It’s been about six months since Gigwise last caught up with the guys from Black Lips. Back then they were having trouble even getting into the country, so we relished the chance to grab a rare half hour of the band’s time to sit down and have a catch up. Along the way, Billie Joe Armstrong, Jay-Z and even David Beckham get a tongue-lashing as we discover their juvenile days may be behind them but thankfully the quick charismatic wit remains.
Guitarist Ian Saint Pé sits down in a constricted corner of this diminutive London bar to begin the conversation as bassist Jared Swilley and drummer Joe Bradley make a quick getaway for a cigarette. “Life is a holiday. I’m on permanent vacation,” reveals a grinning Ian, exposing his alarmingly striking gold teeth. After revealing his current contentment within the band - four years after his induction - Ian turns his attention to finding a new partner…a female one. “M.I.A is taken so I don’t know,” laughs Ian who insists I mention this so he can go on tour with her and win her over.
Joe and Jared enter as Ian darts off for a phone call and the conversation turns to the upcoming festival season. The band will be at this year’s much debated Glastonbury Festival and Joe has some strong words for the cause of all this conflict – Jay-Z. “I think he kind of ruined rap music for the north east for about ten years. I’m a little bias because I love Southern rap and there’s tons of great hip hop out of the north east and I really think they should have stuck to hip hop. They get a little too conscious. I like my rap music dumb and simple.”
It’s not just the rapper who gets to feel the sting of the criticism. Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong is next. “I think that guy’s a douche-bag,” quips Jared before explaining: “What really turned me off was all these bands who think they are so profound for saying ‘oh we hate George Bush’ – that’s such a cliché.” Joe jumps in to profess: “It’s more punk rock to say you like George Bush.”
The Atlanta outfit have had their own personal share of controversy over the years including an incident straight after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Advertising a Red Cross benefit gig with a poster that included a picture of a plane going into the World Trade Center the band naturally upset a few of the locals. “We had ‘blowing up with The Black Lips’ and all these skinheads and local patriots got really mad at us so we had to hide out for a little while. People got really pissed at that,” explains Jared. Joe defends the decision by stating: “We were doing the same thing the newspapers were doing. We were trying to sell a show, they were trying to sell a paper.”
Destruction is never too far away from the band whose new single ‘Bad Kids’ – which includes footage of the riots in Northern Ireland – depicts individuals who are not too distant from their own memories. “It was a basic pop structure, but then we thought about a bunch of stupid stuff we were doing when we were kids. It’s fun to reminisce.” Jared takes a moment to think of a particular incident before revealing: “One time we took acid and broke into our elementary school with baseball bats and I think we caused $300,000 worth of damage, we smashed every computer and every window, then we did it again the next night. Then three weeks later I was in boot camp.”
However, although the band have become known for juvenile misdemeanours at gigs – including vomiting, urinating, nudity and most notably a girl masturbating while she was on stage – Joe admits those incidents are becoming less frequent. “It doesn’t really happen anymore and it hasn’t for a while, but we’re entertainers as well as musicians.” He describes how some of the wild situations first came about: “We didn’t know how to play our instruments and things would be breaking so you’d have to find some way to make up for the lack of music.”
The conversation takes a careful prod back onto the subject of the band’s most recent album ‘Good Bad Not Evil’ and more specifically death. A standout track is the rugged grace of ‘How Do You Tell A Child Someone Has Died’. With lyrics about a drink drive accident I ask if the song is about the tragic loss of their former member Ben Eberbaugh. Jared says not directly: “It’s just a homage to the old country genre like trucker music where they’d just tell really sad stories…a dark country narrative.” Joe approaches the subject of Ben’s passing with an optimistic outlook. He says: “That shit happens. You got to move on because if you let things get you down you’ll never get anywhere. Not that we don’t remember him because of course we do – he was our buddy.”
So will there be any new music around the corner anytime soon? Of course, Black Lips are heading into the studio this summer to record their follow up to 2007’s record. “We’re planning on recording in July for our new album. We’ve all got tons of ideas and I wanna pump them out so they don’t get too stale in our minds,” explains Joe.
Touring has been an incessant part of Black Lips lives and they admit a change in the mechanics of a gig would be more then welcome in the future. “We want to do a show with Chubby Brown and have him up before us,” reveals Jared. We start talking about the surf movie ‘An Endless Summer’ to which Joe enthusiastically professes: “I would like to go on that tour. If we could be a backup band for the Endless Summer tour that would be awesome.”
And so comes the end of another chat with Black Lips. With it being a big football night we start chatting casually about sports, Jared declares: “In America sports are really gay.” Joe jokes: “ It’s like wars. They don’t fight wars over here anymore so they fight it out on the football field.” Inevitably Mr Beckham soon gets an earful as Jared says: “I think it’s hilarious that they spent all that money on him and he finally scored his first goal like two weeks ago. He’s horrible – he’s like 35 or something.”
With our second chat in half a year, Black Lips are beginning to feel like an old friend to Gigwise. We’ve learnt yet more about the playful debauchery of their younger years, their loves, their hates and how although their age maybe growing their will to perform and entertain is equal in maturity. They might not be the bad kids anymore but dreary contemptuous old men they’ll never be.
