Has the way you perform songs from your latest album evolved after playing them for almost 10 months? How?
I think the biggest change is simply rooted in the confidence that you gain from playing a song every single night for 300 nights in a row. One the of the things that's both terrifying and exhilarating about writing brand new songs for an album is that new songs reacquire an immense amount of concentration to pull off at a standard similar to older songs in our set, which we have come to rely on little more than muscle memory to play. Speaking only for myself, learning new songs is usually tricky, since I have a tendency to write guitar parts that are fairly tricky to play while singing a lead vocal line, and there are always a few parts in every album that start out being almost impossible for me to deliver (Rules Don't Stop was the real killer this time around, and the verse of Pittsburgh gave me a pretty hard time, for a while, since I'd combined two guitar parts for the record into the live version). It's just a matter of practice, though. At this point, we don't have to think about playing at all, and focus on enjoying the performance.
You guys do comedy as well, with Steve wants his money. Any plans for a second season, or even a movie?
There are no specific plans to produce anything else at this point-which doesn't mean that it won't happen. The fact is, we just spend so much time thinking about the musical aspects of our band that we tend to be very passive about our comedic work - every focused piece of comedy, from Steve Wants His Money to our NME Awards red carpet interviews have happened because we were approached by the producers from those television stations and asked to create something for them in a relatively short amount of time for no money. It would be great to set aside some time and really put some hard work into crafting something like a TV show, but, so far, we've just been really bad at focusing on that, since the band takes up so much of our time and energy. Another major factor is that Andy, who wrote and played all of the drums on Barbara, is back in the live band. He had to sit out of most of the touring this year, as he had put out a record of his right around the same time as ours, but it looks like he'll be on board as our drummer indefinitely. To be totally frank, he is the finest drummer with whom we've ever played.
Why is comedy important for you?
It's a good question, which, unfortunately, I don't have a very insightful answer for. Like I said earlier, neither of us really work very hard at actually developing our comedy, so we don't have a very academic perspective on that aspect of our personalities. I know that I grew up loving comedy, and apart from music, many of my idols as a teenager were comedians (I adored the American TV show Saturday Night Live, as well as Monty Python's Flying Circus), and I think my reputation amongst my friends was "the funny guy." When I met Chris in college, the first thing I liked about him was that he was a terrifically funny guy, and our relationship developed around the fact that we were both pretty good at making one another laugh. The same is true for our relationship with Andy - he's a perfect fit for our band because he's a tremendously funny guy, and if he wasn’t an actual member in the band, we'd still be desperate to hang out with him for the laughs. Comedy has become such a signature part of our band because we tend to behave naturally, on stage and in interviews, which, for us, means trying to be funny. I'd imagine that it's pretty annoying for people who have to deal with us on a daily basis, but hopefully it's entertaining onstage.
You’ve also done some pretty original performance like the Brain Thrust Mastery seminar. Can we expect more than just a live music performance at the Tiger Translate?
I don't know about that. We've never really incorporated anything quite as elaborate as the BTM seminars into our performances (those seminars were their own, stand-alone shows, and we performed them at mid-day in the student unions of several universities around the UK, with no musical aspect to the performances at all). We do try to come up with interesting, unique performance bits for our musical shows, so I'm sure we'll think of something.
Barbara is almost a year old. What are you working on now?
We've just begun getting together with Andy and hashing through new material for the next album. We don't have anything solidified yet - we're mainly been playing random riffs together and discussing the sort of album we'd like to make over beers. But, yes - our focus has now fully turned toward writing and recording the next record, and we're getting pretty excited about it.
What are you currently listening to? What inspires you?
I've been listening to a lot of older music, recently, especially from the 90's - The Lemonheads, Nirvana, Marilyn Manson, that kind of thing. I think the thing that usually inspires me is music that combines tremendous hooks with unbridled energy - that's why so many of our songs seem to be uptempo, I think. I rarely hear a beautiful ballad and find myself inspired to write a song, no matter how much I may enjoy it, but any good rock jam (anything by Weezer, for example), makes we wish I had a whole new album of party songs under my belt.
This is your first time playing in Thailand. Do you find Asian audiences different from those in the US?
One thing I've learned from all the traveling we've done as a band is that excited fans are pretty similar throughout the world. The only two Asian countries we've been to so far are Japan and Malaysia, and, in the midst of those performances, we might as well have been playing in our hometown. That's probably my favorite aspect of touring the world - having all of the amazing differences between ourselves and our audiences disappear after we go onstage. We're all just a bunch of people at a rock concert.
Tiger Translate 2011 is tonight, starting from 5:30pm, at AP Parking Limited (behind Esplanade). Grab your tickets now at Thaiticketmajor.com.
