The New Cue #331 October 30: The Kills
"The pact was we make this band into our lives and our lives into this band"
Hello,
It’s Monday, the start of the week unless you’re one of those weirdos who thinks the week begins on a Sunday, and it’s time for your weekly Start The Week With… interview. No-one wants to talk to anyone on a Monday morning so we’ve done it for you, your chit-chat super-subs. All you have to do is read! It’s mad the lengths we go to to make you happy. Today we’ve got a conversation with two people that you can pass off as your own: Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince of The Kills. You’ll have to make up your own story about how this encounter happened, we can’t do everything for you. Read it first, iron out the details later.
See you on Friday. Enjoy the edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… The Kills
It’s been 20 years since The Kills emerged with their scuzzy, dive-bar blues debut Keep On Your Mean Side and Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince have turned their sound inside-out over the intervening two decades. On Friday, they released God Games, their first studio album in over seven years and a record that dramatically explodes their sonic worldview. Where before there was raw minimalism, now everything sounds expansive and embellished – a dynamic and atmospheric rock’n’roll record that you can’t see to the bottom of. It’s a brilliant album that lights the way forward for the duo, although they might want to be a bit quicker with the next one. A few weeks ago, Niall spoke to the pair over Zoom about making God Games, reuniting with Paul Epworth and the pros and cons of being a duo…
Hello Alison and Jamie. Are you two always on the same page when it comes to what you want to say about a record?
Alison Mosshart: No, I think we’re very supportive of each other’s answers and our interpretations. I don’t think they’re always the same.
Jamie Hince: I mean, it’s difficult because we contribute pretty much solidly 50/50 on every record, we make it that way and so it would be either a crazy coincidence or a lie if we agreed on absolutely everything.
This album has been long in the making. I remember reading an interview with you guys a few years ago where it sounded like it was close to completion.
JH: Yeah, we suffer from being a live-orientated band, we’re not a hit machine, we make records that interest us that we love and then we slog around the world with a record playing it live. And so with [2016 album] Ash & Ice, we were still touring it three years later and then we went in and demoed four new songs - one of them was Bullet Sound - and that was winter 2019, which is a significantly long time ago.
AM: We were really hyped to get going on the record and then of course the pandemic happened and everything came to a pretty big halt. I was annoyed about it at the time, but I think it worked to our advantage...
JH: That’s where we differ because I loved it...
AM: I know you loved it, but we started approaching songs from a different angle and it felt like the road was wide open and we had a lot of time to really explore. He was teaching himself piano and he was convincing me to write on a keyboard and I don’t know if I would have done that if we had just kept going at the end of 2019 and had a record out two years ago, I don’t know but I’m thankful for whatever discoveries we made along the way in a very strange time.
Tell me about some of those discoveries, what did you learn about yourselves taking that long way round?
AM: It gave us a lot more time for introspection and thought and philosophising about things and asking questions... asking lots of questions that don’t really have answers, but thinking a lot more.
JH: Lyrically, it’s a massive difference. Alison’s lyrics have always been great but I’ve always struggled with lyrics, it’s always been the last thing that I put on my songs and there’s always a patch of them where I feel a little bit compromised. But this time around, I refused to make any music until I’d written the lyric to a song. It definitely made me be more philosophical and make sure I was being coherent in what I was trying to say. The big thing for me with learnings between this record on the last record was I learnt how to use Pro Tools, it became this really empowering thing where I didn’t have to tell an engineer and try to describe something in my head, I could actually do it. For me, that was why it was a long and fruitful journey because all these ideas that I had, where I’d be like, ‘I want it to be like MF Doom but with guitars!’, I can do it now… or attempt it.
Was there a particular breakthrough with the record?
AM: It was happening constantly as the songs were coming together. LA Hex was one of his songs he made in his fake side-project that he invented to free his writing and when he played me that song, I just felt like, ‘We have a record, even though we have one song, we have a record’.
JH: I felt like that with Bullet Sound, but with Bullet Sound we had 51 seconds of it and then it kind of went nowhere after 51 seconds. We demoed it and still after that, it was still good for 51 seconds. We didn’t really finish it and that was one of the last songs we finished. Sometimes you need to write a song to start the fire, where we were trying to beat that song. I think it’s good to have a little thing like that.
Do all Kills records settle into a similar rhythm, or is each one different in how it’s created?
AM: There’s similarities. Each one’s different in how it’s created just because it’s a different portion of time in our lives and there’s always a million different things, but the way that we write, the process where we both write and send each other songs - we’ve been doing that since the very beginning, even before we were The Kills, working on music together and sending four-track cassette tapes back and forth and adding our little bits and going back and forth and back and forth. I think we’ve both become much better songwriters than we were in the very beginning this and I think we’re both much more capable of forming whole songs with lyrics and everything and sending them to each other.
JH: All the stuff that most bands just do naturally!
You worked with Paul Epworth on this record. He’s one of the world’s most in-demand producers now but back when The Kills started, he was your soundman. Was there anything he reminded you of that you’d forgotten from that early period?JH: Well, he told us we fired him, which we’d forgotten about.
AM: We did not!
JH: We’d been talking to him over email and he said he was into the idea of it, so we sent him some music and then we had a Zoom call and he was on a beach in Mexico with a cocktail and a straw hat. The first thing he said was, ‘You fired me!’. But I don’t remember it like that! I remember it being that his trajectory was going very steep, he was in the back of the van doing Kylie Minogue remixes and it was pretty obvious that he had a whole world out there who was waiting for him.
It was the 20th anniversary of your debut this year. What’s been the toughest period for The Kills since then?
JH: Well, there’s always that problem of wisdom in hindsight, so whatever’s happened, you make it feel like it was done for a reason or it had some meaning to it that you don’t regret it or you wouldn’t change it. But for me, I’ve had a lot of accidents and that’s really slowed the process down. Those have always been the toughest time, trying to make a record with a shattered elbow, broken feet, loss of my finger. Those have been my personal tough times...
AM:It adds a new element of stress to the situation... it’s triumphant to do it when we can get it together despite the odds, make something that you feel is wonderful. Sometimes it’s just been more challenging than other times.
JH: I’m definitely staying out of trouble from now on, starting from now.
Who’s given you the best advice across your career?
AM: I feel like we pay attention to things going on around us and learn from that and we learn from our own mistakes.
JH: I feel a little bit self-congratulatory that people don’t really often try and give us advice because I feel like we’ve taken our own path. We’ve taken a long way around, we’ve taken our own path and we’re not really like, ‘this is what you should do, this is how you fit into the music business’ cos we haven’t really done that. We have conflicting advice as well, for every person that tells us to get a drummer, there’s someone else that tells us to get rid of the drummer. We don’t really listen.
What’s one advantage and one disadvantage to being in a duo?
JH: Seriously, cynically, it’s really helped with us being able to make a living out of it with it just being two people. That is a cynical answer, I know. Everything else, we would be doing in the same way, because with the heart and the feel of it but that changes a lot, that you can pay your bills changes your world.
AM: The other positive thing is when we started the band, the pact was we make this band into our lives and our lives into this band, and that there are no restrictions and there are no rules and we can do any genre, we can do anything we want. We could just stop playing music for five years and paint if we felt like it, we’re just going to make art, we’re going to make art, we’re going to make music. And so I’ve never felt like we’re locked into any one thing we’re supposed to be doing. If you had four people, there’s a lot more needs. I think that’s a real positive thing and negative thing. We’re just two people… there’s a lot to do at all times.
JH: Yeah, there’s no ‘Get the bass player to cover this one - he’ll do this!’. That’s part of the reason on our last album, we had a drummer and we had a bass keyboard. It just seemed, ‘Oh my god, it’s so exhausting just two people keeping the show together’. Especially at a time when everyone’s expecting bells and whistles and LED video screens and lighting shows and laser things and dancers, they want everything and it just felt like two little people with a light bulb was not enough. I believe it is now again. But it is a lot of pressure on two people, it feels like that before you go on stage, just two little people.
AM: I think it’s like the best energy though, having two people go up there, it’s totally nerve wracking which I think makes the show really exciting. It’s all the other stuff I refer to, taking care of everything, keeping everything going as two people, nobody gets to have an off day. You just can’t. I think that might be the difference of having a group of four people or five people, you can really pass the shit around.
ND