The Kills, Keep On Their Good Side

 

Gigwise: So, with a few dates of the tour under your belt, how do you feel its going?

 

Hotel: Yeah, its going really good, we were just saying, it’s like the first time we have felt we really have fans, all the other tours we have felt people have just come to check us out, you know following the hype.

 

G: Hype from the music press?

 

H: Yeah, it’s nice that people really know the songs now.

 

G: The new album, ‘No Wow’, seems to have developed from the raw, garage-blues sound of your debut album to a more electro or disco like sound, is that a natural progression or has there been any particular influence which has produced this new sound?

 

H: Well, I always felt like the first album was kinda’ mistaken as a celebration of rock or something, we just felt like we were experimenting with a drum machine more than anything, I guess we had just as much in common with early electronic music as blues or garage. In fact, I get really sick of people asking me what kind of guitarists I liked, because I don’t really like the sound of the guitar all that much.

 

G: Is it just exploring the electronic side of music that has inspired you to work in that way or have there been any artists that have encouraged that interest?

 

VV: I think it’s just because we had a drum machine, it’s not very ‘rock n roll’ to have a drum machine, you can’t have crazy, fast drum fills all of a sudden, a kind of restriction.

 

H: It just makes you think about music in a really different way, it makes you play differently, it makes you kinda’ hold back and it creates some kind of tension.

 

G: So, do you ever feel limited with the line up being just the two of you?

 

H: It’s limiting in one way, because we wanted to replicate everything live so there is obviously millions of things that we cant do, though having a limited structure actually liberates you a bit more, so I don’t feel at all restricted, just liberated in the little structure that we have provided for ourselves.

 

VV: I like all those factors, kinda’ scare ourselves into playing, do shows on the adrenalin. When we write and record, if we figure we need four months we will give ourselves four weeks, scare ourselves into it.

 

G: When you are on the road do your songs have time to develop, especially when they are fresh off a new album?

 

VV: Oh, totally, I love playing live, it’s real weird to record an album, you never listen to yourself. After ages writing and recording it, when you hear someone playing it, it’s real weird, so when we are on stage there is loads of space for the tunes to evolve. On stage we really feel like we are pushing ourselves every night and that really plays a part in the development of the songs and also the performance. A real difference between this new record and the last is that the old songs were played loads live before we recorded, these new ones didn’t have that so they have time to grow.

      

G: The title of your new album, ‘No Wow' suggests that you are trying to bring something back to music, or perhaps something a little different. Would you say that is true?

 

VV: Well we're talking music as a scene here, music is filtering out into fashion, into art, into film and this huge flourishing scene and again, going back to the Velvet Underground and the Warhol scene and all of those things really affecting one another.

 

H: If you look at all the ground-breaking scenes like punk that wasn’t contained simply on stage or a record, people's creativity spilled out in all these ways and people couldn’t catch up with it. The whole ‘No Wow’ thing is all about all these record labels at the moment that absorb all the new bands creativity and turn it into this really dull things like poster campaigns and promo videos and not really much else, we just like the chaos and anarchy that used to surround things like punk.

 

G: So what do you think of this new wave of bands, the ‘art-rock’ sound of Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand or the Futureheads?

 

VV: We love that music, we have toured with Franz and they are all really nice guys but that whole ‘art-rock’ scene is very N.M.E, the old wave of the new wave, post whatever…you know?

 

G: What would you state as your main influences?

H: We were really into the velvet underground and how they took a form like 12-bar and just kinda’ ****ed it up. I think it is just as important what you leave off a song as what you put on it.

 

VV: On every one of their records there are so many imperfections and that is something we were really drawn to.

 

G: Your new song, ‘The Good Ones’ is about the search for the elusive ‘good time’, so to you, what is a good time?

 

H: Well, we went on this crazy night out, going from one bar to another, taxi by taxi, witnessing people hunting for drugs. It’s definitely not an anti-drugs song at all, more of an anti-fun thing, just an endless circle of trying to find fun that became the evening rather than constant parties.

 

G: We have never had a good explanation of your nick-names, VV and Hotel, can you clear that up for us please?!

 

VV: We just spent a real drunk night together, and thought it would be real fun to come up with new names for one another, not just Alison and Jamie, so we did, and they stuck. There is no deep meaning or anything just a night of real drunk fun.