Bad Kids No More - The Black Lips

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.”