"NMN started because I bought a TIAC 4 track reel to reel in 1979. My brother was going to high school at the time and I was doing little or nothing so I thought `Why don't we make some music' because I had been listening to Punk rock from England and stuff like that. I figured that if they could get away with it, so could I (haha). We didn't become NMN until about 3 years later. We did an album of just 2 piece music because when we finally played live we decided we wanted to do something different, we didn't bother getting a guitar player, we played for about a year and a half with just bass, drums and vocals. I think the whole of the rhythm section can be more than just the background for a guitar. When you play without a guitar you loose all the cliches, because you can't do them, so you have to fill out dynamics and melody and interest in the song with rhythms and doing a little more doing a little different than you would in a standard rock format.
So we did that and were pretty successful and people actually liked it. We did an album of that called Mama of which only 500 copies were made. It was one of those cottage industry things. Then a good friend of ours (Andy Kerr) who was in another band that John had also joined called the Infamous Scientists, a punk band from Victoria B.C. That band broke up and he was at a loose end and we were getting kind of tired with the restrictions of the format that we were in and we knew that he was a good performer who didn't indulge in rock cliches in guitar usually, unless he wanted to. But most of the time he wanted to do something different so he fitted in perfectly and we have been in that format for eight years. He makes a game of not putting his name on the albums. I submit that it is just to attract more attention to himself.
How did your association with Alternative Tentacles begin?
We just did one of those horrible starvation tours to the states but one place we played to 20 people, one of them was Jello Biafra and other people from A.T. who had been warned by our friends to come out and see us. And they did and fed us spaghetti and put us up for three days while we were at a loose end in San Francisco. We had already recorded Sexmad and had already put that out in Canada under a label Psyche and Jello heard it, he hadn't liked our other recorded efforts, but he liked the live band and he liked Sexmad so he put it out and we have been putting records out with them ever since. Which is really good, it is a real person to person relationship with the people who work there and some who have some and gone over the years. And with Jello himself we have just finished doing an album with him which has just been released. It was kind of an interesting thing to do. I don't know how seriously you can take these things, its sort of a battle of the network stars.
Jello just had tonnes of songs and he didn't have a band anymore and he was looking for people to help get his music happening again and we were glad to do that, we were always big fans of him and the DK's. He also did work with DOA as well and with Al Jourgenson , the Lard stuff which I think is probably the best since it the most different. He tends to turn everyone who plays with him into the DK's. (haha). Which just goes to show how much control he had over that band and how much it was his musical and lyrical vision. He was really the one that made that band go. It's a shame they broke up but that's what happens to bands.
It was sort of a very casual thing, I hope people don't take it too seriously like this was the ultimate from either of us, it's just a way of getting together and making some music and that's about as serious as it should be taken. I think there are some really good songs, I think Chew is a really really good song. We had fun because he did a benefit with us, we did an anti-censorship benefit up here at the Commodore. He was here and he did some spoken word and then he did two songs off the album with us, which is the only time they have ever been performed. It was kind of neat watching him crawl all over the stage. (haha). I really hope he gets out because his strong point is performing, whether spoken word or in a band situation. I just hope he eventually gets it together and gets his own firm solid band together.
How have you been received touring in the States and Canada.
We have done relatively well everywhere, by that I mean in the states we play to hundreds rather than thousands and get paid in hundreds and not thousands. Relatively in the States because it is very difficult for an independent band in the states to make a go of it and to get good shows and get good crowds and that sort of stuff. In Canada we do a little better, because the scene here is a little better. In Europe we have just done wonderfully. I don't really know why we just seem to have come over at the right time and we were still out of the hard-core scene but playing a little different kind of music which people appreciated. We did really well and I am grateful.
We do really well in Amster-dam because that is where we first started touring overseas. The dutch crowds have always been really good to us, in Germany as well. And England I mean, when we first went over people warned us, ` Oh no you're not going to get payed and there'll be two people there.' Right from our first tour we didn't make a lot of money but we got good shows and good crowds and everytime we've gone back we've done better. And Scotland, I think we've played Edinburgh twice. We got there so late, we are usually pretty good about arriving on time but we got totally lost, one of our amps broke down and we had to spend three hours getting it fixed. I don't think we arrived till like 2330 and the promoters going ahhh! and there was no us. But it turned out alright, we just whipped up on stage and it was so hot in there, we could hardly breathe. We did a lot of those shows cause a lot of the places in Europe were squats or small halls and stuff and they tend to be overly packed which is good, you like a lot of people, but you like to breath.
How do you survive when not in the studio or touring? Day jobs, prostitution perhaps?
The last year and a half we have not had to have day jobs. We have made quite a bit of money playing music. It is a nice thing to be able to do after ten years. It is not living very highly, but at least you don't have to wash dishes and stuff like that, we may have to do that again, we took a seven month break after the last tour because you also have to be something other than a touring musician otherwise that becomes kind of a mechanical act after a while which is not good for you or the audience. I moved over here, I got married, I am becoming a sort of suburban dad. . .
John and Andy are still in Victoria hanging out doing that they want to do, John does a lot of work with other bands, he produced Victims family's new album, and they are a really good band. He has done other local bands as well.
So as a band, do you all get along?
We do, it's a bit like a a marriage, at this point a bit like an old marriage. We're pretty tight as people. We know each other well enough to know what to expect and what not to expect. That is the down fall of most of the band after a few years, it's like: I can't stand this person anymore, I'm quitting. We've managed to avoid that by giving each other distance when we're not doing that band stuff and also the fact that we just like what we do, I hope we have respect for each others talents, we have fun, we write a new song it's like a kick in the ass, it's fun, and it's that way when we tour and the people we tour with in terms of promoters, people who book us and the crowd who come, it's all pretty casual, it all pretty one-to-one. It's not a big deal. It's become a little bigger of a deal but we seem to have snuck around that and therefore there is not pressure. I think if we had been more successful sooner we might not be a band, what happens to a lot of bands is that they become very popular and it does become very official and very much of a business and there is a lot of pressure and that contributes to any kind of personality clashes that you may have, or differences of opinion, or inflated egos. By accident and sort of by design we have managed to stay small, not real small, big enough to pay our rent and stuff like that, but small enough to keep out of the major bullshit and that in itself helps the band stay together just having fun and writing good songs.
Why do Sexmad and Wrong sound so similar, while The Day and Small Parts are very avant garde.
Sexmad is really basically doing the best we could in a sixteen track studio in very little time. The other two we go into a 24 track studio with more time and more money, therefore we got a little more ambitious, unfortunately we didn't have the experience to back up those ambitions so I think that it is a little over produced that record, but I do like it a lot, I think a lot of the songs are strange, long and slow. A lot of Epics on the both, and they were all recorded at the same time both The Day Everything Became Nothing and Small Parts Isolated and Destroyed. When we came back for Wrong the songs were different, they were less epics and a more casual attitude, a few throwaway songs, well not really throwaway songs but like Oh no Bruno which was just for fun, it was really the story of a friend of ours who went to jail and it's just an excuse to play a 3 chord punk rock song which is the stuff we kind of like listening to. We also went for really simple sounds, in terms of just trying to get everything to sound good as it was. A good drum sounds like a good drums, not try a lot of production tricks and effects just get as good basic sounds as we could and that worked out really well. The next record will be a combination between both those approaches, because we are a little better at getting those sounds to begin with and with that experience we can maybe do a little better production job and maybe do a little more innovative things. Also a lot of the new songs are going to have wildly different feels between each one of them, one that sounds like a Divo cover, one that sounds like a folk song, one that sounds like a Motorhead song, a couple of hardcore songs, a couple of extremely strange hardcore songs so it is going to be extremely diverse, I hope, but you never know till you get there. We try to challenge ourselves, we don't want to make another Wrong. Maybe that would be the most wise thing to do, the most successful but we want to make something that people would say `ah, I didn't expect them to do that' Because we feel the same way about some of the stuff we do too, we tend to do stuff which is interesting, not the hit single of next week. A band like us never has hits, so you don't have to worry about that bullshit.
Your music seems to focus on feel-ings of Desolate, Isolation, Alien-ation, why do you think that is?
We just write about what's there. It came out of the tradition we are playing in. One of the things that originally drew me to punk rock music was not just the boost of energy and the back to the roots sounds and getting rid of all the star bullshit. There was also what people were saying, they were drawing upon feelings which were negative but in a positive way. In a sense of recognising that people are not gods, and great wise fathers, they are just little animals who have tamed themselves and bred themselves and civilised themselves to the point where they are seriously detached and unnatural in a world which they should feel at home, but don't. That is reflected in our life experiences in everyone's who lives in a modern western country. And it is reflected in our lyrics. There is humour and there is energy and the ability to get that out and do it honestly and not use it as a pose but try to share experience and feelings with the audience and that is a positive thing. I feel that people come to our shows, and I have always felt playing our shows, that they are a positive thing, not an indulgence in the darker sides of life, they are just a sort of a journey. Hopefully we all come out the other end wiser but richer. (haha).
Where did the `only sheep need a leader' considering there are no religious songs on the album.
I used that image, that promotion shot as a joke. I put on a religious collar, a military hat, a suit like a businessman and a pair of police handcuffs (which didn't appear on the picture). You've got all these figures of authority and when you put it all together it is the most evil thing you ever saw. Why is that I wonder?
If you don't like the way things are and you don't seem to be able to change them, you can at least change yourself. You can change what you do. If you don't like big corporations or the government, don't work for them for one thing. With what we do we are our own boss, we make our money directly from the people who like what we do they come to the shows and give it to us, and in a sense that is our political strategy, to be independent people who rely on ourselves and don't fuck other people around and don't deal with people who do fuck other people around as much as possible. Maybe that's not enough but that's as good as we can do so far. Just a bunch of Minstrel's; tinkers of the music world.
Last question, How do you think that punk has evolved since it's apparent conception in the mid-seventies?
Well like anything it has become a bit on an institution in itself, a sweaty and grotty one to be sure. Fortunately things burst out and people get a common idea and just go with them and that's because what they have been doing before has been really boring and that's great but it only lasts a little while, then suddenly all the things that were spontaneous become third generation in terms of, its the third person who saw a safety pin and put one on, by that point it becomes the monkey copying his buddy and slowly it becomes what it had initially been a revolt against a uniformity of idea and approach, generic cliches in creative expressions instead of just doing what you want. That happened to a lot of hardcore bands, there was a time when there was really fast hardcore and one band was just about the same as another in terms of what they did. Some of them managed to rise above that and certain bands for a while were amazingly good in terms of the restrictions they placed on themselves, Discharge and Minor Threat and stuff like that, but it also caused some people to think and even that's a blind alley, some of the political stuff began to become more and more tunnel visioned more and more `our tribe' and this is what we believe instead of a vision of everyone can live. But I'm more interested in what is happening now, in terms of, we are a punk band and I certainly do not reject that label. But we are also people who just do what we do because we have something in ourselves which we want to express, there was really never a `I wanna look like that or sound like that', it the `I wanna get up there are say something like those people are' but it's what I want to say and not necessarily what they want to say. My advice to bands is that is what you should do, that's where any success is going to lie is being yourself in being what you are, uniquely as an individual by not really being the cool band that you like, take what they've done and use that as an inspiration to do exactly the opposite maybe, but as long as it is coming out of you to me that is what punk rock has always been about. And when it's good that's what is cool about it. It's not about any certain style of music or dress or anything, it's just about doing what you want and doing it very loud and very intensely.