moving in with his brother and his brother’s husband.
Grunge “was over. I was trying to quit. My brother and his husband live in Queen Anne,” he says, referring to a neighbourhood of northern Seattle. “I was, like, ‘I’m going to school.’ Kurt was dead. The town was a bit hangdog. I’ve always sought to be around family – that’s the thing. ‘I’ll go. I’ll stop playing music. I’ll get on with the business of being an adult. I’ll hang with my brother ...’ But it didn’t work out that way.”
He crossed paths with a local band, Screaming Trees – grunge greats, but a group riven with dysfunction. Still, they needed a guitarist, so Homme signed up and went on the road with them for the 1996 Lollapalooza tour, a Gen X counterculture carnival controversially headlined that year by Metallica, the most mainstream of mainstream rockers.
“It was also Soundgarden, and it was The Ramones. As a fan of both ... I was, like, who fucking cares?” he says about Lollapalooza losing a certain amount of credibility by booking Metallica. “I had every intention of playing that summer with the Screaming Trees and going back to school,” Homme says.
“The Ramones were in their way as dysfunctional as the Trees. CJ Ramone [The Ramones bassist], he and I gravitated towards each other, looking for some kind of oasis away from their dysfunction. He had this truck and a motorcycle trailer, which he and his friend Anthony from New Jersey used.
“They were riding motorcycles. They needed someone to drive the truck. So I got off the bus and drove the case truck. Their motorcycles would break down. I was, like, ‘I’m quitting this to go to school? I’m already in school.’”
He became friends with Mark Lanegan, who would go on to have a solo career and to sing with Queens of the Stone Age on Songs for the Deaf, their masterpiece from 2002. Lanegan later moved to a cottage near Tralee: Ireland was convenient when it came to touring Europe – and reminded him of the Pacific Northwest.
Having narrowly survived Covid during a long stay at Tralee Hospital, Lanegan died unexpectedly, in 2022, at the age of 57. He and Homme were close, but the singer doesn’t romanticise Lanegan.
“He was a very complex and multilayered junkie. And junkies have two programmes: I respect you; or I use you. Mark and I had a great respect for each other. None of those guys [in Screaming Trees] got along great. I got along with all of them. But me and Mark got on like a house on fire.
“I saw things with Mark that I would not have been able to see because I myself was not a junkie. I think he felt a kid-brother sense with me. I felt like this motherfucker needs me to watch his back. I was very much a rough baby-faced boy.”
Queens of the Stone Age’s Dublin show takes place a week after Oasis play two nights at Croke Park. As with the Gallagher brothers, Homme has seen his band catch on with Gen Zers, who have discovered the band’s music on TikTok and YouTube.
A glass-half-empty rocker, he worries about shouldering the expectation of another generation. “I feel like the wrong man to front that. I feel like when I get scared or afraid or insecure ... I’m, like, I’d better watch out for my feet, because I’m going to shoot myself in the foot.”
The thing that keeps him going, he says, is the support of his bandmates. “You can’t pick your family. You can pick your friends. You should pick them wisely. You should pick people who – they may be as eccentric as fuck – but they’ve got your back and you’ve got theirs and you mean it. That’s where I am. Thank God I’ve got people who’ve got each other’s back, because this is a wild business.”
The year after Lanegan’s death, Van Conner, Screaming Trees’ bassist, also died, aged 55. Natasha Schneider, Queens of the Stone Age’s former keyboardist, had died in 2008, at the age of 52. Homme was also friendly with Taylor Hawkins, the Foo Fighters drummer, who died in 2022, at 50.
“We’re one of the few bands that has lost two people separately,” he says about Lanegan and Schneider. “I saw a thing on YouTube about Iggy [Pop] the other day. Someone complimented him and said he had good brinkmanship. That he could take himself to the brink without falling over.
“I’ve always had this obsession myself. I’ve always played with a like-minded merry bunch of minstrels, skipping through the countryside, where one of the bonding factors is that you’ve hung your toes off the edge – ‘Man, you’ve got to see the view from here ... it’s fucking insane.’ It requires a certain amount of brinkmanship to not die. And some of us will die.”
He takes a breath. “It’s okay to understand that’s true and to also hate the fact that’s true. What can I do? What am I supposed to do? I try to educate my kids, but I don’t try to tell them who to be. My friends and the people I play with, I don’t say, ‘You know what you should do? You know what you need?’
“I celebrate what I love about who they actually are. My goal isn’t to correct somebody. That would suggest I understand what’s correct. Brother, I don’t know the first fucking thing about it.”
Alive in the Catacombs is released on vinyl by Matador; it is also available on streaming platforms
