Trivia / Kula Shaker

• Creator Backlash: Crispian Mills has stated his dissatisfaction with the music video for "Mystical Machine Gun", mainly do to it having nothing to do with the song.
• Creator Killer: Despite being unpopular with critics for their style and the belief that they owed their career to their lead singer Crispian Mills being the son of Hayley Mills, Kula Shaker were quite successful in the 1990s. However, things went completely pear-shaped when Mills expressed a desire that the swastika would be reclaimed for its positive mystical meanings during an interview. It was then discovered that Mills' previous band, The Objects of Desire, had included a former member of the far-right National Front party, who was dating Hayley Mills at the time, and had played at a conspiracy theory conference in London that had also featured notorious Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites among the speakers. While Mills did apologize for his comments later on and ridiculed neo-Nazi ideology, the band broke up in 1999 from fierce backlash, before reuniting in 2004 to slimmer success.
• He Also Did:
  • Crispian Mills also wrote and co-directed the Simon Pegg film A Fantastic Fear of Everything.
  • Jay Darlington played keyboards for Oasis while he was away from the band.
• Playing Against Type: Crispian Mills ended up lending his voice to "Narayan" by The Prodigy, which is a hardcore breakbeat electronic song that sounds drastically different from Kula Shaker's rock-fringed sound, outside of Mills' signature Hindi chanting.
• The Pete Best: Saul Dimont, who was the vocalist when the band was still called The Kays. He left within a year of the band forming, leaving guitarist Crispian Mills to assume vocal duties.
• Real-Life Relative: Josephine Mills, Crispian's wife, was the model for the covers of the Strangefolk album and the "Hey Dude" single.
• What Could Have Been: "Gokula" was meant to be included on K, but had to be released as a single instead. This is largely due to the song Sampling the main guitar riff of "Ski-ing" by George Harrison, as Northern Songs (the publishing company that owns the song) only allowing full covers of George's songs or songs by The Beatles.

---