The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

Things didn’t look especially pretty for The Kills after their second album, No Wow, came out in 2005. The idea behind it - to write and record the whole damn thing in just three weeks - could have worked out great for them and their stripped-down, keep-it-simple aesthetic, but didn’t. Not really. The record was by no means a flop… it’s more that it had little of the crunch and sting of their debut, Keep On Your Mean Side.

The Kills toured the album for a year or so to an audience that hadn’t grown much, then disappeared. To those that gave it a second thought, it seemed their time was up; that they were a classic example of a band who only had one good record in them. Let’s be frank here: a lot of people wanted to think that too. Perhaps because they’ve always been darlings of the fashion press or perhaps because they sometimes come across as being a bit snotty and elitist, supposed real music fans have been quick to write them off as style over substance, including us. We gave them a proper pasting after No Wow came out, accusing them of being spoilt and pretentious. That was cruel, especially since No Wow was a real record with real ideas, even if the execution wasn’t perfect. And it shouldn’t be a surprise that The Kills are back with a brilliant third album, Midnight Boom. It’s a genuine victory; an album that achieves everything Jamie Hince, aka Hotel, ever wanted for the band: to continually think ahead and create records that re-write the rules of the previous ones.

And so it was that the dogma of their first two albums was cast off and they spent two solid years working on Midnight Boom. They went on quite a journey - physically and emotionally - starting in London and ending in New York, via LA, Michigan and Mexico. Scores of songs were written and discarded, they argued and suffered bouts of paranoia, ran completely out of money, hired one producer and sacked him, then asked Spank Rock’s beat creator, Armani XXXchange, to help them finish off the 12 short, sharp songs that make up the album.

Bringing in Armani XXXchange was an inspired decision: he’s a musical mastermind and he was right on side with what they wanted to create: a crisper, fuller, taughter, more fun, poppy even, album. Is it their best? For our money, yes, although they both say here that they like their debut equally. They’re back and they’re going to become a much bigger band this time round. That Jamie is going out with one of the world’s most famous women will help that, but that doesn’t mean shit if you haven’t got a tough record out.

The Kills - Jamie, an Englishman originally from Andover, and Alison Mosshart, aka VV, an American originally from Florida - met in London and began their creative partnership by sending unfinished songs to each other across the Atlantic. Both had played in bands before and both worked to a Beat ideal - with their songwriting, art, photography and lo-fi filmmaking. Distance being an obvious enemy of spontaneity, Alison left America and moved into Jamie’s flat in south London eight years ago.

People have always been intrigued by their relationship and whether or not they were lovers. The official line is that they are soul mates only, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t an intense sexual charge to both their recordings and, particularly, their live show. It gets almost pornographic at times and much was made of it at their sold-out comeback gig in London on January 17, especially since Jamie is now going out with Kate Moss. Theirs is a Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra, or Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, even Jack and Meg White in their early days, kind of partnership - a man and his muse. But it’s not a case of ‘I’ve got the brains, you’ve got the looks, let’s make lots of money’. Massive fans of the Velvet Underground, Suicide and Fugazi, they remain steadfastly anti-commercial and they intentionally operate in a parallel universe to the business of music.

The Kills still live together, in a studio-style flat in east London rammed full of guitars, old amps and keyboards, Jack Kerouac books, over-flowing ashtrays and Polaroid photos. It’s quite a place and, no, they don’t share a bedroom. Also, countering the long-held belief that their world is clandestine and insoluble, they opened up their home to us for this story and allowed Mattia to take photographs whenever he pleased. You cynics might think that was a thought-through attempt to appear more reachable. It wasn’t. Really. Greatly misunderstood? Yes. Snobby? Not in the slightest.

The interview took place on Thursday January 10.

Pigeon: The last time we spoke, three years ago, you said you were just beginning to get a proper fanbase. How it is now?
Jamie: It’s hard to tell really. I hope we have one. We’ve got a show next Tuesday and it’s been so long since we last put a record out that I’ve got no idea whether 30 people will come out or…

Pigeon: Are you pleased with the new record?
Jamie: It was pretty torturous getting there but, yeah, we’re really happy with it.

Pigeon: Is it your best one?
Alison: I think so.
Jamie: I think the first one’s the best one.

Pigeon: Really?
Jamie: No, I’m just saying that.
Alison: I really love the record, but I like the first one too.

Pigeon: Give us the story. When did you start writing and where?
Jamie: We started at home - the HQ - way back in January 2006 and we were just coming out with folk songs. I was spending a lot of time trying to find my feet - some thread to start the whole thing off - and we weren’t really finding it. I was panicking about it but she was quite relaxed. I was like, ‘This is just not happening - we’re just coming up with gentle, acoustic songs.’ Then suddenly it dawned on me that that was how we started the band - with no sense of what we were going to be or how we were going to sound… It just fell out. And that’s when I realised it was going to be a long journey.

Pigeon: With the last album, No Wow, the aesthetic was, ‘write it, record it, soon as possible’. But this time there were no rules?
Jamie: We put so many restrictions on both those last two records and I just didn’t want to do that this time.
Alison: I wanted it to be more like it was when we started - when we didn’t have pressure and we had fun. We did so many things before we were The Kills - we wrote so much stuff and went through so many phases, long before Keep On Your Mean Side or even the ‘Black Rooster’ EP. I felt like it was time for that again and I never really cared for how long it was going to take. It was sometimes stressful, though… I’d be like, ‘Alright, it’s been a year and I don’t know what we have.’ Without meaning to we went on a journey and travelled around. And we worked really really hard - the whole time.
Jamie: I always wanted to be a band that evolved and made every record different. And with this one I always wanted the strength of it to be in the vocals and the style, much like Royal Trux always came out with really diverse records but you knew they were always undoubtedly theirs. I knew I wanted this album to be something really different and I guess it dawned on me that it was gonna take a while to find it. I’ve shouted my mouth off so often about rock music being so retro and reverential… we wanted to shed our influences and do a really forward-thinking record as much as we could.

Pigeon: Did the songs that ended up on the record come late or had they stewed for a while?
Jamie: They came from across the whole period. ‘Tape Song’ is the first song we wrote; ‘Sour Cherry’ was one of the last ones.

Pigeon: When did you think about getting Spank Rock’s Armani XXXchange in?
Jamie: After we’d recorded the record.
Alison: A bit late!
Jamie: We’d started with the idea of trying to use a producer because we wanted to do everything the opposite way to everything we’ve done before. We got this guy in and he lasted four days. It just didn’t work.

Pigeon: That was in Michigan?
Jamie: We started in LA and we just hated LA, so we moved to Michigan and he came out to Michigan. But it was over by the fourth day.

Pigeon: Who was he?
Jamie: I can’t say.

Pigeon: Why not!?
Alison: It was a bit of a disaster.
Jamie: It really was - the worst way you can possibly imagine starting off a record.

Pigeon: He came in with ideas that rubbed against yours?
Jamie: No, he had a fucking breakdown. But it did help me realise what we wanted to do. The only advantage of having a producer is being able to hear yourself argue and realising that you are sure about what you want to do. Once he left, I guess I…
Alison: It took us about a week to get over the shock of the experience first.
Jamie: We were definitely a little tainted by it, then we got lost in the process of writing and recording. It took us about seven weeks and, even then, I couldn’t tell whether it was finished or not. I love that Spank Rock record, so I got into a conversion with Alex [Armani XXXchange]. He said, ‘I think your band is really cool,’ which was amazing to hear from him because I thought he was the coolest thing. So I was like, ‘Do you wanna come over to Michigan?’ He came over for four days and listened to the stuff and it was a massive morale boost that he was so into it and so excited by it. He helped us… he didn’t write any beats or anything, but he worked on things I’d come up with and helped us move things around. He’s just a genius at making things work: he would move the drumbeats around the guitar so they would speed up slightly and things like that. He just made it sound more chaotic and I like that [laughs]. I was working on this MPC60 - this old hip hop drum sequencer - and he fucking hated it… he thought it sounded all clunky. So the boys had a big argument about that and I got really paranoid… I was going through all the files because I kept thinking he was going to delete them.
Alison: We’re not good at working with anyone else. That’s just the way it goes [laughs].
Jamie: And, by then, we’d written some more songs that we wanted on the record, so we went to Brooklyn and went into a studio with Alex for a couple more weeks. Again, that was pretty hard. We’re really obstreperous.
Alison: Especially since this was the very first time ever we’d recorded anything on a computer. It was so weird: ‘Where is the music?’ ‘Where is that thing I played?’ You start getting really paranoid that people are getting rid of things, or that you don’t know where things have ended up. I really didn’t enjoy working in Pro Tools.

Pigeon: Did Alex play any instruments on the record?
Jamie: He played live drums on some tracks. There’s MPC on everything, but we backed it up with live drums.

Pigeon: It sounds like you’re using a bass on some tracks too.
Jamie: No, it’s a guitar with an octave pedal. I’m not very good on the bass - it just feels fat, like I’m a painter and decorator. I guess on this record we wanted to embrace the technology that we’d always slagged off. When the Velvet Underground were doing stuff, they used everything new then. They wanted to be forward thinking. Same with Beefheart and many other bands that blow me away. We wanted to do the same thing, even though my heart said it was ugly.

Pigeon: The irony of hearing you say all this is that the record sounds very natural and effortless.
Jamie: Previously, on No Wow, I can hear all mathematics - we’d work on one song and change it and go back to it and try and improve it. Whereas with this, everything eventually came out in one go, but the process was across 45 songs. We didn’t stop and work on a particular song, we just wrote a new one.

Pigeon: The lyric in the song ‘No Wow’ goes, ‘This ain’t no wow no more,’ like the premise of the record is that you were feeling uninspired; that it’s about searching for excitement. Is that right?
Alison: We were in a darker place then. We were really happy making this record, when it all came together.
Jamie: We had a laugh making this record. It really was like we were back to starting the band again. On the tapes, there is laughter at the beginning of pretty much every song.

Pigeon: How come you fled to Mexico at some point during the making of the album?
Alison: We didn’t think we were getting anything done and we’d run out of money.
Jamie: It’s the classic, stereotypical place to run away to. We thought we’d go into hiding there. I was happy to never come back.
Alison: But we went there during hurricane season. Everything was boarded up and there were sandbags everywhere.
Jamie: That was a low point. We’d lost our way. We’d listen to the sessions we’d done by that point and they were terrible, absolutely terrible. But that was when we started to get an understanding of things.

Pigeon: Was there pressure from Laurence Bell, Domino records’ boss, to deliver something quicker that you did?
Alison: Not at all. He’d come over to our house, get drunk with us, listen to our demos and get really excited. He’d always say, ‘Take as long as you want.’ But we’d run out of money, so there was pressure to finish because of that.
Jamie: There was a point when it went from, ‘Do you have enough songs for a record?’ to him going, ‘You’re really onto something, keep going.’ That really fired us up. With every record we make we always feel like we’re onto something, but when you’ve got Laurence Bell telling you it make you feel great. He’s become such an amazing friend of ours. We were playing him songs in really, really terrible demo state and he was just getting it, and getting really excited.

Pigeon: It always seemed with you that the band was all-consuming - that it was far more than a hobby or a bit of fun. Even more so now than ever?
Jamie: Making Midnight Boom we took that to the absolute furthest extreme possible. We were doing it 24 hours a day and not working jobs or doing much else with our lives.
Alison: We had no social life. At all.
Jamie: We had no money or anything. I lost my girlfriend… all we had to see us through was The Kills.
Alison: We hadn’t toured or done anything like that to make any money and studios are really expensive, so you go to a cheap one and end up staying there for longer… It’s really stressful being that broke. We really owe a lot of people a lot of money and it’s only these little moments when we ever have any money anyway - it always goes away.

Pigeon: Did circumstances put pressure on your own relationship? Did The Kills want to kill each other at lot of the time?
Jamie: We fell out a few times, but we’ve always had a volatile relationship. I’ve got a serious cigarette habit, so I wasn’t much fun to be around when we couldn’t afford to buy tobacco.

Pigeon: You’ve always seemed like a global band - you’re well known across Europe and America…
Jamie: Yeah, I’m very grateful for that. It’s not like we sell millions of records, but the people who buy them are spread out.
Alison: It’s so nice - we can go almost anywhere and have a good time.
Jamie: I just wish you could survive on selling 200,000 records…

Pigeon: Do you involve yourselves with what’s happening in the music industry - downloading and so on?
Alison: We don’t talk about it at all unless someone asks us about it.
Jamie: It sounds awful, but I’m just not fucking interested.
Alison: Me neither.
Jamie: I just wanna play music, you know? I always say that we’d be playing music whether we’re on a label or whether the internet didn’t exist. We never thought anyone would be interested anyway; we thought we’d be playing in my bedroom forever, and we would have been more than happy.

Pigeon: There’s already stuff online saying that the poppier sound of Midnight Boom is you going for the pot of gold…
Jamie: Flatly denied!
Alison: How could you plan for something like that?
Jamie: With the kind of music I listen to being commercial and accessible is an insult. I feel like that too.

Pigeon: Since you’ve been going out with Kate Moss, Jamie, have you noticed interest in the band coming from different places?
Jamie: Yeah, obviously, but interest on a level that I’m not interested in. It’s just word association and none of those people really care about what I’m doing musically, and I don’t care about them. Occasionally there might be someone who comes across us with that, but… I don’t know.

Pigeon: What’s it like having paparazzi people following you? Do you manage to hide away from it?
Jamie: I hate it, I really hate it. It’s so ridiculous. It’s such a surreal, ridiculous thing that you can only respond to it in that way - try and block it out. I hate it, but you can’t help the circumstances.

Pigeon: Are their no benefits?
Alison: It’s just a real mind-fuck.
Jamie: Obviously people are telling me that we’re getting loads of publicity.
Alison: You hear that the whole time. Jamie’s in the papers almost every day. I honestly look at them and I don’t understand it, because I know him. It’s super weird. And I don’t know how it can help. Maybe someone reads that shit and likes our band a little bit…
Jamie: You can’t get caught up in that. You become a cartoon - a clown. That’s why it’s torturous - I know I’m becoming a clown.

Pigeon: Your live shows always seemed to be ruled by nerves and fear. You don’t seem like flamboyant, show-boaty types. That must make the attention double hard to deal with.
Alison: We pride ourselves on being secretive. We always have been, naturally. I can’t even imagine what it must be like for him: I’ve seen how ridiculous it is - I’ve seen him walk down the street. I was shocked.

Pigeon: How close do they get? Do they know where you live?
Alison: Yeah, they know where we live, but they don’t come to the house…
Jamie: We’ve had some journalists there…
Alison: Some came by and said they were someone else.
Jamie: But the thing is that they’re not really interested in me because I’m not really anybody. It’s just an association thing. It says a lot more about the media than it does about me and Kate.

Pigeon: Another thing that must bother you is that you’re often referred to as a fashion band…
Alison: I think that’s because music magazines wouldn’t cover us. But the fashion magazines would.
Jamie: We really struggled with No Wow. We weren’t getting any music press. It was a time when we were associated with the garage scene, which seemed to run its course about a decade before.
Alison: And it’s because there aren’t any really good music magazines and there are lot of fashion magazines that cover music. But I don’t feel like we’re a fashion band. In fact, I don’t know what that is. What is a fashion band? I don’t know.
Jamie: I’m terribly cynical about the fashion/music crossover, but a lot of those style magazines came up with things we wanted to do - ideas for articles that sounded exciting. And there was a time when it wasn’t that common. It’s different now - there are so many style magazines. Maybe I’m wrong, but it seemed like when No Wow came out we were doing things that were new.
Alison: And then it suddenly seemed like every band was a fashion band. Those magazines did open something up - they did take an interest in music and feature some bands that weren’t getting the coverage they deserved.
Jamie: I just don’t really care that much about it. It doesn’t matter if we’re seen like that. You only really worry if deep down in your heart you think you are a fashion band and I’m very confident we’re not.

Pigeon: Has it been different this time? Have you been speaking to more of the music titles?
Alison: It’s been totally mixed. We’re doing you now, but we did Vogue this morning. They turned up at 11 o’clock. I was still in my pyjamas and I stayed in them for the first part of the shoot. I just woke up 15 minutes before.

Pigeon: Were Vogue interested in you because of Kate?
Jamie: Nah, we’ve always done things like that. Fashion wants to take something from rock music and it always has done - it finds rock music inspiring. And Alison… the way she looks - she’s kinda model-like and they’re desperate for a girl in rock to be a fashion icon.
Alison: But then we did an interview with someone from Teletext. He’s a really nice guy. Jamie’s talked to him before on the phone.

Pigeon: Do you find that the same writers come back and interview you each time there’s a new record coming?
Alison: A lot of the time and that’s really great. It means we don’t have to cover all the old stuff again [laughs].

Pigeon: You’re good friends with Stewart Lupton, insanely talented former Jonathan Fire*Eater frontman, who could have been a huge star but he lost a decade of his life to heroin. Is he an inspirational character or just a fuck-up?
Jamie: Fuck-up! No, of course not. And I don’t think he fucked his chance up. What does that really mean? That he didn’t become a commercial success? That’s so important to everybody right across the board now. People don’t think you can have a fulfilling life in any way if you don’t have money or sell records or products. Stewart’s a genius, but there is a fear that he’s going to open up those books he carries around with him and they’re going to be blank. There’s that fear, but I have total faith in him. He’s a fucking throwback. It’s like he’s from the eighteenth century - he sees things differently and it’s such a rare thing. He has a genuinely different set of morals - he’s a proper libertine. I think that’s great in a world where however libertarian you are, you probably just want to make money. I genuinely think that Stewart doesn’t want any of those things and I love being part of that when I get the opportunity.

Pigeon: Do you think he’s a romantic figure?
Jamie: Yes.
Alison: Yes.

Pigeon: But he told us when we interviewed him for a cover story a few issues back that he was pining for money, and he was jealous of the success that his former bandmates went on to have with The Walkmen?
Jamie: That’s true - he does think he’s owed something.
Alison: But he’s looking for financial independence in life, which he doesn’t have.
Jamie: Like anyone involved in art, they want to leave their mark and I think he feels like he hasn’t yet. He’s definitely not in it to keep his ego satisfied. It’s a struggle for him because he feels like he hasn’t made it.

Pigeon: You speak of him like he’s your comrade in music. Is there anyone else that you feel like that about?
Jamie: Scout Niblett. She’ll be making music the way she does, no matter what happens. If she has an audience of five, like she sometimes does, she doesn’t give a shit.
Alison: She’s so good.

Pigeon: No one else? You’re a big Suicide fan, aren’t you Jamie?
Jamie: I am, but with the new record we attempted to clean the slate. I just think that rock music hasn’t done anything new is so long. It all gravitates back to sixties music.

Pigeon: Any different aspirations for the new record?
Alison: I want to go to Hong Kong. And Russia [laughs].

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