Coming for Pennsylvannia, what noticeable differences are there with gigs in the UK and back home?
There's definitely difference, I think here there's definitely less of a line between genres of music. At home it's a little harder for us to play with some bands. A great example you know the band Enter Shikari we played with them in New Jersey maybe a year and a half two year's ago. Over there they are considered a straight up hardcore band, and when we played with them, the crowd just stood there with their arms crossed and stared at us. Where as here, when we play with them, the kids are way more open, they actually think we're kind of similar. I just think people here are far more open, and it's okay to listen to hip hop, and listen to pop music, and listen to drum and bass, and still like metal.
Whereas I think in America, I'm not saying it's a definitive line, but there's more of like kids who are like ' I'm into hardcore, I don't like that Innerpartysystem. Blah, blah, blah.' And people over here seem to be hungrier, in America maybe it's because there are so many band, but here kids come out and say, 'I've actually never heard you guys before but a mate just told me about you, and I just wanted to come and check it out.' I think you see that less at home people are more I'll check them on MySpace and download a couple of their songs first. People are more hungry here for live music, that's what I'm trying to say.
What inspired you to take up the drums?
I was really young actually, my dad is a musician he plays guitar, Ive been around music all my life, and he still plays in bands around our home town. He bought me a drum set when I was about six and I get real into it until I was 12 0r 13 and took lessons for 6 of 7 years. Then when I was a teenager I kind of like dropped the whole thing, I was really into partying and Nirvana at that point.
Then, around 16 or so, I started playing in another band with this guy called Steve Penta, who actually is our manager now, and he's a long time friend. I just kept going, and got back into it, hit my twenties and now I'm here.
That reminds me, your band hijacked the Celebrity Big Brother website on the final night, how did that come about?
It's funny we have the four guys in the band, and we have a sound guy Andy, who is basically the fifth member of the band, he makes all the lights, and does a lot of vocal manipulation from the sound booth, and then we've got our manager Steve who does a lot of the video stuff, and all of our little online viral videos he does. He directed all of our music videos, and we keep everything in house between the six of us.
He actually didn't even tell us, he made up this little clip, and because we were here, it's very hard to communicate, I don't have an international phone, so basically it's email, that's it unless I buy a calling card of something. He did it, and it was funny, the next day somebody asked about it in an interview. And I was like, 'I don't know what you're talking about man.' Then I actually put a blog up, saying does anyone know what the deal is with this thing.
Then the next night Steve emailed me and said, 'yo check this out' and he gave me a screen shot of it, and it was really awesome, but I said 'you should tell me if you're going to do stuff like that.'
Basically, he's kind of like the online visual guy for the band, and he helps us with a lot of this stuff, and that was one of his.
Have you been over here before?
Yes, this is actually our fourth time in less than a year, our first time was last month for Camden Crawl. It was awesome, it was my very first time going to any other country besides Canada, and I live close to Canada, so that's no big deal. To come here was awesome, I'd never have thought I'd come to England in my life. To be in a band that gets to travel and everything, I was so stoked like I said before how flourishing the indie music scene is. You get smaller bands, bands who have played in bars.
We played at this place called The Good Mixer, it might have fit about sixtypeople, but it was packed to the walls, we couldn't move it was sweaty as hell, and we couldn't even use our lights. And yet it was one of my favourite gigs I've ever played, I just love stuff like that where it's not about attitude, people just want to see loud, good rock music and drink a lot and spill beer everywhere, I swear every floor in this country is sticky.
You're getting a good reputation for using new technology, what's your favourite gadget?
Man, that's interesting umm, a gadget that we own? Because if you're asking about any gadget, I could go on for ever, because there's a lot out there that I want to get my hands on. Well my favourite gadget that we own is one that we've built ourselves, our sound man Andy built. It's a box that controls.... We put a lot of our backing tracks and bass tones, and auxiliary drum parts on a backing track as well. He actually made a box so that we can control the backing track, in a clear box, it's made of plexiglass, it has a big blue light in it, and you can't miss it, it's right in the centre of stage, and it's super bright.
He actually put guitar knobs on it, and arcade buttons from an old school arcade machine so that you can actually control the tracks, like beat repeat, where if the vocal goes, 'Yeah' we can make it go 'Yeeeeeeeeaaaaaahhhhhhh' and you can glitch it out, and make it all drum and bassy. But he wired this thing so you push the arcade buttons like old arcade games but it manipulates the tracks. It's probably something that costs about $8 to make, and he probably had the spare parts lying around in his room, but he's the coolest guy I've ever seen.
So he's the gadget man that also makes your other kit....
All the lights, besides all the moving lights, that we rent when we come here, but all the light boxes he builds. We don't actually have a lighting guy, there's nobody there controlling the lights, they are actually controlled by computer. He and our sub player Jesse actually designed the whole light show. So that now, we're really self sufficient, all we have to do is press a space bar. I play to a click so all the lights hit on time and everything, and it's just really efficient for a band like us which doesn't have a whole lot of money, for an upcoming band, that can't generally have a crew, to have this pretty cool looking light show for a minimal amount of money or personnel, s we don't need people to operate it.
Is Andy in demand by other bands then?
It's funny, there have been a lot of bands ask about it, because it's efficient, and especially nowadays it's a lot harder to make money, considerably harder. This day and age there's pressures and especially in America, so a lot of bands are trying to strip things down. One thing is bus chairs, so now there's two bands sharing on a tour bus or stuff like not having some of the guys in your crew. A lot of bands like Thursday, we've been talking to them, and big bands that we look up to have been MySpacing us and asking, 'How do you guys have your lights going, and no one's controlling them, can we do that?' Andy's definitely been spreading his knowledge.
What about live shows, who is the best band you've seen live?
Lately it's been Nine Inch Nails we've gotten to play a couple of festivals that they've played, and that show is definitely a big influence on ours, I mean it's a long shot to be in a band that huge, but I'd love to one day be a part of a production that big because their shows are unprecedented. Every time I see them I just can't believe how big their production is, and to date it's one of the best shows I've seen.
Have you got any festivals for this year lined up yet?
Well, our summer is mostly eaten up with the Warped Tour. I know we've submitted for Reading and Leeds, I don't know if we're playing Reading and Leeds yet, but I hoping we find out soon, and I'm crossing my fingers, because it's somewhere I've wanted to play since I was 12, when I knew what it was. It's a very popular festival. You would hear bands that you'd be into growing up in America saying they were playing Reading, and I'd think 'I'd love to do that.'
You had some big producers put your new album together, who was the best to work with?
Well, the funny thing is that I think the only one we actually worked with was Mark Needham (The Killers, Pete Yorn), we actually went there and tracked some stuff. We record and do the stuff on our own, which is why we went to Mark was because it's really hard to record live drums at our house, you need a nice space, tonnes of mics, and a lot of gear to do it properly. So we recorded a lot of the rockier tracks with him that we needed live guitar and live drums for, but we do most of the programming ourselves.
A lot of the Stuart Price (Madonna, Missy Elliott, The Killers, Gwen Stefani) stuff we did, it was just us sending him our files, and then he would send back his ideas. Like, maybe we should change this snare drum here, it's a little weak, what if we try this sound. It carried on back and forth like that for a month or so, until we were all happy. Alan Moulder (Depeche Mode, Smashing Pumpkins, My Bloody Valentine) mixed a few tracks and that we just mixing, that was the same thing, we'd just send him stuff. The internet is a beautiful thing for doing this kind of stuff, we can be halfway around the globe and send him this song, and be like make this sound the same as it is, but just bigger.
I guess he's English, I've never met him. I've met Stuart Price once, not from him producing, I just saw him at a show. He came to one of our shows. Working with Mark Needham was awesome I'd definitely like to work with him again. The guy did the first Killers record too and that's one of my favourite records ever. It was definitely an honour to do this with him.
Talking of records, what are you listening to at the moment?
I'm really into Chase & Status, I don't know if they're big over here, drum and bass stuff, I'm stuck on that now, I love them. I'm new to drum and bass, about a year now, and I was more into hard core punk, and right now I'm stuck on drum and bass, I've heard the new Prodigy tracks. Otherwise there's a band we toured with last month called ?Paper Route?. They're coming to the UK soon, they're kind of like Band Of Horses, a little Coldplay, really well written songs but they have tape loops, and samplers and they're a little more electronic. It's really chilled, well written huge choruses. Man, they're blowing my mind right now. Check them out!
What's next for Innerpartysystem?
After this show tomorrow, we go home, then we go to Australia for Soundwave, then we're doing a Canadian tour with Under Oath, and then I think we're open up to Warped tour. We're going to start writing again, we'll take a month off before Warp Toour and we'll hopefully have a four five song EP we're doing to put out at the end of September. We've just started talking about that, but that's the plan.
Have you got anything new coming out here soon?
Probably not, we've got some remixes, we've just done one with this guy Trouble Andrew in the States, but I'm not sure that's going to come out here. We've just done a Keane mix which I'm really excited about, I'm pretty sure that's been accepted for their song '?Perfect Symmetry?' that's either their single now, or their next single. We should have a couple more remixes in the works, but otherwise right now we're going to concentrate on touring, and just spreading the word.
Thanks for your time, enjoy Wagamammas.
Thank you man, appreciate it, have a good one.
article by: Scott Williams
photos by: Chris Mathews
published: 17/02/2009 14:47
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