Field Day Aftermath

Another festival down, and plenty more on the way. Juke's day in the field turned out to be another congealed mess of partying and pestilence, and all the oddities in between. Definite highlight of the day was being reminded of this song by a woman in sequinned pants eating a flaming candelabra. Rad.

After the volume was turned down and we were escorted off the premises by a squint eyed security guard with a lisp, we went to a pub to hang out with old favourites No Age after they killed it in the park to chat about the day, record stores and their new album.



Hey guys, how was your Field Day? Do you find the interaction with you music is different over here to in LA?

Dean: The UK is fucking great usually. We can usually get people going wild.

Randy: Yeah, people told us that the UK audience is pretty reserved...

Dean: ...but we find them to be wild beasts. Wilder beasts.

How was your experience of the weekend?

Dean: It’s a great festival. I’m really into the artwork and the whole atmosphere of the day. We’ve been in London for a week just hanging out, so it was great to play the show.

Oh yeah? Where were you hanging out?

Dean: Umm all over. We went to visit the Crass house, you know, where the band Crass started. We’ve been hanging out in Bethnal Green, Shoreditch and on Brick Lane too.

Have you bought any good records since you’ve been over here?

Dean: I’ve only bought one record, the new Wolfgang Voigt record. Other than that I haven’t bought anything. I’ll be back in October, so I’ll try and get some more then. We really wanted to go to this record shop in...where was it, Holloway?

Randy: Was it DOC Records? Our friend lives above that store.

Dean: Yeah, DOC Records. There’s all these old EPs and LPs. It looks really cool, and all the records were like dollars.

It’s a real shame because it feels like all the old style record store have totally died out or are in the process of doing so in the UK

Dean: Everywhere, man. We did find a record store, I can’t remember where it was, but we were driving to London with Silk Flowers and we found this store

Randy: The one in the basement? Oh yeah.

Dean: Yeah, and it had like such rad records. Young Marble Giants 45s for like a dollar, loads of Madness and Two Tone stuff, The Specials…like really cool records, you know.

When you played your set on Saturday it sounded like you yelled “Fuck Depeche Mode!” – did you actually say that?

Dean: I probably said that. I said a bunch of stuff.

Randy: I thought you said “Fuck the police!”?

Dean: I said a lot of things. I said “Fuck the law”, “fuck Depeche Mode” just cos. I was just talking shit. I just felt like talking shit.

Do you like Depeche Mode?

Dean: Yeah, I do. I do a lot. I like bands that rip off Depeche Mode. Those guys are awesome.

What other bands did you catch at the weekend?

Randy: Atlas Sound.

Dean: Pantha Du Prince…We saw Phoenix. Thought they were awesome. That’s about all we saw, we were just running about the whole time.

What do you think of the music here or what you’ve experienced of it in comparison to what you’ve got back home?

Dean: Well, you’ve got things like Upset The Rhythm, which throws it down and puts out really good music. That’s the kind of world we know from London, I guess, and it seems amazing.

It was a shame that your set got stopped at the weekend as you didn’t really get to play much off the new record…is the guy playing synths at the side a really recent addition because he wasn’t around when you played London before?

Randy: He’s playing samples. A lot of the songs that we were writing were written out of the range of the samplers, so it just made a lot of sense to have another pair of hands to turn all of those. It just got to the point where we another guy being there really helped.

Yeah, cos in the past you’ve been like moving all over the stage hitting stuff with your feet…

Randy: We still got a lot of stuff going on, but it’s just a bit easier having someone else there.

Dean: I mean, it’s challenging and it’s fun, but sometimes you just want to relax.

Dude, you didn’t look all that relaxed

Randy: Haha, it’s a lot of work.

Dean: But like before I’ve been like “Arrr!”, and it’s fun to, you know, like push yourself, but…and plus if you’ve got another person you’ve got more amps, so it’s just more full sounding.



Listening to the new album through, the sound seems to have taken like a lot more of pop direction with more focus on structure, is that something you were conscious of?

Randy: Not really. I think we just wanted to make something that we liked, and that’s just what came out, and what we were interested in. I was listening to a lot of power pop and stuff like that, so I was listening to that sort of style of song writing from a guitar perspective…Elvis Costello inspired ideas…

Dean: I was listening to more like ambient kind of stuff…

It’s strange because you can hear that influence more on like Weirdo Rippers than you can on this record…

Dean: Well, now I think we tried to put them together. Like, we tried to add that layer of ambient stuff like with the songs. Thing is, with Weirdo Rippers, there’s like two brains like fighting with each other and with this record we kinda tried to put them together a little.

Randy: We just experimented by combining sound for musical pieces, versus me like having a schizophrenic live set up…I think that we were able to get a lot of form by doing long atmospheric pieces like with the soundtrack to The Bear etc, and I think there was a conversation at one point about this being a lot of compulsive songs and then at some later date doing something that’s a lot more free form.

Dean: Yeah, we could have almost just made an ambient record.

Do think that’s the direction you’re eventually going to go?

Dean: Well, no, we did the Losing Feeling EP and it felt like we were going to go on to make something like that, but then at the same time that we were writing for this record, we did the score for The Bear and we did the Rodarte film, and we did this collaboration with our friend Brian Roettinger, that’s like samples live and stuff. And I kinda feel like we got a lot of it out of our system, but at the same time we were writing for this record. It kinda felt like we had the ball and we were running with it and we did a little juke…I don’t fucking know man. It’s just nice to be able to make the record we want. It’s cool to just do whatever you know.