Good Music. Bad Luck. Not Evil - Black Lips

We at Gigwise can straight up bare witness to the insanity that is the lives of all of the members of the Black Lips. The guys have had anything but an easy year.  In a nutshell, this self-described “flower punk” band have been signed to a popular label (Vice), have been on a virtually non-stop world tour, are just about to put out a new album (Good Bad Not Evil), had their network television debut in the U.S. (Late Night with Conan O’Brien), been the first punk rock band to tour the Middle East, and are about to start production on a film. And that’s just a fraction of their endeavours.

We sit down with bassist/vocalist Jared Swilley to find out everything about the craziness of this past year, including why he thinks the UK is tough to conquer tour-wise, how insane the Texas festival South by Southwest was for them this year (there was an incident where a balcony collapsed), how he was almost detained at the Newcastle airport for apparently violating a terrorist act, and other outrageous moments.  We are actually supposed to get the whole band to ourselves, but in true Black Lips fashion, something chaotic throws them off their schedule.

Just the night before we’re supposed to have a chat with the band, we find out that lead singer / guitarist Cole Alexander is stranded. In Portugal. Alone. “Yeah, Cole lost his passport and he’s either still in Portugal or on a plane going back to the U.S.,” Jared explains straightforwardly. So where are the other two band members, guitarist Ian St. Pe’ and drummer Joe Bradley? “The other guys had to get some sleep.  We didn’t even get back to our place until 7am, so they just had to crash.  But I’m still goin’,” he says.

What did the guys do the night before at the gig they were scheduled to play in Leicester?  Surely with one man down they would have cancelled…wrong. “No, we played it.  I mean, it’s rough playing without our full line-up, but we’ve had to do it before.  I think we’ve played without one of each of us at least once.  If we have a show to play, we’re not gonna cancel it because of that.”

“I’m just glad that our audience has grown in Leicester, even if it’s just a little,” the sleepy-eyed Jared continues. “The UK’s a tough little country.” How so? “It’s small, and there are a lot of bands, so there’s a lot of competition. I think it’s way easier to be a band in the States than it is to be one in England.”  Interesting.

Most of us who have followed the Black Lips’ career for the past year probably heard about them first because of their ridiculously packed South by Southwest schedule. In just three days the band played over thirteen gigs across the city of Austin, Texas and were labelled “The Hardest Working Band at SXSW” by the New York Times newspaper.  We ask Jared to explain the chaos of that week. “This year was definitely insane. We kept agreeing to do more shows and more shows, just piling ‘em on.  On paper it looked good, but once we got there it was kind of like getting beat up every day, physically.  It kinda sucked because I missed all the bands I wanted to see.  By the end of it, I couldn’t even talk I was so exhausted. I think we averaged two hours of sleep a night. We barely even had enough time to get drunk.” Yes, of course, the true rock ‘n rollers always have time for booze. 

Continuing on SXSW, Jared tells us a funny story: “We were going to play this Vice party.  Against Me! was playing, and all of a sudden there were all these people running around yelling that the porch had collapsed. I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’, so we got the hell out of there and moved the show to a random bridge somewhere, but we didn’t play. We gave the show to Fucked Up and the Carbonas.  That was the highlight of South by Southwest, this random show on a bridge. I can’t believe it didn’t get busted by the cops.”

For anyone who hasn’t seen the Black Lips either live or on film, to describe them we’d say they’re, well, crazy. In a good way. Think of the Jackass guys with instruments. On stage they’ve been known to get naked, snog each other, urinate, and just wreak general entertaining havoc.  So what do their parents think of them, their onstage antics and their music? “They like our music, but my dad is a bishop, so he gets upset about the things we do sometimes. But they come to our shows, so it’s good.”