People in music industry have had it too good for too long. Maybe if records sales suffer from downloading it will force bands to be more original and make better records.
People in music industry have had it too good for too long. Maybe if records sales suffer from downloading it will force bands to be more original and make better records.
Incendiary have a nice cup of tea with 1990s – Part Two
IN: Let’s talk band family tree… Glasgow. (I show them my diagram, with V Twin, Franz Ferdinand, Belle and Sebastian and Yummy furs. We discuss the sort of exact layout. I think they were amused by my attempt to contain their musical lineage.
Jamie: I would love to see someone try to do a Glasgow rock family tree! Ours alone is quite complex. (Laughs)
IN: INSANE GLASGOW! INSANE! I love it! Insane amounts of different bands too over the years! I am really jealous of your music scene. (I also show them a list I’ve made with just even recent bands that have made it big from Glasgow. Insane…)
Jackie: Ah thank you. Yeah, you’d expect that there would have been a few bands that sounded like Franz Ferdinand to come out.
Jamie: I am still waiting. (Smiles)
Jackie: People were like, "that’s Franz Ferdinand, that’s their thing". People are intelligent in Glasgow, if a band is going get big or famous, it probably wouldn’t be helped by sounding like Franz Ferdinand. Franz got big because there wasn’t anyone making music like that, Belle and Sebastian were the same and Mogwai also. They are nothing like each other. I mean, our music is not "original", we based stuff on the classic bands like The Rolling Stones, but we were definitely the only people in Glasgow doing that at that time. If there was even one of two other bands in Glasgow doing that, I would have really tried not to make that kind of music, because you really just want to make something that is your own. I’ve seen a lot of bands that sounds like they are doing similar stuff now, and I’m glad we got early with it. There are more party time rock and roll bands out there now. It would be like having 4 different versions of the White Stripes; over saturation.
IN: Have you now acquired more then one bass Jamie? How many guitars do you have Jackie?
Jamie: I’ve gotten one other one. They are both in shaky form.
Jackie: I’ve got one guitar that works. I think having 5 guitars is like having 5 girlfriends!
Jamie: Not that there anything wrong with that! (Laughs)
IN: So do you want more guitars?
Jackie: No, I want fewer guitars and more girlfriends. (Laughs)
Jackie: Ok, one guitar and one girlfriend. Every time you play a good show with a guitar or record an album all that seeps into that guitar, so you want to keep using it. If you keep buying guitars that all goes to waste. I’ve used my guitar all over the world, I’ve dropped it and bashed it and it’s just gets better and better the worse it gets. My amp too, it has got two settings, one is supposed to be clean and the other is supposed to be distorted. Now it’s basically distorted and only slightly less distorted.
IN: What do you need clean for anyways?
Jackie: Actually I need to get a new amp, there are a few songs that need a nice guitar sounds, like on Arcade Prescient. I love that amp. It feeds back really well.
IN: You can’t really replicate that sound, I mean you can’t get a new amp and then drop it a few times and hope that you get the sound you want you know? You can try it!
Jackie: Yeah… and then you just end up buying hundred of effects pedals. We don’t use any effects pedals. I just use a channel switcher, but not effects pedals.
Jamie: Like Sonic Youth, only certain guitars could play or create that sound for certain songs.
IN: Bobby (Kildea) also told us something about that. That Sonic Youth had all this wonky equipment and it all got stolen and all of a sudden they couldn’t play half their songs.
Jamie: They had to cancel a lot of shows.
Jackie: They were possibly never able to play certain songs again. Cause they could never replicate them. I like that, in a way… life is like that… final. Recently at my mam’s house, I still had half my life and record collection; books, photographs and films in the garage and some little kids burned it down. My mam was like, "you’re not going to like this, but that garage has burned down and everything is gone". I was like… Ohhh… GREAT! It’s like this thing around your neck dragging you back to when you were fifteen. I’ve done it, I don’t need to go back and read about it. I’m totally free now.
IN: That was sort of my next questions, was about collections, what do you guys collect.
Jackie: There were a lot of films that burned down and were lost, that did annoy me. But then you go someplace like New York and you can go buy any film in the world, right off the shelf, not even a bootleg.
Jamie: I really like comic books. I read a lot of comics. I’ve got friends, who collect them, put them in boxes with the cards and in the bags, but usually with in a week of my buying a new comic I just end up sliding across the floor on it, (laughs) or I am on the train, read it and forget it. Collector items are just crap.
IN: You’ve read it, enjoyed it and then passed it on. A very Buddhist notion…
Jackie: We played my best friends wedding. We did a Velvet Underground cover of Sad Song and also a song called Sorry for Laughing by Josef K. I didn’t have those records anymore; we covered them based on what we could remember of them. It was probably nothing like the original. Maybe we got something more interesting out of it, rather then just Googling it and copying it instantly.
IN: Before there was music, what were your trades?
Jamie: I was kind of a chef. Not like a classy chef and I keep thinking and I might one day go back to being a chef.
Jackie: I worked in a supermarket stocking shelves and studied film in the daytime. If I wasn’t doing music, I think I would like to make films. It is very hard. It’s not like making a record or writing a novel, where no one is on your back. Well, Rough Trade never told us what to do… My top filmmakers that I’ve been inspired by is Fassbinder and John Cassavetes. Fassbinder made 43 films is 13 years; 4 or 5 films a year and his first 9 films were in the first year and a half and they are all great. None of those are bad. Some famous ones are Merchant of Four Seasons, The Marriage of Maria Braun, Jailbait, Love is Colder Than Death…
IN: Cool… I will go home and Google him. The wonderful WWW.
Jackie: That’s the good thing. People in music industry have had it too good for too long. Maybe if records sales suffer from downloading it will force bands to be more original and make better records. Now it is getting to the point where any song is eligible for the charts because of downloading. So bands have got to start making better albums. All your songs have got to be good. Now what they do is put a few hits in the beginning and then a really good song second to last, so you go, that was really good… when actually, no it wasn’t really; the middle 7 songs were shit! (Laughs) Record labels know now that kids don’t listen to much more than the first few songs. Beyonce’s last album, which I love, is one of the most left-field pop albums, but only the first few songs are any good.
Jamie: Bands can just put their music out on myspace now, that’s what they do.
Jackie: The only way you use to hear music was by putting on records and giving them to people. In reality, we don’t make records, we make music. Maybe music is finally returning to the right form!
Words: Zoe E. Gottehrer
Pictures: Zoe E Gottehrer
Part one of the interview can be found here…