TLOBF Interview :: No Age

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6:10 or something on a Wednesday night, and a combination of my heating breaking, having to buy a new electric razor and then realizing they don’t have normal-world power cables, and playing juggle-the-timing with this, my girlfriend catching a train home to Glasgow, and getting to eat some food before Times New Viking start tonight has left made me… well actually I guess going back aways you could say just generally my parents’ obsession with good timing, passed in some sort of evil fully-ingrained, can’t-even-be-late-when-tries-and-gets-annoyed-with-self-at-mere-prospect-of-poor-timing form to me, has put me in kind of a bad mood, which isn’t ideal for just before getting to ask some questions to, you know, actually like a proper band who aren’t even from this country or anything and stuff.

But luckily, No Age are really nice guys and this turned out to be a really cool interview to do. It was backstage at Academy 3 in Manchester and me and my girlfriend walked through Los Campesinos soundchecking on our way there and got a Dictaphone from the student radio station and Randy was sat blogging and Dean was signing poster after poster for some reason he wasn’t entirely sure of and he drew a penis on one for posterity.

Here is my interview:

Ok so um… where would you say you existed between noise and pop?
Dean: Where do we exist?
Randy: Definitely closer in bed with pop. We’re living in the noise house… but sleeping with pop.
Dean: That makes sense. Yeah, I feel like we flirt a little more with noise.

So, would you rather write pop songs, or make load of fucked-up noise… if you couldn’t do both?
Dean: Ooh. I don’t know if I’d do either. I guess probably write pop songs… but the way we think about pop songs. Different from, um…

So what would you say makes a really good pop song then?
Dean: Interesting hook… interesting being key.

How do you write your songs?
Randy: We kind of… uh, just start playing. I feel like usually I mean… I’ll have a few ideas on the guitar, and Dean’ll have a some ideas, or like a sound or a concept or something.
Dean: Yeah, more like we’ll talk about a concept.

Cool.
Dean: But sometimes it’ll just be like, one-two-three go, method.

What made you decide to start writing music with each other, I mean I know you were in Wives together…
Dean: Yeah, uh, we were in a band… we were in Wives and we were sort of… the third person in the band was our connection to each other, and we just realized we liked playing… we just realized we had more in common, and musically, and we just thought if it was us two, we could make interesting… good… music.

Do you feel that the almost unanimous praise Nouns received was expected/justified?
Dean: Unexpected and unjustified.
Randy: Yeah, definitely never we would have imagined, I mean for us we were just trying to make a record we wanted to listen to.
Dean: But it is awesome, I listened to it the other day on the plane…

Yeah, it’s a good album.
Dean: I kind of like flipped over and I was like, ooh, but… definitely unexpected, I mean we liked it but…

So there wasn’t like a sense of the hype, building up or…
Dean: No…

Well, you got quite a lot of praise from like Pitchfork, DrownedInSound…
Dean: Oh yeah well there was a little bit of that, but it didn’t really… I mean, you know… I just thought that we wrote songs that we liked, you know… I just thought… its exciting.

Whats it like touring with Los Campesinos and Times New Viking?
Randy: <shouting across the room to Beth Times New Viking, who is sat quietly on a laptop> Oh my God Times New Viking are such assholes! <she looks up> Oh, hey! Uh… no its awesome. A lot of fun. Lots of camaraderie, joking… drinking… good, good times.
Dean: They’re really fun. It’s the last night.

Oh right yeah.
Randy: This is it! We’re gonna miss everybody.

How often are people from DrownedInSound following you around with video cameras?
<laughter, then something incomprehensible>
Randy: No, uh… I feel like it hasn’t been… too overly documented… or maybe it has. Every once in a while Gareth, who’s doing the merch and stuff will ask us to do something funny. We went to a pet store in Leeds.

What did you do there?
Randy: Just looked at bunnies, cockatiels…
Dean: <squawking in cockney accent> ‘ELLO!
Randy: Saw this bird with a cockney accent. It was fun.

Whats the ‘The Smell’ scene in Los Angeles really like, I mean is it as the media sort of portray it or…
Randy: No. Uh…
Dean: It’s a lot of fun, but…
Randy: Its just a lot of people playing good music I don’t think its necessarily… its just a space that’s really open that lets you do what you want, just lots of cool people come… or not just cool people just, people who want to start a band or whatever, it’s a place to play…
Dean: Its not really as thought out as it seems.

Have you done any new material since ‘Nouns’, and if so what direction is it going in?
Dean: In terms of new material since ‘Nouns’, we have been…
Randy: Covers.
Dean: We’ve done a lot of covers… we’ve done a B-side for the single of ‘Teen Creeps’ called ‘Intimate Descriptions’, it has, um… it sounds exactly like a song from ‘Weirdo Rippers’.

Was that intentional, or…
Dean: Oh no, we just played it back and… I think its better, its like an updated version, or something.

Oh so like 5-8-6 or whatever?
Dean: Yeah, yeah. We have a new… song… which kind of sounds like The Kinks. Yeah, so… and we’ve not really done any other stuff. We’re just trying to stay open. Definitely I wanna get more minimal, and uh… …

So no major changes of direction then?
Dean: Oh no. Just… tighten up. Yup.

OK, um… oh, I uh, forgot a question that was meant to go earlier here… when you’re writing your songs, is there one of you who’s kind of like the ‘noise’ guy and one who’s the ‘pop’ guy, or…
Both: No.
Dean: I think, uh… we’re both the pop guy, and we’re both… you know. We go back and forth. I think we’re both the other and vice versa, I think sometimes I wanna go very non-songy, or I’ll just want to make a song that’s one not or whatever, and then sometimes I’ll wanna write silly little cheeseball songs. I think that’s both the way we kind of, thought about music and wanted to make it…
Randy: Yeah.
Dean: This is a very good interview, just like
Randy: Yeah.
Dean: That’s always good.

Um… well, that’s a good a time as any, just when you said you liked how concise it was, to say I don’t have any more questions, so… if there’s anything more you want to say or…

My girlfriend: What happened to your guitar? It fell from the rafters in Glasgow…
Randy: Oh yeah when we were playing in Glasgow…
My girlfriend: Yeah, I was there.
Randy: Well I was really happy to be up there, and it was hanging from the rafters, 18ft up, and I couldn’t leave well enough alone so I had to start fucking with the cable, and… uh… it fell, and the broke but I’ll take it home and I’ll glue it back together.