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“I don’t mean to sound weird,” says Trail Of Dead frontman, Conrad Keely, “But do you mind if I do this interview lying down?” Given the band’s current touring schedule, it’d seem pretty miserly to begrudge him the request. Slightly worse for wear after a trans-Atlantic flight from Texas, an all-night bender in Camden, and a three hour bus journey, Conrad lies curled up on the floor of Cardiff’s spartan dressing room. “You’d know after three days whether touring is for you. Sleeping on a bunk bed on wheels is a strange experience…”
It’s the first night of Trail Of Dead’s UK tour. They are supporting heavy hitting supergroup Audioslave. January saw the release of ‘Worlds Apart’, Trail Of Dead’s most ambitious and experimental work to date. The accompanying DVD documentary shows the core of the band, Conrad and Jason Reece, getting into all manner of scrapes with tour managers, breaking things, and pontificating on the history of rock and roll.
Conrad doesn’t know that the Cardiff Arena management have purposely removed all the expensive furniture from their dressing room. They anticipate Trail Of Dead will live up to their petulant reputation. It’s a good place to start:
It’s the first night of your UK tour, what will the tour manager do if you smash up your equipment again?
Oh he won’t do anything, it’s up to our guitar techs to salvage that! It’s funny ‘cause we have our own set of equipment over here. Supposedly in London there’s this storage space full of four years worth of accumulated broken stuff that we’ve just left there. They could make an amazing garage sale. I’d love to see it, a big room full of junk (laughs).
Do you get any time off?
We had a lot of time off before ‘Worlds Apart’ came out, I think it influenced how the record was made. I was doing a lot of travelling, I went to Thailand to visit family who I hadn’t seen in like twenty years. I spent some time in Paris by myself, it affected my writing and gave me time to figure out what direction I wanted the band to go in next.
Worlds Apart seems more political than your previous work, do you agree?
Yes, but not in the sense we’re actually talking about politics. I don’t consider myself right or left wing. I think politics is about the way people treat each other in a global sense. There’s a definite ‘state of the world’ tone to the record, which comes from touring so much. I think we’re at a very exciting time, but the potential for global disaster is huge. The world is in a precarious, over-populated position. Personally, I would advocate the legalisation of marijuana.
What are you listening to at the moment?
Nothing either I or anyone else is probably very familiar with. I don’t like listening to something more than once, I like being challenged by the unusual. There’s this band called Orchestra Baobab. I love that. It’s like this Afro-Cuban style music. They’re from Senegal so they sing in French. I’ve just downloaded a twenty volume collection called ‘The History of Country & Western Music’. It’s really made me think how the history of rock has been misrepresented.
On the Worlds Apart DVD you say your music is no different to Bill Halley. What did you mean?When I said that, there was a certain element of facetiousness, but to someone living in this day and time, genres matter. There are huge differences between our music and that of Mogwai, Audioslave and The Strokes, but if you imagine listening to rock music four hundred years from now, in the same way we listen to classical music today, you’re actually clumping together three hundred years of western music. To listeners in the future, rock and roll is also going to sound all the same, in the same way classical music does to many people right now.
Has new technology affected your sound?
For the new record, yes. We used sound effects libraries to get all the bird noises. It’s a bridge between two ideas on the record. We see making a record as a continuous narrative. ‘Worlds Apart’ isn’t a concept record but we’re inviting the listener to interpret it themselves. A good example would be the second side of ‘Abbey Road.’ That montage of songs helps create an image.
What’s the deal with swapping instruments on stage?
It’s always been that way with me and Jason (Reece), we would take turns to play drums. We didn’t want designated roles in the band. The idea would be each song would be played by whoever was best suited to it. That was influenced by the bands we grew up with in Washington State. In the early days, Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill would sing and play drums.
You’ve toured with Mogwai a few times, do you share a musical affinity?
They’re our oldest buddies in the business. I think their attitude is similar to ours. They’re very compatible with us in terms of personality. We have a shared sense of humour, we like to call Scotland the Texas of the UK (laughs).
Do you have any contemporaries?
I don’t want to sound arrogant but I do feel we occupy a very lonely position. Maybe we have similarities with the Mars Volta. We are friends with them but there isn’t a strong musical dialogue, it’s more about shared appreciation.
What’s next for the band?
We’ve really missed touring. You couldn’t imagine two more opposing lifestyles than making a record and life on the road. Touring is all about meeting as many people as you can, recording is about locking the world out. I don’t think there’s much normal about our lives in Trail Of The Dead. Compared to my mom’s job in an office, being a rock musician is pretty wild…
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