Jim
On stage, we're one of the sexiest groups you can imagine. Three of four reasonably young guys in leather rolling around showing their backsides to the audience. All I know is that we get tons of screaming young girls. If a gig doesn't have sex, there's something wrong.
When it comes to a boy meets girl situation, I'm not in the least bit romantic. Romantic to me means that you build up an idea of something and nothing touches it. I tend to get romantic about things like Hell's Angels, you know, motorbikers that wear dirty black leather. People are too complex to get romantic about. I'm romantic about Rock N Roll music; to me Rock N Roll is a very romantic idea.
I know it sounds like a complete cliche, but I've always been a big Velvet Underground fan, and the effect I want to have on people is the effect it has on me looking at pictures of Lou Reed, John Cale and Sterling Morrison in 1966. The photographs of them in Andy Warhol's Factory contain just about everything that made their music so awesome. That's what we're trying to do -- our words, our music, our photographs. It should all be that one thing.
I think the whole surf thing had a lot of potential... I mean, think of the Beach Boys brilliant songs, but look at the way they dressed, look at the way they produced their records. It should have been a gang of Hell's Angels that made surf music.
The best thing that could have happened to the Rolling Stones was if they'd have met Charles Manson in '69 and he could have hacked their heads off with a chainsaw.
I'm embarassed to tell people what I do with my life, to think that what I do is the same as what Eric Clapton does. He's raping it, he's puking on it, he's pissing on it. For that reason I don't want to be a part of it.
They write encyclopedias on the Eighties and we're not even mentioned. We WERE the fucking eighties.
Guitars look good. That's all we really care about. They look good, they make good sounds. You don't really need to sit down and learn to play the fuckin' thing. That would be three or four years of your life wasted. You should be doing a gig the day you get your first guitar.
WORST PLACE?
"I stayed in a lot of shit holes, but the worst was this place in Fulham. It was a big house and would have been comfortable for a family of four, but there were just all these little bedsits. It was horribly grimy and dirty. Really unclean."
WORST FEATURE?
"The other people. There was this psychotic Scottish drug dealer who used to come in with blood all over his face. Then there was this woman down the hall who used to have arguments with herself. You'd hear her shouting "BAAAASTARD!" and throwing things around in her room, but she lived on her own. Must have been schizophrenic."
CHANCES OF STUDENT SURVIVAL?
"Well, you'd have to be pretty tough. I remember one time when William came round to have a bath, and he was getting out of the bath just as the door got kicked in by the mad Scottish drug dealer. He'd got blood all over his face and needed to wash it off. He just said "WAGHYOUSEDOINMAAAGHBATHROOM?". You'd get out of there quick. Having said that I lived there for years."
"...but it's easy to be exciting onstage. You could walk onstage with a gun and shoot a dog. That's exciting, but so what?... Excitement is easy, you just walk on with a road drill and destroy the stage. But anybody can do it. And if that's what you're into buy a road drill and a stage and do it yourself!" - NME / Sporran Co-Despondents / September 24, 1994
William
I've never felt comfortable on stage -- never. Playing live is the biggest contradiction. Everything we do in the studio may sound spontaneous, but it's not. It takes time. I've always hated other people's songs played live too. I just hate gigs.
After us, the perfect record is 'I Wanne Be Your Dog' by the Stooges, but the horrible guitar solo fucks it up.
Bo Diddley wrote 'Who Do You Love' in 1955 and I don't know if you can make out the words on our version, but they're like pure evil. These days they would be considered grossly offensive, too evil for mass consumption. And this was released in the day of Doris Day and Perry Como...
Whenever my girlfriend wears tights, I refuse to see her, I put her on the first train back to Hornchurch and tell her to come back wearing suspenders.
There has never been a riot at any of our gigs. You get the odd clown who thinks he's Rambo, doing tap dances on the mixing desk. I hate it, I despise it. We're trying to present ourselves as serious, not a Cockney Rejects Oi Oi type of group.
Sacrifice myself for rock'n'roll? Fuck off - Vox, February 1992
There's nothing worse than waking up next to someone you don't even know or like
I think success isn't necessarily a good thing. Look at U2. What will they ever do to top Zoo TV? And look what happened to Kurt Cobain. That guy should've been a bus driver. He would've been alive until he was 87. - CMJ: New Music Monthly, January 1995
A lot of times we're just awkward, fucked-up little idiots - RAYGUN magazine, September 1994
