The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

There are so many hilarious stories about Jon Richards, singer and guitarist with London trio The Notorious Hi-Fi Killers, it’s hard to remember where one ends and the others start. They get told by his bandmates, Rhys (drums) and Tony (bass), and the many other groups they’re friends with. I’ll attempt to relay a tale about when The Notorious Hi-Fi Killers scored a gig in Leeds. It involves drugs, and lots of them, consumed by Jon at the home of one of the bands on the bill with them that night. With a long drive back to London ahead, Rhys and Tony suggesting leaving around midnight. But Jon didn’t want to go. He stayed, saying he’d hitchhike south later. A coarse message on their MySpace the next day suggested he might have outstayed his welcome. They later found out he’s got so twatted he’d jumped into bed with one of his host’s girlfriends. And all hell had broken loose.

This is why people love Jon Richards. He’s old school rock’n’roll. People root for him and his band, and often in amusing ways. When it emerged that these journeymen of the capital’s underground rock scene were putting a record out on Rocket, The Stool Pigeon was emailed by a friend of theirs: “Stick Jon on the cover! In leopard skin Speedos, a denim jacket and a guitar raised over his head. Standing on a tank!”

Classic stuff, and it tells you something about the kind of band The Notorious Hi-Fi Killers are. Nope, no arch, angular wank for these gentlemen. In Jon’s words: “People always think of us as a stoner rock band, but it was never that. I just always wanted us to be like the MC5 - a rock’n’roll band where there were no limitations.”

Or, more explicitly: “We recorded with Tim from Part Chimp a while back trying to get an album together, but it wasn’t really working. We’ve used about four songs from then and loads of new ones. Until about two years ago, we were all playing post rock basically. But then we got a new discipline. Sometimes people are afraid of being just a rock band. A lot of people want to intellectualise music and I’d had enough of that, and I gathered Rhys and Tony had too. So we went back to the album and we record on four-track so it was a doddle - it wasn’t like it was costing us £300 a day.”

The album The Notorious Hi-Fi Killers eventually came up with, Which Side Are You On?, mixes sludge rock with monster Sabbath riffs and epic, Elevators-style freak-outs. It’s a hell of a trip - tight and explosive, then suddenly dubbed out and loose. They put Freddie King’s ‘Going Down’ through the mincer, then they step back into cosmic voodoo land. Sax man Luke Garwood pitches up at one point, screeeeeeeching like a wild beast, and members of Part Chimp and Alexander Tucker join in as well. It rocks. Heavily. Like you don’t hear much anymore. But is it unfashionable - maybe too classic? “Yes,” says Jon, delighted. “But what is punk rock? Is punk rock just being a minimalist or is it doing the total fucking opposite to what everyone else is doing?”

Some quick fire questions, because Jon gives great answers…

Jon, are you aware that you rub a lot of people up the wrong way - often on stage by pulling the cock rock thing, and also sometimes in life in general? “I am. I’m very aware of it. But I’m a loving guy - I don’t really wish harm on anyone. I’m a proper Londoner. Most people I hang around with now are from all over the country - all over the world. And sometimes I don’t like them telling me how to fucking behave.”

Your two bandmates run a small bedroom label, Noisestar, that put out the killer 3hostwomexicansandatinofspanners debut LP and, pop fact fans, the Edmund Fitzgerald, an early incarnation of Foals. Why isn’t Which Side Are You On? coming out on Noisestar? “Because people don’t take you seriously if you put your own records out. Unless you’re fucking Fugazi or something.”

And, finally, the big one: How much weed were you smoking when you made the record? “Quite a lot - pretty much all the time, actually. The days when we didn’t have any we couldn’t really do anything. I mean, we could, but I don’t think anybody felt like it.”