Boots Electric, Interview

We caught up with Jesse Hughes of Boots Electric and Eagles Of Death metal for a quick chat before a recent gig at The Cockpit in Leeds.

You're 4 dates into your UK tour now, how are you finding it?
F**king awesome, it's the coolest sh*t I ever done. When we come to the U.K., the audiences are same as ever; beautiful sweaty and ready to rock. Elsewhere it's hard to compare anywhere to Australia, but in the States a lot of the time people just look up on stage at you like they're already bored. Here you get a fair chance, it's like 'you said you were guna rock so if you're guna rock let's see it, you've got about 10 minutes.'

What can people expect from your shows?
You can expect to see women getting impregnated every two minutes!

How did you find working alone on the Boots Electric material?
Making a solo record sometimes is just about being by yourself. When I'm making an Eagles album it's me and my best friend making an album having the best time of my life, when I was making the solo album it was me having the best time of my life without having anybody around to share it with.
That where I met Tuesday (Cross - girlfriend and now bassist for Boots Electric) and she helped me in the making of the record and she's the great love of my life. One the greatest barely legal porn stars ever put onto film and she retired just for me. So you guys can go to the Internet and look her up!

How did you find working with Money Mark (Beastie Boys, Beck) on the album?
Well I found that working with him made the most sense to me 'cause a lot of time what dudes are obsessed with, they are things that you would not consider. The first album that changed my life was Check Your Head by the Beastie Boys, which is a rock album, it's a hip-hop album, it's a punk album, it's all those things. I felt that my album was going to be all over the place, it'll be schizophrenic, so I thought I'd better get this guy to help me on it. I wanted Dr Dre, but I got the best instead.

Do you find that bands rely more on touring now than they have in the past?
The reality is that bands have always relied on touring; the record sales would just be a bonus I guess. Touring would be where you'd sell you merch and the way I've always looked at it is, and the way I've been raise because I was raised in a musical family is that the record should only be a promise of what the live show is going to be like. The music industry is an inevitable conclusion to something that was made many years ago. The standard that I've applied to Eagles of Death Metal and Boots Electric is that I want you to go home tonight and be like 'I want a moustache.'

You were late coming into music, how did you make the transition into the music business?
That's my favourite way of putting that question [laughs]. What happened was I went through a divorce, it was a really bad divorce and I got addicted to speed. A lot of people will stand here before you and try and talk sh*t about drugs but I'm not guna be one of those guys. I don't think drugs are for everybody but I don't think they're not for anybody.

You're quite open with your relationship with drugs, how would you define it?
The way I see it; you don't trust anyone who'd try and hide something from you. I don't like it when someone is high and they're trying to tell me they're not, it's just phony. I've played more shows sober than I will ever play high, thing is every situation is situational. Drugs, for example, don't disqualify you from something. I have a son who I desperately don't want to make some of the choices I've made, but I can now say it from a place of example.

A lot of your sound is very nostalgic, where do you draw most of your influences?
Oh man, where do I draw most of my influence from? Honestly I'll be at The Thirsty Crow where Eden (guitarist for Boots Electric) DJ's and he'll play a song like some weird rock and roll song from the sixties and I won't even know the name of the song but he'll play it and I'll just take instant influence. Like The Monks' 'Oh, How To Do Now' - listen to that song next to 'Complexity' and you tell me which one is which.

Do you listen to many recent releases?
I do yeah, but I've got like really weird standards. Just new for the sake of new and nothing else is not a good reason to listen to something. For me it's just got to be good and I think that we can all agree that a lot of good things took place between 1961 and 1985, but then 1985 to present you can count how many good acts have passed. Black Flag, Crass, even the Red Hot Chilli Peppers as much as everyone hates them. The record labels that started in the eighties like SST, Alternative Tentacles, Dischord; these things influenced me and I think I'm more influenced by their attitude than their sound. Also this has a lot to do with the way I make music, when I was a little kid every Sunday I went round to my grandpa's house to have corned beef and cabbage then afterwards we'd all sit around, pick up a guitar or mandolin and play some hillbilly music. So that's what I do in the studio, I give everyone a guitar, they'll all kinda know what's going on and it'll be intuitive.

Festival season is coming up; can we expect to see you back in the U.K. anytime soon?
[Hands over Leeds/Reading Festival poster] Main Stage, ready to lose. Eagles of Death Metal will be back.

So if you're playing Leeds with Eagles, does this mean we should be expecting some new material from them?
As soon as I'm back from this tour, Josh (Homme) and I are back in the studio and making a new record and I want it to feel like the world is being raped by John Holmes in the most pleasant way possible.

Joe Wilde

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We Are Augustines, Interview

Contact Music was fortunate enough to catch up with Eric Sanderson of We Are Augustines' in London prior to the band's recent European tour. It's been an emotional ride for the Brooklyn three-piece over the last year. Their previous band, Pela became the victim of the music industry at it's cruelest. 'We lost everything' Sanderson said, 'we went from being a band for 8 years, producing 2 records and building a network of friends and industry support that disappeared overnight, it was a complete abyss'. It took them a while to pull themselves away from that experience but in re-evaluating what they wanted to achieve and taking on board the response from their fans, they formed their new band and have just celebrated their year anniversary. 'Its incredible says Sanderson, in a year and a half's time we went from complete rock bottom, truly questioning if we should even continue to do music and now we are going on our first European tour and this will be our fifth time back to the UK'. With their old band, they lived the rock star life and did all the partying and they are determined not to fall into that trap again. 'We have set a code, we wanted to have a conscious, have intention and be artistically minded and be good people and when we set out on that path all these incredible opportunities opened up to us'

And those opportunities have come in thick and fast, from playing with the like's of The Boxer Rebellion and The Kaiser Chiefs to appearing on The Late Show with Letterman and enjoying support from both fans and the industry. Sanderson talks to us about them, about how the band has changed and tells us what to expect from their debut album, 'Rise Ye Sunken Ships'.

How's the UK treating you this time round?
Its wonderful as always, the people here are so warm and everyone is so supportive of what we're doing, at our shows we have people dancing and singing along and being really celebratory.

The UK has really embraced you and you've had a lot of support from Radio personalities as well as the fans, how do you feel about that?
Wonderful, we couldn't be happier, its quite amazing actually to go from rock bottom and then to come to a place where we are played on major radio stations in Europe and the UK, its just incredible.

Are the UK crowds different to those in the US?
Every city in the US is different. Some, like Seattle, Boston and New York clamp their arms and just stare at you, that thing that some cities are famous for, it goes along with the whole bullshit hipster thing. We are fortunate not to experience it too much and London isn't at all like that at all. the crowds really open up to us.

Do you have any stand out gigs?
Not really but the show that I'm most looking forward to is Frightened Rabbit show coming up in Edinburgh. When our old band broke up, it was right about the time Frightened Rabbit's 'Midnight Organ Fight' came out and it was quite emotive for me and it encouraged me to get back into music because it reminded me how much I loved music. When we played Glasgow, Scott and Billy from the band came to the show and we met up and we hung out and it was really wonderful to meet them and see that they liked what we were doing and I was able to tell them how much their band meant to me and next thing you know we have a show set up.

How would you describe your live show?
100% passion, we work really hard on the energy. Both in our recordings and in our live show, energy is really important to us. Whether it is the kind of song that will make you want to jump up and down and scream at the top of your lungs or it's a slower more introspective tune, we are always focused on the energy behind it. The shows are very celebratory and very thoughtful at times.

What has influenced you as a band?
We never intended to be very 'heart on your sleeve' when we create music but it did kind of end up that way. It ended up being representative of our lives, whether that was travelling the world or dealing with family issues or personal internal issues and enduring the difficulties of that, it all becomes representative. But we are now trying to talk about the bigger picture, look at 'Chapel Song', you could take it literally as a man watching his first love walk down the aisle and marry someone else. But really what the song is about is traversing a life and having to deal with change and the fact that things aren't permanent.

Which artists have inspired you over the years?
So so many! But the Chicago scene in the 2000s was very motivating, pretty much anything that came out on Thrill Jockey. It was a very interesting kind of instrumental music and that was influenced from Brian Eno, I've recently been really into Brian Eno - I have a nerdy passion for instrumentals! I think the northwest scene, Modest Mouse, Elliot Smith, heavily influenced us both. But with listening and playing music for so many years now, the influences are less direct than they used to be. The music we made ten years ago, you could listen to and say 'oh that sounds like such and such' but we have all worked very hard on trying to reach inside ourselves and express who we are rather than use someone else's expression. Hopefully when people hear our music, they hear what we are going through.

How has your music changed in the transition from Pela to We Are Augustines?
The thing that has really changed is how we go about what we do and why we do what we do. With the old band we found ourselves sacrificing what we were comfortable with for this intangible idea of 'making it', nowadays we realize that 'making it' is being conscious, being compassionate, living a career that we can be proud of and a life we are comfsortable with. It doesn't matter if we are making lots of money or are successful because we have a sense of consciousness in what we do and we have compassion towards other people and that's all that matters. That was not there in the other band.

Now you are riding high on the wave of success, are you ever tempted to go back to your old ways?
Yeah we are, its hard when journalists are asking you questions about your life all the time in terms of self importance, it makes you feel different and 'better' than other people or when your pictures are on blogs or if people come up to you after a show, its not always a given to keep you ego in check. But we have all been doing a really good job about it.

What can people expect from RYSS?
I believe the album to be nostalgic, a bit raw at times, something that they can put in the car or on their headphones but also at a bar and people can turn up and really celebrate life but also connect with it on a deeper level in the privacy of their own home. It can be very emotional at times.

And finally, can the fans catch you at any festivals this year?
Coachella on the Saturday, the day we are most excited and also Sasquatch Music festival in the states, a beautiful festival out on the gorge in Washington and we have other ones that are in that are in the works that we cant announce yet.

We Are Augustines are currently touring the States but they will be back in the UK in May, playing London Dingwalls on May 5th and will also be appearing at Latitude Festival this year. and Rise Ye Sunken Ships is out now.