It's not too hard to understand why a band like No Age have generated so much interest since they rose from the ashes of their previous band, Wives. The two-piece drench their fans with enthusiasm, distorted hooks and then tie-dye their songs with ambient soundscapes. Their most recent release, 'Nouns', (released through the ever respectable Sub Pop label) is their most celebrated release to date. Amidst their european tour, Craig Sharp gets to talk to guitarist Randy Randall backstage at The Scala in London.
So, let's start with the fact that you're a two-piece. As a band, is that a lot easier or a lot harder to handle?
It's so much easier to handle. It makes the whole decision process become entirely streamlined - "should we do this?", "yes/no", etc. If there were more people involved you'd have to wrangle, do things to everyone's schedules, see who's available when but with this way decision-making is done within a minute.
Travelling's easier too. We travel around in a small mini van, and just need to get two plane tickets.
So is it just you guys who go on tour then?
Yeah, just us. We have had a merch person and a person to do sound in the past but still, four people including crew for a band isn't bad.
Sub Pop recently had their 20th birthday, I was reading a lot of features in magazines like Mojo, Plan B, etc about it and they all highlight you as their staple band at the moment. Was there a lot of pressure when you signed to Sub Pop to live up to the label's prestigious nature?
Well if there was, we didn't feel it... No one said to us that we had to sell a lot of records. I think the only pressure was that we knew people might hear it more than anything we had done before, but we were already excited about that prospect; we wanted people to hear it. Sub Pop were really supportive and were awesome just to talk with. They'd humour us with crazy ideas like the 64 page, full-colour booklet for the 'Nouns' CD, which, well, CDs aren't the biggest selling product, y'know, but we wanted to add value to it. So if you were to buy it, you knew you had something worthy of having.
I guess that's it, music isn't enough to sell CDs anymore - artwork has risen to become paramount in the selling of physical music. Your artwork on previous release, like with the 5 EPs was really brilliant. I had the 'Get Hurt' 10"...
Yeah, with that photograph of the girl in the swing with the 'No Age' t-shirt? That's such a beautiful, haunting photo.
I didn't know all the records spelt out 'No Age', I just thought there was a cool bit of abstract/op art on the back - but yeah I bought that record solely because of the artwork, I knew nothing about you guys.
Oh wow, yeah, that's the power of art! That's how I grew up buying records, I mean still to this day you can tell when someone makes something that has a particular point-of-view, you know, I think we all know what kind of artwork we find somewhat different or just intriguing. Like that band, 10CC? They had beautiful artwork, not always the best records though...
"I still think the physical world of music is an important part of life."
So, to you guys it must be important?
Yeah, it's 2008. You download, I download, we're doing an interview for a website - chances are the people reading this are downloading something right now, as they're reading this they're probably waiting for something to download. So it's a fact of life but I still think the physical world of music is an important part of life. The records that I own, the CDs that get scratched in my car are still part of my daily existence and I see them more than I see my mp3s. So, yeah, I'm into it but I guess we don't worry about how the cover art will look like in a half-inch by half-inch square on iTunes...
And with the actual method of that release. I think that strategy's really great for an independent band; 5 EPs released through 5 different independent labels on the same day...
Ah, yeah. They weren't released on the same day but that was the aim. It was all released in the same month though. But to be honest there was never really a plan to do what we did. We were aware that no-one knew who we were. We wanted to release records in a way where we didn't feel like we were putting it all in one basket.
We had the concept and got in contact with 5 record labels, they were really honest and supportive but we didn't know if they'd definitely release it so we thought, "Well, we'll take our chances". We didn't think all five would do it, it was shocking because no-one knew who we were. They were cool independent labels from all over: New York, LA, London, Malmö. It went far better than we ever imagined. We thought we'd take our chances and maybe half of them would forget to put it out, not have the money or we'd never hear from them again. It was unusual that it worked out, we pretty much rolled the dice five times.
They all came out though. With the design [each release spelling out the band's name] - part of what Dean and I do is just make each other laugh with crazy ideas and he suggest it on tour and it sounded like such a blast. It was a joke and our first experiment in this kind of 'one-upmanship' of crazy ideas.
It seems like a good idea for a band who's perhaps worried about releasing a debut album and it not coming out properly or it not getting press or whatever and wasting all those songs that you recorded. It's pretty scary.
You and Dean were in Wives together, has it informed a lot of what you do with No Age?
We learnt a lot from it. It was great, it was all we did. We toured and got broken bones and took a chance and it literally destroyed us as a band. As people we really had to come back and think what we really wanted because we learned that people lie, they cheat, and we were just such a young, naïve band and we learnt a lot from Wives. From some of those lessons we learnt came No Age.
Suddenly I realised that Wives wasn't all that I wanted to play. We were young, it was too dark and aggressive. When we toured it I wanted to play something I could relate to in a better way, not something I wrote on my one angry night.
So do you have a job other than the band or is this full-time now?
It's started to get so busy, I love doing this and there's just not enough time anymore. I'm not home long enough. The main job I had was teaching for a special needs school and I loved it, it was such a fun job and I even enjoyed working there on an early morning after a show. I tried to substitute teach as much as I could but we've spent pretty much the last 6 months on the road. I've had some of those kids message me on MySpace like "Hey Mister, I saw your band on MTV/some magazine"... I always told them I played in a band and they just kind of laughed at me!
"That's the big thing about DIY; if you want it, you have to do it."
I interviewed John from Health quite recently and we talked a bit about The Smell, I know you've helped dig trenches for The Smell - which has been well publicised...
[Laughs] Yeah, I never thought that would come up in an interview! A lot of people worked harder than I did...
How has a venue like that turned out to be really important to your local scene?
Oh, it's hugely important to us which is part of the reason why it comes up so often and we talk a lot about it in interviews. I feel that an all-ages venues, especially in America, that has a $5 entry fee and is fun and kind of feels dangerous is really important to foster people's imaginations. I mean, the first gig I ever went to there I thought, "I could do this". Y'know, I just had this sense, 'they're just people doing this' - there was a guy with a stamp, stamping people's hands and some guy doing sound and it looked do-able. The music being made was cool and something I could play, I could see what they were doing... It just made it seem so accessible. But I was 17, it still took me 4/5 years to work up the courage to do it and get a band together.
But yeah, The Smell's really important to No Age, and that's what's ironic about it - that we're able to tour - because if you played The Smell, you played... The Smell. No-one else would have you. There's so many shitty clubs in LA, and bars, that are just for cool kids and The Smell was never like that.
You mentioned being inspired by The Smell's accessibility, does this carry through with No Age to inspire DIY ethics to people listening to your music?
It's all we really know. I think we'd have a hard time encouraging people to do anything else but work hard. Dean and I are both hard workers and, yeah, that's the big thing about DIY; if you want it, you have to do it. You know, the whole matter of the fact is: you just do it.
"[The Smell] just made everything seem so accessible."
I realised this a while ago. After college, I had stayed on at school and figured out how much that was going to get me (the degree) and the day I graduated I couldn't get a job. My first job was working in a hotel changing the little bottles of whiskey in the mini-bars. So I thought, "OK, well I better figure out what I want to do". The thing I always wanted to do was play guitar so it became clear to me, like, when you meet a writer and you ask, "So, what do you do" and they answer. "I'm a writer" it's because they spend more time writing than they do anything else. I was like, "Well, I work in a record store, in a restaurant, in a hotel..." and I wanted to be able to say, "I play guitar". So I made it a point to play guitar more than I worked. Whether it was good or not I would sit and play, writing stuff just because I felt like if I wanted to say that I play guitar, I had to play guitar. You know, that was always my dream and I had to just pick it up and do it and maybe I was sitting, watching TV or drinking beer or hanging out with my girlfriend but I made it a point to be like, "No, I want to do this, I've got to spend my time doing it." It wasn't out of accident, I wasn't living somewhere in the mountains...
I noticed quite recently you featured on Pete Wentz [from Fallout Boy]'s FN MTV show, I wouldn't particularly associate No Age with that type of thing but I think it's pretty cool exposure for the band - but does all this attention worry you; that you might be labelled as a buzz band?
I don't think so, we know what we're doing. The funny thing about the FN MTV thing was that I don't think we went over that well... It would've been scary if people did like but I think people really didn't like it, or like us. Their responses were so funny as well, this kid was right - we don't sing much, it does look like we made the video for no money in our back yard, etc. and it's like... 'Exactly'! That's the thing; we're not big rockstars! If anyone was to say we had sold out or that we're a buzz band then it's like, the proof's in the pudding.
The other thing is maybe people will appreciate it and yeah, you can do it yourself and yeah, you can have a video that looks cheap and, "Wow, I never thought I'd see something like this on MTV" so hopefully that will encourage kids and people watching to think, "Wait, I could do that!" Maybe all their friends were there and laughed at us but one kid thought, "Hmmm... They're no different to me - if they can do it then maybe I can do it". That's it, ultimately we're not trying to be something we're not.
But yeah, the MTV thing was a lot of fun.
I remember seeing one of the responses on YouTube when I was trying to watch clips from the show online and it was hilarious! Some black kid with an amazing accent saying stuff like, "All they did was run! They should call the band 'No Walking'!"
[Laughs] Oh yeah, I loved that video! I thought it was awesome! See, we know what we do and we like doing what we do. I wouldn't know how to do what Pete Wentz does. I don't want to do that.
You tour really hard, does it ever get really stressful for you guys?
Stressful? Yes. It's hard being away from your friends and your home. That's the hardest part. Things like today where the airline baggage handlers in Belgium decided to go on strike on the same day that we were in Belgium. We sat on a plane for an hour yesterday because no one would get the bridge to connect the plane to the airport and let people off. So when we finally get off the plane, our bags don't get off the plane and we had to borrow equipment from Health so we could play a show in France.
Did you still have your loop pedal? [As a two-piece No Age loop guitar parts to add extra sounds and it's used strongly in their songs]
Yeah. I mean, 'Thank God!' too! So we waited around and got our bags this morning and ran as fast as we could to catch our flight and just missed it. In the end we got the Eurostar through the Channel Tunnel to London.
I know you guys both are keen skateboarders, I used to do a bit of that when I was younger and through skateboarding videos I got into a lot of hardcore and post-hardcore from America. Do you have a favourite skateboard video soundtrack?
So many. I'd go for Toy Machine's 'Heavy Metal'. It had Jon Spencer Blues Explosion on Ed Templeton's section...
Ha, he used to be my favourite skater...
Yeah?! He still is for me. He actually took all our press photos for Nouns with us looking really withdrawn and me wearing a coon skin hat... Yeah, he's really cool.
Okay, well, I think that's everything. Thanks for your time.
Thanks so much.
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| Coding: Darren Burrows