Interviews

On a scale of eccentricity I give us a 6 or 7. I’ve never really understood the concept of eccentricity myself. It’s a coverall for all kinds of things that could be better described.

Also we are really stuck with them… almost literally. Cos Subroutine, when they wrote up our first press release they wrote all this stuff about our beards, and man… that’s followed us round. Stuff about our beards.

And even for me as a woman, I take for granted all the freedoms I have and it’s hard for me to, you know, to realise that that is happening today, and our world is very archaic and NOT updated!

To be honest I don’t know that enough about the Dutch scene. We don’t seem to be part of it, we don’t get invited into it, I don’t even know how they see us, whether they see us as an old Dutch punk band..

It just felt like the right thing and the right time to do it, even though it was a bit rushed.

This kind of retro thing in music now… we’re all kind of looking back to look forward you know? We do too. It’s kind of always been like that but now it’s really as if the retro thing is the dominant force in new music.

Prior to Dinosaur Jr.’s Paradiso gig, Incendiary sought out nineties indie luminary Lou Barlow for a chat.

In the 80s, Germany did not have an infrastructure for independent music, but it started. America and England were the masters of pop then. I think now you can listen to very good new music from all over the world and that’s liberating.

When you work you really start seeing the value of time in a very tangible way, and music seems like the total opposite of what working in an office represents - we just have to do something outside of that.

The basis is friendship and the fact that we see people getting pleasure from what our friendship has produced is special to us. Friendship is the basis, the fundamental element in Nouveau Vélo. But there is a lot of separateness about us. Eenheid.

I think our inspiration comes from completely random things, like a broken traffic light, or some drums from Burundi, or a crying yoga teacher lying naked on the floor. There’s no logic to it.

It is not the ideal time for a half drunk Incendiary member to stumble into the dressing room and interrupt your ironing but this was exactly the situation that Cody Chesnutt and I found ourselves in. He was armed with an iron and a half de-creased red cardigan. I was armed with a memo recorder and a brain that was beginning to lose its faculties

The olive oil, the holy water, the milk in the goat’s horn are all part of a ritual to protect me and the musicians on stage from going insane, some of sort of African voodoo I don’t believe in.

You know we’d maybe make a dub record, we’ve thought of making a dub record. That should happen at some point. It will happen after we have new stuff, but you’ve got to take things from dub and keep it Rats. We can’t be just appropriating it. But we love reggae….

I have always thought of Snorkel as some kind of organism or eco system which has it's own set of logic and rules which the musicians are engaging with.

I don’t wanna be hearing someone singing words all the time on stage I want abstract and I want noise, and I realised I could do that. When I was writing I was changed by that thinking. I mean I like Throbbing Gristle and I’d say “let’s put a little gristle on the twee”

I think going to gigs has for some people just become a social event rather than a musical event that is there to provoke a bit of passion in people. I don’t know if it’s a sign of getting older or being more miserable but I’m sure when I used to go to gigs there was a real air of excitement in the room, a tension, with people so desperate for this band or artist to come out on stage.

I don’t wanna be a member of a club that wants me as a member. I never had the feeling that I wanna be part of something. I wanna be part of my band and I love my band members and that’s a scene on its own.

Bands seem to have a bit more lip in Holland, and not the sort of attitude that feels stereotyped or hyped, or false. They just seem more cheeky, bored of being told what a band “should” do by the apparatchiks in Hilversum, more up for having their own brand of having “a laugh and a say”.

I regard lyrics as spells, that start working when you forget their meaning.