Friction adds piquancy to Red Hot Chili Peppers’ friendship

Red Hot Chili Peppers bandmates survive the highs and lows of success.

Red Hot Chili Peppers spent a year working on songs for The Getaway, only to ditch them and start again from scratch. Picture: Steve Keros

Michael Balzary — better known as Flea, the hyperactive bassist of Red Hot Chili Peppers — lives in the kind of Malibu, California, beachfront house that dreams are made of. A long, cactus-speckled garden with an uninterrupted view of the ocean leads up to a vast kitchen and, beyond that, a bohemian living room with low sofas, exotic rugs and a wall devoted to Flea’s album collection.

Anthony Kiedis, the band’s lead singer, is 30 minutes away in another Malibu beach house with a very different decor scheme, but more of that later. Friends since meeting at high school in Los Angeles, the former drug-abusing denizens of Hollywood’s low-life are now the heart of a stadium-filling funk-rock outfit that has sold more than 80 million albums.

While Flea and Kiedis may have moved only from one side of LA to the other, it’s another world.

“Anthony and I grew up in the poor side of Hollywood — mostly Mexican, real segregated,” Flea says. “When we formed the band the only motivation was to get enough money to pay the rent and eat. Not that we did either very often. One time when we didn’t pay the rent in an apartment in a really rough neighbourhood, they took off the front door to get rid of us. For the next few months we would be sitting on the sofa and people on the street would be looking in. The Los Angeles of celebrities and nightclubs is a little sprinkling on the top of what this city really is.”

As former street kids from Hollywood’s anarchic early 1980s punk scene, Red Hot Chili Peppers are an unlikely success. After four largely underground albums and the death by heroin overdose of their original guitarist, Hillel Slovak, the band hit the big time in 1991 with Blood Sugar Sex Magik.

The album’s mix of funk-rock riffs, sexual innuendo, catchy choruses and propulsive rhythms turned them into superstars, but the darker side of the lifestyle was always there in the music. Under the Bridge, the biggest song on the album, is about how Kiedis would sneak away from his girlfriend, ­actress Ione Skye, to shoot heroin and cocaine speedballs with Mexican gangsters under a freeway.

Success took its toll. John Frusciante, who had replaced Slovak on guitar, left the band twice, ­developing a heroin habit so bad that his teeth fell out. (He has been replaced by Josh Klinghoffer.)

Being in Red Hot Chili Peppers is still not the easiest job in the world. For their new album, The Getaway, they spent a year working on 25 songs, only for new producer Brian Burton, also known as Danger Mouse, to insist they ditch them all and write new ones in the studio. It gave the band a new lease of life; melodic and reflective, The Getaway is the best Chili Peppers album in years, but it tested the limits of their endurance.

Wouldn’t it be easier to just kick back in his Malibu beach house, hang out with his young daughter, Sunny, and beautiful wife, model Frankie Rayder, and relax?

“Yes, it would,” Flea says. “But the desire to be good is still there. I feel like I’ve got to be a songwriter on the level of Cole Porter or a ­musician like Jimi Hendrix or as hard a rocker as Lemmy, and it’s not fuel­led by the healthiest of ­motivations either. It’s something about coming from a broken home and feeling the need to validate yourself because you’re always striving to overcome whatever pain and emptiness is inside you.

“This afternoon I could be sitting on the beach, eating papaya and smoking joints. Instead I’ll be going into a rehearsal studio and arguing with Anthony. But something makes us keep doing it.”

Before I head to Kiedis’s house, Flea offers insight into the fractious friendship at the heart of the band. “I was 15 when I met him,” says the bassist, who at 53 still has something of the excited schoolboy. “I came home and said, ‘Mum, I’ve finally found someone I can talk to!’ And it’s been like that ever since. Even when we can’t speak to each other we still love each other. I can’t explain it but it’s at the heart of everything we do.”

Kiedis has just been surfing when I arrive at his house, which looks like a boy’s fantasy world: a pinball table in the corner, brightly coloured furniture, pop art posters. It turns out that this is less inspired by the singer’s refusal to grow up — though there’s an element of that — than by a desire to build the ideal environment for Everly, his eight-year-old son from a relationship with model Heather Christie.

“The great love of my life has turned out to be my son, which I did not see coming at all,” says Kiedis, a veteran Casanova who, with his floppy fringe and oversized moustache, looks youthful at 53.

Kiedis’s own father was actor, drug dealer and Hollywood scenester Blackie Dammett. Aged 11, Kiedis lost his virginity to his ­father’s girlfriend. Kiedis’s godfather was musician Sonny Bono and Bono’s ex-wife, Cher, once babysat Kiedis. “My childhood was a great adventure but my ­father never gave me a sense of safety or the idea that he would take care of me. The reaction is that I want my boy to know I’ll be here to support him come hell or high water.”

Another great, but briefer, love inspired much of The Getaway. “You fall in love and you have no control over who that’s going to be with,” says Kiedis. “I was so into this girl for a couple of years, I just adored her. On paper it made less than zero sense — different continents, different generations, different places in life, different aspirations — and it took me two years to realise it wasn’t going to work. This album, however ­abstractly, is related to this girl and the feelings she brought up in me, the feelings of loss and attraction.”

Who was the girl?

Kiedis takes a long pause before answering: “A girl”. However, it isn’t hard to work out who it is. Displayed on top of a nearby table is an album by Du Blonde, the stage name of 25-year-old Newcastle singer Beth Jeans Houghton, with whom Kiedis was in a relationship before the band made The Getaway. He has since dated a couple of young ­models but there does seem to be a level of maturity creeping into the life of Kiedis and the band for whom much of the past four decades has been one endless party.

“I haven’t used drugs and ­alcohol for so long now that it seems like another lifetime,” Kiedis says. “Now I live the life of a ­father. I get up at six in the morning and take my kid to school, and if I’m lucky I’ll get a couple of hours in the ocean. The one thing that hasn’t dawned on me is that, as you grow older, you have to curl up in a ball and grow increasingly incompetent.”

They haven’t grown up too much. In a recent episode of James Corden’s Carpool Karaoke, Kiedis and Flea sang along to Chili Pepper hits with Corden, all three of them bare-chested, and Kiedis wrestled with the presenter on someone’s lawn.

Before he leaves to argue with Flea and the other members of the band in a Hollywood rehearsal room, Kiedis reflects on what it is that keeps them going.

“I have a weird, competitive, brother-like relationship with Flea that goes back to high school and that is at the foundation of the Chili Peppers,” he says. “I love him dearly but every day we look at each other as if to say, ‘Are you ­serious?’ We’re like kids. But that’s the bonus of this job. You don’t have to be grown up all the time.

“Despite all the friction, we know how much we’ve both been through. Now here we are, we’re alive and well, we’re still happy to go to work. I think, quietly, we ­admire the tenacity of one ­another. I think that’s what keeps us going.”

The Times

The Getaway is out now on Warner Bros.