!!! Interview June 2010
By: Alex Lee Thomson
On the evening of this interview, the outlandish dance rock outfit !!! are due to play a ‘Sailor Jerry Presents’ night at The Arches in Glasgow. We caught a few words with the band’s Nic Offer, a man who has wrestled the almost unpronounceable outfit through over a decade of sonic tomfoolery.
They’ve been a filthy indie dancefloor mainstay for years, but having never gone much further than the club, and following the tragic death of drummer Jerry MacLean last year, they seem to always find themselves being talked about as an entity, a thing, an event… however you sum it up, it’s rarely about the music. Yet having survived the rise and fall of the Klaxons and a noughties nu-rave scene, they’re still propelling their brand of frenetic rock live, so of course, we relish the chance to pass a quizzical sentences back and forth on the subject of noise.
RFB: You guys came out in the late 90’s, an era hardly known for its, let’s say, creativity. Was it the lack of imagination in music at that time which led to the formation of !!!?
!!!: “We definitely felt indie music was a drag in the late 90's, and all the creative stuff was happening on popular hip hop and RnB radio. Timbaland was changing the sound of it monthly and everyone else sounded fresh just trying to keep up. We knew that in the same way art-punks in the late 70's had been influenced by contemporary black music; the way forward for us was through the black music of our day. I still keep up on contemporary hip hop but I now find what's happening in indie to be much more exciting. I'm sure it'll switch over again soon and I won't be listening to any indie. So to answer your question, yes. We definitely viewed ourselves as a reaction to the stale guitar-addled indie scene, but at the same time we were completely inspired by an incredibly avant-garde time for pop radio.”
RFB: With each record you seem to make simpler, yet wonderfully more unreserved (I’m avoiding saying “expansive”) music; is that something you’re consciously trying to do, or is it that you’re just tightening up as songwriters?
!!!: “We don't start with any intention except to play something that grooves and gets "out there". We just follow wherever the music takes us in the jam room, but in the studio we've grown as songwriters and that's where the shaping and tightening comes in. We get unconscious and then try to make sense of it; we've just gotten better at making sense of it.”
RFB: Do you find that record on record, not just the writing of, but the very idea of, songwriting is getting easier or harder?
!!!: “Every time you think it's gets easier, it gets harder… and vice versa. It's never been any easier or more difficult than it is now. I take that back, the first practice we ever had was easy. We wrote a song and a half that night. After that it got more difficult.”
RFB: Are you now reaching (or do you ever feel you will reach) a point in making music that you’ll be able to step back and say, “yes, that’s exactly what we’re about”, that moment when you know you’ve defined the band in a song. Maybe that’s already happened?
!!!: “We've made strong statements throughout the years, some stronger than others, but we change musically and as people so we have different statements to make. Critics always lambasted Led Zeppelin for not writing another ‘Whole Lotta Love’, but I'm quite glad they went on to write ‘Trampled Under Foot’. They had a few other good ones as well.”
ALT: What’s the goal of this band? Is there an overall mission in your minds, something that you’d like the band to stand for, and achieve, or do you think it’s important for a band not to have an agenda?
!!!: “When we started it seemed positively revolutionary to want to make indie rockers dance, now it seems a bit... I don't know, I certainly don't wanna read an interview with some indie rockers banging on about wanting to make people dance. But in the end no other music speaks to us like dance music, and it will always be a good idea to enjoy yourself and get up and dance. Onward...”
ALT: You’re frequently tagged as a dance-punk band, but as a group who have constantly tried to wriggle free of easy pigeonholing, would you rather people did away with easy labels, or are you quite happy being a band that will be looked back on as defining that genre?
!!!: “People will never do away with easy labels. No band will ever like what label their saddled with. I think it's your challenge as a band to transcend your genre. T Rex, Bowie, Roxy Music and Gary Glitter are all considered glam but they all sound very different from each other. And subsequently those of them who didn't push their sound died by that genre. We like to dance, we've got more punk points than the average band, and we're still interested in pushing our sound to places we've never been before. Call us whatever genre you like.”
ALT: What will !!! sound like in the future?
!!!: “It's a surprise!”
Artists in this article: !!!