Tokyo Police Club Interview August 2010
By: Jen Long
Have you heard the new Tokyo Police Club album, Champ, champ? It’s brilliant. I’m kind of in love with it to be honest. Everything about it just wipes my mind blank until that stupid muscle in my chest pumps and swells and encapsulates every last curl of guitar line, every last sentimental couplet, every last soar of chorus.
And did you know that Graham from Tokyo Police Club is the world’s strongest man? Or that when he was six years old he won one of those spelling competitions in the United States and all his competitors were aged twenty-two?
Not really. These are things we made up at the end of this interview. It was right after I’d embarrassed myself by over congratulating his new album to the point of sycophancy. I decided to delete that bit for my write up so it was only fair to make some flattering facts up about Graham. And this is what was left…
Rockfeedback: For anyone who doesn’t know, can you just give me a short introduction to the band? The kind you tell every journalist.
Graham: Could you just hold on one second… I thought so. I just turned my phone on to speaker with my head.
Dave, Josh and I have known each other since we were in grade 4, and then we met Greg when we were in high school, so we’ve all been friends for ages. We were really the only people that we knew that liked the kind of music that each other liked and consequently we all decided it’d be fun to make a band. It just went through its different incarnations and eventually ended up as you see us today.
RFB: I got [first EP] A Lesson In Crime and loved it and then when [debut album] Elephant Shell came out, you seemed like a different band. But now with Champ, it seems more of a follow on.
G: In a way I think that’s true. It’s interesting to me the different reactions that we’ve gotten. To me Elephant Shell and A Lesson In Crime are really part of the same chapter.
We put out A Lesson In Crime and it did quite well, better than anyone was expecting it to do and consequently we found ourselves out on the road constantly touring Canada, touring the States, touring the UK. Going to Japan! And it got crazy really fast and then we got to this point where we had to keep touring and doing stuff because we had to keep whatever buzz alive. But then at the same time we couldn’t keep touring off an eight song EP indefinitely, so we had to make a new record. But we didn’t have time to make a new record coz we couldn’t stop touring. Elephant Shell came out of being in that crazy place and trying to write songs when you had three days off and all anyone wanted to do was sleep and hang out with their families and instead we had to get together and try and write these songs.
So to me it feels like all part of the same scene and I always think those two records sound pretty similar, to me, in terms of a song-writing perspective anyway. Maybe it’s coz I’m so close to it.
To me, Champ is really the departure but what you’ve just been saying is what a lot of people have said which is that Champ feels closer in spirit to A Lesson In Crime and I think the reason for that is A Lesson In Crime we wrote when we were all just out of school, we were all just hanging out, no expectations, writing songs in Josh’s basement coz that was fun to do on a Friday night.
Obviously Elephant Shell was nothing like that and with Champ we kind of got back to that. We took a bunch of time off and didn’t do any shows and didn’t tour and all we did was just get together and write songs. Obviously not quite for a lark, we knew we were gonna make a record eventually, but in a much more relaxed atmosphere that was a lot closer to the atmosphere in which we wrote A Lesson In Crime.
RFB: How did you go about recording it?
G: We actually went to Los Angeles and recorded it with Rob Schnapf who is a brilliant producer who we’d never met in person and only spoken to on the phone. There was really no guarantee that is was going to be anything other than a disaster and fortunately it went exactly the opposite way.
Also we were in California during Canadian winter.
RFB: Are you enjoying being able to play new material…
G: YES!
RFB: …Or do you find it daunting?
G: I mean it is absolutely more challenging and a little riskier but that’s exciting to do. It’s not that we don’t like playing the old material but there comes a point where you’ve played the older material for two years, or even four years in the case of some of those really old songs and you could play them blindfolded with one hand tied behind your back on an instrument you’ve never played before in your life.
I really think with the new material we’ve added a lot of elements to our set that just weren’t there before. You listen to A Lesson In Crime, you listen to Elephant Shell and by in large the songs are two minutes long and really fast and really frantic and crazy. And I think that served us well. The reason a lot of people got into our band in the first place was that it was sort of this ADD, strobe lighting music. But we’re at the point now where we don’t necessarily want to play an hour of two-minute songs. It’s exhausting for the band and it’s exhausting for the audience as well. It got to the point that if we needed to play for an hour at a festival we’d be playing 23 songs which is just… that’s how many songs Radiohead plays when I go and see them for two and a half hours.
So now with the new material, some of them are a lot slower, some are a little slower, they have different vibes, it goes up and down and then we can really mould the set in a way we’ve never done before and have a dynamic to it. It makes it a lot more fun to play and I hope, and I think, it makes it a lot more exciting for audiences as well because it feels like it goes places instead of BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!
RFB: Yeah – I saw you at Latitude festival and I really did enjoy the set…
G; That was one of my favourite shows we’ve ever played. Something good was happening. You get a bunch of people in a place and the vibe can be any number of things. Sometimes it can be negative and sometimes it can be ambivalent and sometimes it can be really positive and that’s when good things happen and that’s what I like about festivals, the possibility of that. And that happened at Latitude.
Artists in this article: Tokyo Police Club