So what can we expect
release wise?
Tomas: A Lot! Next Tuesday we're doing a single for Vital Music, they're doing the entire Who Opera in seven minutes. That's the entire Tommy in seven minutes, with like thirty bands, each band doing a song. We're doing 1, 2, 3, err..4.
Donut: We're not gonna take it. (Singing)
Steve: Yeah "We're not going to take it". Each band has about twenty or thirty seconds to contribute to a seven minute single.
Tomas: They're always doing singles and stuff and they wanted to do a tribute LP to end all tribute LPs, y'know, and keep it to seven minutes.Then there's like a Buzzcocks compilation that we're doing on C/Z records out of Seattle, there's a Dead Kennedys tribute album that's coming for ten years of AT, with a lot of different bands, bands from everywhere. We're doing "Halloween" on that and then we have, like,an EP coming out in September which is the "Ass Trilogy".
Mike: The "Ass Trilogy" with four songs!
What sort of stuff is going to be
on that?
Steve: Big Ass, Bigger Ass, Biggest Ass and Mr Hayes Gimp Leg!
What are you dealing with this time?
Tomas: It's food and sex with an overwhelming hint of violence hovering about it. It's about basics.
Steve: It's about life!
You often do stuff about sex and violence....
Mike: And cruelty!
Tomas: Yeah, food, sex and cruelty.
Steve: It's very decadent. It's a little dancey, Biggest Ass has a nice dance groove.
Is it Madchester?
Steve: Yeah...
Tomas: It's not really Madchester, it's got a sinister New York Groove.
Steve: It's NEW YORKCHESTER!
Mike: In the first album there's all these women songs - Linda Blair, Tipper Gore, Joan of Arc, a love fantasy, off the wall kind of thing.
But since then you haven't done an axe job on anyone. Is there anybody that's got your goat enough to do a song about them?
Mike: Yeah, but everyone's so obvious! You can't do one about Bush.
Steve: How about Pee-Wee?
Mike: Pee-Wee. Hmmmm..
Tomas: But that'd be a tribute!
Yeah, definitely.
I was quite disgusted by the Pee-Wee incident - axe the guy and suddenly - Persona Non Grata.
Tomas: It's Absurd.
Mike: Yeah, like nooobody wanks.
Tomas: They still haven't proved if he did it or if it was just inferred, but that's totally irrelevant now.
Mike: It's horrible because the kids get to hear this and it's worse to feel that masturbation is something terrible that you can have your life ruined by. That's a nice message for the world. It's like psychiatrists in Pee-Wee's slot, telling parents how to deal with this. People are so stupid
Richard: But I think, yeah it sucks, but it might be good for his career in a way `cause he might change and do something different, whereas he might not've before.
His TV show was good - like The Flintstones - you don't need to be a kid to enjoy it.
Richard: He makes these amazing jokes - he's home from a day's shopping and he pulls out the milk and says "milk", pulls out another carton - "milk" pulls out a bottle of lemonade and says "lemonade, around the corner fudge is made!" I couldn't believe it!
Mike: You know that thing in England? "Milk, milk, lemonade, around the corner fudge is made?" It's a little thing we did in grade school.
For toilet training, is it?
Steve: Sex education! Or sixth form poetry!
The reaction of the American Public at the Limelight was really scary.
Mike: Seeing them spew everything they've heard without even thinking.
"Issues get stuck in their brain - Bible = true, Abortion = wrong, Blacks = inferior, Homosexuals = torch `em."
Tomas: There's a shit load of teenagers and people who don't believe that, it's just that They have the voice right now.
"And that's what's so scarey about Pee-Wee, it's all that fear coming out."
Tomas: One day the program's OK for kids, the next it isn't, I hope he gets a new act a a new movie deal. The whole thing's trial by media.
They're saying it's OK to have the Rock'n'Roll image - submissive women in videos, essentially rape is promoted - they're saying that's alright, it's just high-spirited lads.
Richard: If you want to talk about hipocrisy, one thing I noticed in Europe was nudity on TV, is no big deal at all and nudity in public places is cool, I went to this nude thing - it felt a little weird but after a day I got used to it. So, hey, fuck! totally normal.
Mike: Tell us about it!
Steve: What did you see?
Big jugs?
Richard: The thing is, in the US, you can show people getting murdered and mugged, that's accepted, but you can't show nudity on TV.
Tomas: Cartoons.
Richard: What could be more natural than nudity and more heinous than murders?
$20 a month and with cable TV, anything goes.
Steve: I can't afford cable.
Tomas: The Access Cable channel, we should get one of those, you get some psycho with a theory about radio wave transmissions from the Martians affecting the traffic light scheme of New York and through this, he's talking to Zeus! And he's on there telling you this whole conspiracy theory and it's really fascinating but this guy is totally whacked out of his skull! And then you'll see Cooking with George. I like cooking shows, I think they're great. Psychic shows, where they'll do Hitler's chart, or Mansons. Or that guy you can phone and he'll play a request for you on his piano, all the time he's drinking wine and getting drunker and drunker!
You said on the phone that you might be shooting a video, what would that be for?
Steve: That's for Biggest Ass on the EP that's coming out, we've shot most of it.
What is in store this time?
Steve: An orgy of food.
Tomas: Yeah it's intense, it's like an orgy - a food orgy! Mindy Weisberger's doing it, she's been doing videos for us for a long time, four or five, she's great!
I've never seen a video in Britain - not MTV material?
Tomas: No, they're not. But the latest one, "Rise to the Skin" from our last album,, is on MTV Europe, German MTV plays it but MTV here and "120 Minutes" only play a a selection from it, it's really bogus.
What themes are you planning for the next album?
Richard: Power tricks for the junkie set.
Tomas: What was that?
Richard: Yeah , it's like throwing up when you want to!
Mike: Watch me! I'm going to throw up now!
Steve: We don't know yet.
Why has your line-up changed and are you enjoying it?
Tomas: It was a parting of the ways, and Sissi's new.
Sissi: I like it a lot. It's really funny, I love the music.
Mike: We love training someone new, playing the old songs, over and over again. It's fun.
Steve: It's like a shot in the arm. It's an exciting time.
Are you still playing
Lisa's Father?
Tomas: Nah, but we're going to, we have one special Lisa's Father that we're going to do in San Francisco with Greg Wortman, he runs our label - AT - and we've done it once before, with him in Colombus, Ohio and it was incredible.
Steve: Really funny, we'll do it once in a while but we'll usually get someone from the audience to do the narration part `cause there's a lot of people that wanna hear it and there's a lot of people that know it, so...
Tomas: A lot of times it's just been spontaneous, when some-one has just jumped up when we're off-stage and started doing it, we start playing.
Steve: Then there was that time in Germany -
Schorenbaum.
Tomas: Schorenbaum's gotta be the sickest version of Lisa's Father ever.
Steve: We were playing with The Spermbirds and there was Rick Agnew, us and then
The Spermbirds.
Tomas: This place was hot, humid - like, water dripping off the ceiling.
Mike: When they opened the back doors, steam poured out!
Tomas: It was incredible! Like a fog machine! The guitar player from Rick Agnew had heard Lisa's Father on a video on German TV, he kind of knew the song and said "Okay let's do it." The rest of Rick Agnew go "Do it naked" and he goes "Yeah, I wanna do it naked." So I go "Okay - that's fine." He's a really nice guy, a normal sweet guy!
Mike: Or so we thought!
Tomas: And he comes out and he's changed, and he's doing it in a really sinister way, he's whispering "Lisa, Lisa"; then he takes off his shirt and pulls down his pants, wraps the mike cord around his balls and starts squeezing and screaming really dramatically, right, with his face all contorted and we're, like, Whoaa! Then he takes a safety pin and lights the end and then he pierces it through his cock, you know?, and then he comes up to the mike and screams! Everyone's like "What the fuck is this?" We're like, Whoaa! And then he comes and like, my coat's open and he's coming at me. I'm like, "What the fuck?" and he's coming at me with his thing and he pins his dick to my coat, so it was like, a very unnatural act. It was very very wierd.
Sounds very painful.
Tomas: For him.
Steve: Rumour has it that he'd pierced his dick a few days or weeks ago, so it wasn't like a fresh hole he was sticking it in.
Richard: No, it was a fresh hole, I believe.
Tomas: He said he'd never pierced it that fast or in
front of 800 people, 800 sweaty Germans going -
"What the fuck!"
Steve: It was beautiful!
"So, what's the biggest place you've played?"
Tomas: Berkeley. What happened is, we warmed up for Hunter S. Thompson at the Berkeley Auditorium and there's a fuck load of people. It's one of those places that's tiered and some people wanted to hear us but most wanted to hear Hunter Thompson, they didn't give a fuck about us - we're just like a costume band and it was so much fun. We just started going "You wanna hear Hunter S Thompson? Well, he's dead, FUCK YOU!" People were boo-ing and throwing stuff and we were, like,"We could stop now, but we're not..."
Steve: Then the people that are putting on the show are going "We can't find Hunter, keep playing!"
Tomas: It was a lot of fun, coz there were so many people who weren't into us. It was a lot of fun - a lot of the people were boo-ing because it was fun, y'know, to have us back and forth, y'know, kind of like - interaction!
Steve: But I knew there were some people there to see us, coz we were eating some pizzas beforehand and people at the pizza place recognised us and said "Hey - You're Alice Donut! We're coming to see you guys, cool!"
Tomas: We've had a lot of shows worse than that.
Richard: Kentucky.
Tomas: We played in some shithole in Kentucky, no, not Kentucky - South Carolina, what a shithole it was like some wierd cocaine disco!
Mike: We drove away and got to this place, like 15 minutes away from where we were staying and it's, like where are our guitars? We'd left them in a parking lot leaning up against a wall.
Richard: We were so strung out from being so pissed off.
Tomas: It was not the place for us to play - it was just gross, and to leave the guitars was, like a Double Whammy, coz that was just the perfect place for these people to sell the guitars and buy more coke!
Richard: And more dance disco!
Were the guitars still there?
Tomas: The gutiars were still there, coz they were in a dark place in the lot, which was lucky.
Come up with your hands out, is it a true story?
I'm not convinced.
Tomas: Almost entirely true, the only thing that's false is the woman when she robs the bank, everything else is true, she killed her grandfather, her husband's father who'd come from Iowa to visit the family and they hadn't seen him for a long time. She bought him a necktie from Macy's. One morning she strangled him with it, bludgeoned his head with a pan, drove to Albany, passed out and didn't remember anything. She was in an asylum for six months and was let out, she'd blocked everything out and she was supposed to be okay. They let her out and she was fine for a few months til she robbed the bank and they put her back in again. She didn't get shot at the bank.
"Did she take her clothes off at the bank?"
Tomas: She didn't take her clothes off.
So she didn't have sex against the cash machine?
Tomas: I wasn't there for that but I know she did have a gun and y'know robbed the bank and was pretty hysterical and made everyone get down on the floor and she was throwing money around and really out of it and that's all true, she just didn't get gunned down. People snap a lot - it's like a disgruntled postal worker syndrome, it's like they eat shit for a lot of their lives and then snap.
Steve: Did you ever see that guy in Australia? Went into a shopping mall last week, he was like a real business man who had this machine gun and mowed down 10 or 20 people.
Tomas: Australia's gonna have this more and more because it's becoming more like the US, you know?
Yeah, they're trying to get away from the British, which they should.
Tomas: In Canada, it never happens, hardly ever. Mass murders are here, it's easier to get guns and this is where we breed `em. More mass murders here than the rest of the
world combined.
Steve: This is the Land of Opportunity.
Do you write about what you see?
Tomas: I don't know, this is heard through a friend, Jeffery Dahmer is just happening again, everyone knows Mrs Hayes, you know her - it's pretty universal.
Jeffery Dahmer? I arrived here after the fact.
Tomas: He killed some boys and other men. He'd take them home and when they wanted to leave, he wouldn't let them. He'd fuck them, drug them and then chop them into bits. He had bits all over the apartment - it smelled bad. The thing was his probation officer never came to his home. He'd been in prison before, but not for killing anyone. He had some bodies up at his Grandma's place. At the trial, he seemed really normal, calmly saying "Yes I killed them, yes I cut them up." He had all these body parts in his refridgerator and stuff - the sickest thing was the 16 year old Laotian kid, he escaped from Darma, bleeding okay, and naked in the street, went up to the cops and he's crying hysterically and the cops don't give a shit! Darma comes out and says it's a lover's spat - I'll take him home. The cops drove them home and Dahmer kills the guy! Someone else escaped later, someone who spoke English - so they caught the guy. That's so sick. Milwaukee is up in arms, the Laos community is totally freaked.
Yeah, I bet they're not showing Body Parts in Wisconsin.
Have you had any novel experiences this time on tour? Last time you were telling me about the guy who safety pinned his dick to your coat.
Tomas: Right. We haven't had like a safety pin and a dick to the coat extravaganza but during the shows....
Steve: I lost my head one time in Ireland and kicked a bunch of people in the head, but that's not unusual.
Steve: They bumped into my trombone while I was playing it and I just kind of lost my shit.
Steve: They didn't mean it.
???: In London we kicked a bouncer off the stage into
the crowd.
Steve: That was fun, but that was more theatrics. We planned it.
???: Months in advance.
Steve: Months in advance he already had his cheque and cash as expected.
Steve: But he was a nice guy, he wasn't like no-neck. He had a neck, he had hair, he had a band T-Shirt on. I don't know what band it was.
???: Yeah, he popped out of the crowd with a huge smile on his face.
Steve: And it was the weirdest thing because bouncers were like, they were pushing people off the stage that were trying to get on to dive into the crowd, but they were also pulling them onto the stage helping them up over the monitors.
Tomas: No, they were cool.
Steve: It was strange.
Tomas: These guys weren't throwing people off.
Steve: They were cool.
Tomas: They weren't throwing people off at all.
???: One of them came to the show the next day.
Steve: Yeah, the one I kicked into the crowd.
Tomas: This tour there have been good shows and the only weirdness has been like bad shit that's been happening like Norway stealing all our shit at the customs and then like in France we were stopped like every day, several times a day.
Tomas: Because we look like scum-bags so they kept stopping us, I don't know. They just pull us over and just have the dogs sniff in the van.
Michael: They actually found drugs on me.
Tomas: Oh yeah, that's right. They found mushrooms on Michael and Michael said that they were for his eyes and they let him keep them and they let us go. They were like so stupid, man.
Steve: The funniest thing might have been actually if we'd of had this on our video camera it would be brilliant coz they sent this dog into the van to sniff out the van and he either ran into Tom's coat or some of shorts that I play in or something, he ran into some rude laundry and he like turned around and bolted out of the van and started running and they're like 'You come back here !' in French and they had to kick this dog's ass to get him back into the van. He was just like a sound man pretending to turn a knob, he just went into the van and shrugged there's nothing in here.
Steve: You see I had to eat a big piece of hash while this was happening and I guess, well...
???: They are, that's what they do, they get them addicted to shit so they're craving for it and looking for it. Sorta like me. I'm just kidding, that's just my image, that's not really me.
Steve: Shh.
Steve: You want some ? Nah, you don't smoke hash and drink strong cider at the same time, it makes you puke.
Steve: It's so I can swallow it if the cops pull us over.
Steve: I'd like to go to Jamaica for a week or so and kinda chill.
Steve: No, too lazy and I think I'm just gonna stay home and practice my trombone and figure out how to play the thing again. As we've been touring I don't get to practise usually and I can practice and work on stuff. On tour I get to play it for 6 minutes a night. I get to play on 10 and I don't get to warm up or warm down and I don't get to do any sort of exercise, so my chops are kind of like going down. That's what they call it, chops.
???: Oh I wouldn't say that.
Steve: I would.
???: Sometimes they do good.
Steve: Well, it's an ideas thing and there's ideas that with my limited abilities to get it on the horn and I can do stuff, but as far as being flexible and being able to do things I can't really...
Steve: That;s Tom's department, for the most part, I don't know. We're always working on art.
Sissy: We've done 'Hungry like the wolf'.
Steve: Oh cover songs ! I thought you were talking about cover art. I'm sorry ! Hungry like the wolf, yeah.
Steve: Duran Duran, yeah and we covered a Thatcher on Acid song the other night. Oh yeah that was an interesting thing, Tom lost us for a night and we used Ben from Thatcher on Acid, now I guess he's in Schwartzeneggar. See Ben looks a little bit like Tom. We'd done some touring with Thatcher on Acid and he knows the songs'n'stuff and we dressed Ben up in Tom's coat. Tom was in some hotel somewhere.
Tomas: I had a rough night and I didn't make it.
???: Oh we loved it.
Tomas: It's not like it's...it's not like a...
???: We had fun.
Steve: We had a long time going to the police station and going to different squats and different places where Tom might've been.
Sissy: Calling people up...
???: We loved it, it's all part of the tour.
Tomas: It's still like a tender thing. It's better not to talk about it, but it's just I fucked up.
Michael: No, let's talk about it. I'm glad you asked that question, you know.
I think we should talk about it coz it sounds like group therapy to me. So now, Tom, he's missing gigs here.
Tomas: This is the first gig in 5 years.
Steve: And it'll be 6 years
in February.
Tomas: Yeah, so fuck...
Steve: He's doing fine.
Tomas: No no no no. The thing was when I woke up I didn't have, and I was lost in London. I didn't know where the fuck I was and I didn't know where they were. So that's why I fucked up
and then...
???: Easy.
Steve: Well isn't everybody in London lost ?
Tomas: Easy, it's like I was, I just got, you know. It was just a rough night and I didn't know where the fuck I was. I'd went to this party and I stayed, it was too many drugs and too much shit. I woke up and I didn't know where the fuck I was and I didn't know where anybody was. I didn't have their number so Ben did the show.
Steve: It was fun, it was tense and weird.
???: We didn't have fun. Some people supposedly did but it was Donut on Acid, it was not like Alice Donut. We did a Thatch song (outwardly we're lying, inwardly we're crying), a shaky version of that.
Tomas: I'd like to have seen that actually.
Steve: I would have like to have.
Steve: The other night.
Steve: A few days ago. Yesterday. Shut the fuck up, let's drop the subject right.
Tomas: We didn't want to talk about this anyway.
Well there is probably about another hour or two of nonsense on tape, but I hope you found that mindly amusing. We certainly did.