Mudhoney – Interview – September 2010 [PART 2]
By: Charlie Potter
Last time I saw you was actually at the ATP thing that you curated here, and that was a really good show...
That was a great day, getting to see The Flesh Eaters and The Scientists, that was really, really great.
Yeah I really felt that that excitement came out in your performance, it was a really good fun show, but then I guess that for me is something that really characterises your band.
Well yeah, we strive for that.
That’s good because I was thinking about it today, and I was thinking of other bands that I consider to be just really good fun, and the only other band I could really think of was Devo. Obviously in a way there a million miles apart from you guys in terms of how they sound, but…
To me that’s a really, really incredible compliment: I mean I love Devo, seeing Devo in 1980 was one of things that changed the course of my life….
That’s interesting, I wouldn’t have necessarily guessed that.
Well up to that point I’d only seen arena rock shows, where you sit back in a bleacher and the band is a million miles away, and I was happy to do so as a teenager, but as soon as I saw Devo at the Showbox here, and managed to worm my way up through the crowd to nearly the front of the stage until there was just like one person in front of me and the whole crowd – the hall had this kind of sprung dance-floor because it was an old ballroom – was I guess pogoing in unison; just bouncing up and down, and it was an 180º turn from anything that I’d experienced at an arena show. The crowd was involved with the show; the band and the crowd were feeding off of each other - and that’s the kind of thing that we strive to make happen when we play live, hopefully there’s like the feedback loop between the band and the audience…
I certainly think there seems to be a link between the feeling of fun and the kind of D.I.Y. kind of ethic, I don’t know maybe it’s just because it’s kind of a more community minded approach. But it’s something that I kind of feel –I guess I can only really speak for London – but it seems that perhaps that there is not as much of that as there was maybe 10 years ago. There are lots of great new bands but a lot of the time they’re a bit po faced and take themselves a bit too seriously, I don’t know is that something you see or do you think I’m being paranoid?
To tell you the truth I don’t really go out to see shows with the frequency that I did when I was younger, I see really good bands now and again usually because we play with them, and usually because we ask to play with them. But I don’t scour the clubs.
Are there any bands that you have seen recently, or in the last couple of years that you think were really good?
Besides The Stooges and The Scientists?
Yeah, OK. I was thinking more along the lines of new bands.
We’re bringing over a band from here called Unnatural Helpers that we played with in town, they’ll be playing at the London show, and they’re actually doing all the UK and Ireland shows with us. They’re great. The day after we played all tomorrows parties in New York we played with Pissed Jeans and White Hills and Pissed Jeans are – I think – a phenomenal band. I think they’re the best punk rock band going at this point - that I’ve heard - they just seem untouchable and they have a really great sense of humour, and they’re loose, and loud. I don’t really like the clenched fist approach to punk rock y’know with the sing along backing vocals I prefer like the random attack of Flipper or Black Flag or something like that.
Yeah I was lucky enough to see Pissed Jeans a couple of years back, they have a kind of sloppiness that’s visceral at the same time.
Yeah and they don’t take themselves or anything seriously, there’s no sacred cows. What drives me crazy is seeing kids nowadays wearing their punk rock garb, as if they’re doing some 50’s revival thing but they’re doing early 80’s revival, and they’ve got their Mohawks, and their leather jackets, and it says both ‘Crass’ and ‘The Exploited’. They’ve got both those bands on their leather jackets and it’s like, you’re fucking shitting me, people who are Crass fans would not go anywhere near The Exploited, and the other way around, but now it’s all just kind of washed together with time, it drives me crazy... and if you can’t tell the difference between the two bands just by listening to their records then you should just stop listening to punk rock. Period.
That’s good: it’s a good hard line to take
Yeah well you know I’m all about the hard line – extreme firm stances.
So you’re doing this big tour, and your last record came out in 2008?
2008 yeah, recorded 2007
Any more material kind of emerging?
There’s some emerging - it’s not emerging very quickly. Steve moved to Portland a couple of years back and it makes every time we practice a 6 hour round trip for him, so we don’t work on stuff – again - nearly as much to my liking. It’s kind of hard to get everyone in the same room.
But it seems that it’s nearly always the case that whenever there’s a long gap between albums for a band the one that comes out after that gap is one of their best.
Hopefully that’ll be the case.
I think it’s good to let things age a little while before they get sealed off into their kind of definite form.
Another thing I was going to ask you is thinking in terms of your last album, whenever I read interviews with you it’s obvious that you’re big music fans, you’re always listing off whole bunches of bands sometimes very obscure sometimes more popular or surprising, today I read an interview with you in which you’re talking a bit about Krautrock, and then you’re talking about Devo, but at the same time with your albums, whilst you can hear those influences, you have such a definite sound, even to the point that I don’t know what your fans would do if Steve didn’t use a fuzz pedal on the next album: I wondered how you saw that process of taking in influences into your music?
I don’t know, because our influences as a band are collectively really wide, I mean Steve really likes a lot of really singer/songwriter kind of folky stuff, I like a lot of jazz stuff, it’s something that’s not directly audible in the band maybe but I think it makes its essence felt if that makes any sense. Recently I hung out for a couple of days in New York and went to see my first Broadway musical and it was a musical about Fela Kuti...
OK…
Which was fucking phenomenal, and I was kicking myself that I didn’t pay attention when he would come to town in the Eighties, I was just not interested in world music at that time, and I’m not really interested in world music now, but Fela is fucking phenomenal: there’s like, James Brown and John Coltrane and his own thing in there, yeah, it’s pretty amazing stuff. But of course we’re not really going to do a record that sounds like that.
I feel with bands - and it’s often where they make their biggest mistake – where they’ve obviously been listening to something and they go out and try and sound like it. Whereas I don’t feel like there’s ever that pressure with your band: it always seems like your quite happy just being Mudhoney, and just letting all these influences and sounds come in their own natural way - I don’t know if you agree with that?
Yeah, yeah I agree with it.... we do what we do. I don’t really know how to describe it beyond that, I hope that what we do is instantly recognisable as something that is from us – that is instantly recognisable as a Mudhoney song. But I also don’t want to do like, you know as much as I like ACDC and Motorhead and the Ramones I don’t want to do the same song over and over and over again, there’s variations in those bands of course but it’s pretty limited.
Hmmm… it’s funny you should say that, because something that Buzz from the Melvins often says that he loves the Ramones, but he would never want to be in the Ramones.
I saw Melvins play in Minneapolis three weeks ago and they did a version of ‘Pinhead’. It was great. But there are millions of reasons that you wouldn’t want to be in the Ramones, for instance: if you were Johnny and Joey and you were speaking to the other one for three years...
Yeah I think I even saw I thing on TV about them once and it showed that they played a benefit for the Republicans and one for The Democrats within a couple of years of each other, because Johnny was so right wing and Joey kind of thought it would be nice to do one for The Democrats…
Well o.k. I’m fast running out of notes here so I think I’m about done.
Well I’ve got another interview at 11 so….
Oh o.k. so what time is it there now?
It’s about two minutes till
Oh, oh right o.k. well thank you very much
Sure thing Charlie
Well I really enjoyed the last album and I’m looking forward to the next one and I’m looking forward to seeing you in October.
Well if you happen to see me wandering around the club just step and see me and say hi, you know we talked on the phone.
O.K.
All right, OK. Bye Charlie
Bye.
Artists in this article: Mudhoney