This interview appears in an upcoming issue of Collective Zine (www.collective-zine.co.uk)
Interview by Julia Downes, contact:buttercuplovesyou@hotmail.com
The day I met Alison
So here I was blagging myself into the cockpit posing as some sort of music journalist wannabe stuttering and stumbling all over the place, lying about actually interviewing bands before and somehow making it through to be in the same room as Alison chain smoking menthol marlboro’s and engaging in conversation with little me… The day I met Alison Mosshart was a huge deal for me. I almost couldn’t face it. When I was sixteen watching Discount play was a total escape for me it opened so many opportunities and made me feel more secure about my so-called weird ways. If it wasn’t for women like Alison alongside Courtney, Kat and Kathleen there’s no way I would be around today. Not a chance in hell. I have this really conflicting relationship with her new band the Kills I was gutted when Discount split up but excited when I heard she was in a new band and promptly went to go check them out. But it wasn’t the same, it was no where near, and situated in a milieu of punk rock purists the whole ‘selling out’ argument was easy to digest and I saw no need to look further. But after meeting her and hearing what she had to say I am a converted Kills fan. It’s the passion, the art, the love of rock n roll, the need to break the rules and question our mediocre surroundings, and the importance of inspiring each other. It’s everything that keeps me on this planet. This meeting came at a crucial time for me. January had been hell. After leaving the Holy Terror I’ve been pretty shaken up. It’s hard to leave something behind that you’ve invested so much in, but stranger still when you’re jerked to the outside looking in at the amazement of the shit you allowed yourself to be put through and the weird habits I developed and the ways my character had become distorted by what I can see now was an oppressive context. I had allowed myself to get stuck in this weird space of being walked all over, silenced, of not being able to sleep, of putting others needs before my own mental health and wanting to numb everything out with mtv, drugs and alcohol. I was en route to a self-destructive passionless boring existence and was seething with frustration and guilt. Nobody could describe this claustrophobia I had become encased in better than Alison and encouraged me to keep creative, keep fighting back and to eventually feel a lot better… So there I was under the guise of a Leeds student paper music interviewer armed with some badly thought out questions, cynicism and a headache of nerves. I waited outside the room as the earlier interviewers, two rather slick looking dudes came out and gave me a nod. My heart is in my fucking throat I manage a quick smile and check to see if I have any shit stuck in my braces. The tour manager comes out and says okay come in you’ve got fifteen minutes…
(I shook her hand and I professed my love for Discount and for the ways in which she inspired me when I was younger and my excitement of meeting her. Then realised I did have to actually record some kind of question – answer affair so fumbled around with the tape recorder and this is what happened…)
Me: Okay so I heard this was like your first headlining tour in the UK since 2002 just generally you seem to be touring all the time, so how’s this tour going? (I took Bob’s suggestion of the opening tour question cuz I was a bit of a wreck)
Alison: Good I’m not really sure this is our first headlining tour since 2002 but…
Me: Oh right my information must be wrong (damn that stupid press release and I thought I would look like I knew something!)
Alison: Right yeah but we’ve been touring for about two years constantly inbetween doing some recording and stuff but erm it feels really fantastic we’ve only played two shows on this tour and both nights have been so so amazing this is the first time that I’ve ever had this sense that people are coming to see us. You know we do play lots we’ve done lots of gigs with quite large bands in the past and been really like it’s quite scary and nerve wracking to play to an audience that has no idea who you are and I kind of get off on that because it’s way harder but then I don’t know if I ever thought or got a sense that people were actually coming to see us before. The last two nights has just been, it’s been unbelievable like the first time I’m sort of seeing the audience which I’ve avoided doing for two years like you know checking them out in any way. So it’s been really interesting quite invigorating.
Me: I remember seeing you at Josephs Well I don’t know if you remember that show?
Alison: I think I do remember it, it’s when me and Jamie were driving around ourselves yeah.
Me: So starting at the beginning how did you actually manage the transition from Discount to the Kills?
Alison: Well it was a really long transition I was in Discount for seven years and probably by year four I was becoming really this is probably like before you saw us play here. I had become really dissatisfied with the music you know it was like I was in a band with four people with very four separate opinions kind of not in the same sort of headspace about seriousness about being in a band and the type of music they wanted to do that was kind of affecting my moods more and more so I was really like working twenty-four hours a day never sleeping just so obsessed and no one else kind of had that. You know and you can’t expect people some people are like that most people aren’t you know but I wanted something else really badly so probably three years before that band split up I started doing stuff on my own like really secretive and no one knew about it. And then what happened was I met Jamie and that was the first person I ever met and I met him when I was probably eighteen that actually wanted I wanted him to hear everything I’d ever done I wanted to show him all this art that I’d done and all these things that just like you know boxes of things in my bedroom all these tapes and so we sort of struck up a friendship and hung out and stuff and played each other records and it you know we never decided to be a band it was nothing like that it was like a soulmate like he was doing the exact same sort of things. He was doing all this stuff and like I don’t know when you’re kind of surrounded by your friends in your community or whatever it’s like. I think we both had that sense that you see you’re supported but your not supported and you’re like made fun of for being too arty so you kind of tend to you tend to shy away from ever exposing what you’re doing and just keeping something it’s feeling like it’s making you powerful but they don’t know about it you know you do that I mean I think artists do that naturally it’s just like it’s not the easy thing to just
Me: Yeah like writing a journal or something or starting up something without your friends knowing
Alison: Yeah you know but we met each other and we knew we were safe with that kind of thing and we could totally explore it together and it was the most exciting day of my life meeting him. And you know he was the main reason I moved and it was really like I just decided one morning that I wanted to move I called my mom and told her I was going to move I called the airline and bought the ticket a couple of days later I called him and said I was coming and he didn’t believe me and I showed up and I’ve never gone back and that was like five years ago so.
Me: That is so cool ( I know I am gushy there is no avoiding this state right now)
Alison: You know like really spur of the moment but I never regretted it for a minute and it was exciting because I had no money it was just like this new fresh start and I was fearless and I was you know quite young and just like fuck it why not I hate Florida I don’t want to live in America anymore I hate that as well I was really like the disgruntled teen you know I just did not want any more to do with it.
Me: What things did you not like about Florida then?
Alison: It’s just not you know it was just very typical like I mean this is not like everybody there are some amazing people and amazing artists that I knew and amazing musicians that I knew there moved and went off to do really great things and there’s quite a few of them they’d move and there’s a reason for that because Florida’s like it’s just a bed of sleep people get really complacent really lazy or really happy with just getting videos on the weekends and drinking loads of beer and eating pizza and getting fatter and fatter and doing nothing and their brains are just shrinking and it’s like I actually had a panic attack there I couldn’t cope with what I was seeing happening because I was just growing up and you know and seeing how people were maturing in that weird way. They’d been so ambitious as kids and then all of a sudden it was like just some of them wanted to be really really ultra normal and I felt trapped I felt so trapped that I left you know. But I’ve come to find that it’s very much like that everywhere in the world there’s always people doing there’s It’s not just that thing but I reacted to it quite drastically and I’m glad I did because I don’t regret anything that I’ve done.
Me: It’s just too easy to be mediocre
Alison: Yeah it’s just so easy to just kind of be like, ‘oh it’s alright it could be worse’ but its like ‘it’s so bad’ I don’t know. I am really like emotional, really obsessive moody and you know I take things in huge ways it’s got to be all or nothing over everything that I do you know I can’t kind of go down the middle road I just get sick literally and physically sick at times so I’m glad I’m like that.
Me: Yeah because I was wondering what the pseudonyms were about, like a disguise from that?
Alison: Well it’s kind of about what I’m just saying we both felt like that we were like kind of trapped in other people’s worlds where we couldn’t express ourselves and we were so inspired by the Warhol scene and the factory and all these characters and just people being so over the top and celebrating art and celebrating themselves you know really just I don’t know stunning personalities you know and tragic stories and just exciting and whether it was really not that way I don’t care because it’s like the legend of it is what has been like waking me up in the morning since I was thirteen so you know we kind of both felt like we just wanted to start over and we didn’t want anybody to know what we’d done before and that’s why I’ve got such a vague memory of Discount because I made a really conscious decision to forget about it
Me: Oops sorry
Alison: No no it’s okay because I have to talk about it once in a while and it’s like I’m still friends with most those people and it’s cool but I needed that kind of conscious decision to start over again like really from scratch. I wanted to learn how to play guitar I wanted to do all these things that I never got a chance to in that band. And so we were really drunk and we just like initial our names and just start over and go on tours and we won’t tell anybody who we really are and that way no one’s going to. We’re not going to be feeling that from like backwards we wanted to go forwards like totally and we didn’t want any help do you know what I mean? It’s like ‘hey it’s me remember me I was doing this yeah check me out can you help me’ I did not want to go down that way. I just felt it would be really trapping and so that’s why we did it but it was so light-hearted the name thing you know it just kind of worked out really well in our favour because we did go for like a year and a half without anybody figuring out who the hell we were and it was really really cool you know. I still have people who come to Kills shows who don’t know and they’ll be standing there watching me play and afterwards they’ll be like ‘were you’ you know at this gig nine years ago ‘were you that girl that was in that band erm you really look familiar to me’ and I was like I almost got away with it but I can’t lie to you (laughter) I don’t know what to do and it’s like uh huh and then it’s like funny because people still don’t know yet you know lots of people don’t.
Me: That would be cool though I can totally see why you get off on that. So there’s a lot of change in the Kills sound the Kills sound is a lot more stripped down like drum machine and guitar and I was just wondering what that might mean, is there any sort of way I which you perceive your aesthetics you know?
Alison: Well there’s two of us you know and so that’s quite stripped down and we wanted to be able to reproduce everything on stage exactly like in the studio so… Okay so it’s like the kind of things that have really inspired us are like I think there’s a real art to like and a real beauty in music about the space in music and what you can leave off is just as powerful as what you can put in you know and people forget that and layer and hide things that are not that good with other things and just like a big clump of stuff it’s like having an idea and pouring water all over it you know. We just have an idea and you just do it but you just really need to basic things and I think we get really turned on by that because we can do that and we write songs sometimes and the just start cutting it up with scissors you know like we don’t need that we don’t need this lose that entire sentence you know just you don’t need these things because like the message is stronger if it’s more direct you know. And it’s quite hard to do because I think naturally you want it to be like grand you know and so it’s but it actually turns out sounds a lot cooler if you leave the stupid things off. And yeah so but yeah there’s two of us and that’s just how it is we’ve both been in bands with loads of people and it’s just really exciting not to be you know and using that as a tool. There’s only two of us so let’s sound like there’s more we can create a huger thing with just two of us then we could have ever created with four because that was what it is it was so diluted with four people coming from different directions and Jamie’s like part of me and I’m part of him and I just like. If we’re in a room together I feel alone do you know what I mean it’s like it’s just we spend twenty-four hours together we’re totally are psychic we don’t it’s pretty amazing it’s like doing a solo record with another person. It just feels like that like we’re the same exact person.
Me: So you have a habit of recording albums in two weeks
Alison: Yeah we did that
Me: Did you do that twice for this record as well?
Alison: Well the first one was recorded really fast as well but the first one was written for a year and a half this one was actually written in three and a half weeks from start to finish and then recorded in two weeks and then mixed for a week.
Me: That’s really spontaneous!
Alison: Yeah it was quite like that was sort of the theme because we didn’t have any time at all because we’d been on the road and we could never write songs on the road we’re so distracted and like you know our minds are in every direction and just couldn’t focus at all. So we just thought let’s just lock ourselves away for three well we actually gave ourselves a month but we actually finished way ahead of time because we just sorta stopped sleeping and everything we got so into it and we figured all of our favourite songs were written in ten or fifteen minutes you know so it was super easy.
Me: Yeah because I read somewhere that your songs grow out of conversations that you and Jamie have and so what do you talk about?
Alison: I don’t know everything that there is to talk about I mean you know we’re like travelling around the world all the time and seeing all these things and discovering all these things together and there’s a million things to talk about. But this record is totally written from we went to this place and this place is barren and it’s in the middle of nowhere and we didn’t know that but our way of kind of coping with the fact that we had nowhere to write was like we thought let’s just bring everything that we find inspiring let’s bring everything that we’ve done in the last year on the road. So that was like 3000 photographs we’d taken books and books of journals of writing and art and all this stuff and we basically pasted it up everywhere laid it around and you look at all these things and you remember there’s like stories everywhere you look you know and it’s really easy to write and it was so simple and we’d get into long conversations about things and all of a sudden it’s I’ve an idea and we’d just record the idea and that was it. We did about seventeen songs in three and a half weeks and the songs that didn’t end up on the record were the ones we’d thought about too much and all the ones that came so super quickly and naturally were the ones that made it.
Me: Okay so I read somewhere that the whole ‘no wow’ title was a comment on how you felt about music at the time and the general culture you were embedded in. And I was just wondering what things make you go wow?
Alison: A lot of people ask that I don’t know. (and I thought I was being real clever using their new album title to get into their inspirations ha ha) I don’t know I guess just like I’m really obsessed with legends and things that probably aren’t true my sorta aspirations are so much more than human you know. I don’t feel like I’m ever going to be satisfied with anything it’s just I quite like that like I said it has to be super-drastic and super-impossible or I’m not interested so it’s that kind of thing you know and the ‘no wow’ statement was just like it felt like this really strong term for us and it was the first song we wrote for the record so it was just kind of a flag waving over us pushing each other as hard as you could push each other before you broke down and cried and at times we did. You know it’s just really really trying to move up a hundred gears you know and in no time at all just going somewhere you didn’t know where to go and it’s a statement about everything around it’s just kind of like I want people to be like that I can’t have my way but I want people to be inspired like that just like go for it try and push the boundaries and try and break the rules and try and change them and just get something celebrate art again rather than calling it pretentious and fake and you know people should be like celebrating you know the things that they do and in order to celebrate something that you do you have to know that it’s really fucking good and so people need to work really hard and it’s just like a call on people to sorta get their shit together
Me: And do something!
Alison: Yeah!
Me: That’s really cool. So where do you find your inspiration?
Alison: Jamie’s has been my hugest inspiration ever he’s the most inspiring person that I know for sure. You know but I’m inspired by really kind of inane things that you just see around I’m inspired by people I’m inspired by tragedy and like crimes of passion and like you know really horrible morbid stuff and really amazing stuff you know like completely on this side of the spectrum or this side of the spectrum because I tend to avoid the middle part because it’s really like grey do you know what I mean and just looking at the dark side of human nature is really interesting and people don’t really explore. I mean people explore it in films and they explore it in art and it’s quite acceptable but people don’t really explore it in music. In music if you explore it you get a stamp on your record that says like you know eighteen or over and you get like you know you don’t get played on the radio if something’s too dark or something’s too weird. People don’t for some reason it just has not crossed over into music other than maybe in Marilyn Manson for instance who you know people really like him and he’s really smart but you know just it’s not typically accepted and I think it’s really super-interesting that kind of side of human nature like what people will do if they’re pushed and what people will do with their you know everybody has like addictions and people do things in different ways people get obsessed and people go crazy and go nuts and just freak out and it’s so obvious when you look at the world and the way that it is why commit insane crimes and go ballistic and I think it’s really a picture of how it is you know none of the people need to look at it to figure out what’s wrong because you can kind of trace through what they’ve been through you can see that a hell of a lot of other people are going through similar things and it’s only a matter of time you know before everything just kicks off I think it’s incredibly interesting I think that stuff’s inspiring. Loads of our art, loads of our conversations stem from that we like look through the papers for frigging stories about people and just sit and talk for hours.
Me: Okay so you’ve started attracting lots of celebrities like Courtney Love and Michael Stipe I mean how do you feel about that?
Alison: I don’t really feel anything about it you know just like I think if you live in a big city that’s just not even like a weird thing to run into people like that or for them to be around or you know. I quite admire like fashion and music and art and film scene and those people and they’ve got really excellent stories and they’re very cool characters but I think they’re not scary people to play a gig to, scary people to play a gig to are kids. You know they are because they’re deciding really they’re at the beginning and they’re deciding which way they’re gonna go and they’re the ones you can actually have an impact on. You can get them to start a band or you can get them to throw shit at you and you can get them to do things whereas the hipsters just stand there looking really cool thinking about themselves half the time. It isn’t very interesting you know. I have loads of friends who are really amazing and they’re probably like considered famous or whatever but they’re just normal people it’s not a big deal. Jamie and I don’t get off stage and go so and so was here and blah blah blah it’s just like not even part of it it’s more like that fifteen year old girl in the front row fucking stared me out the entire time and I’m really excited about it do you know what I mean? That’s the sort of thing like kids come up at the end and they just tell you they’re so free with their language you know they’re talking a hundred miles an hour and you can kind of catch half of it and they’re so excited and they’re bright red and they’re trying to say, ‘well this is what it meant to me and this is what I’m going to do now I’m going to go home and do this’ and you’re like that is the whole reason for doing this because that’s the kind of thing what happened for me. I went and saw Fugazi when I was a kid and I was so obsessed by that I followed them round for a month and a half and I changed my entire life because this was all I was going to do and I was already in a band and I was already touring all the time. But there was something about them and the kind and amount of passion they put into it every night the amount of energy absolutely everything they have and it’s like they’re dead people afterwards.
Me: Yeah I saw them and they played for like two hours
Alison: Yeah and it never goes down at all it just keeps going up it’s unbelievable you know I yeah it’s just I want to be that have that kind of impact I want to leave the mark you know and I don’t care if it doesn’t come until twenty years after I’m dead it’s like that’s the aim that’s not. Not really interested into what kind of happens right now it’s just sorta. I want it to be like those bands that I think about that are kind of either dead or broken up but they had so much impact on me when I was growing up and they inspired me to do everything I’ve ever done.
Me: Like who else did that for you?
Alison: Velvet Underground Patti Smith she’s still around I saw her play not too long ago fucking awesome and let’s see I don’t know Television, Magazine, Suicide but I can’t really go see them now because if it’s bad and I don’t want it to change my mind. I don’t know a fairly long list but you know that feeling it’s just.
Me: Yeah I know what you mean because when I saw you when I was young that was a big influence on me in starting a band and write stuff write music generally and bands like Bikini Kill
Alison: Yeah totally and Bikini Kill was part of that for me and I was quite young when I first saw them and I was like this is fucking totally up my alley this is so amazing
Me: I never got to see Bikini Kill live but you know Le Tigre Kathleen’s new band I get a lot from watching them play live
Alison: Oh Le Tigre yeah
Me: So I have to go so do you have any words of wisdom or any lessons learnt or still learning?
Alison: Not really I hate that I get that question and I never say anything (laughs) but yeah.
Me: That’s fine
(I don’t think she’ll ever understand how much her words have just saved my life)
(An incomplete) Discography!
Discount - Ataxia's Alright Tonight (1996: Liquid Meat)
Discount – Half Fiction (1997: Kat Records)
Discount – Love Billy (1998: Fuelled By Ramen)
Discount – Crash Diagnostic (2000: New American Dream)
Discount –The singles #1 (2001: New American Dream)
Discount - The singles #2 (2001: New American Dream)
The Kills – Black Rooster EP (2002: Domino)
The Kills – Keep on Your Mean Side (2002: Domino)
The Kills – No Wow (2005: Domino)
of Discount and The Kills