Incendiary American indie rockers Black Lips tell Amit Gurbaxani what brings them our way.
Rock fans who feared that few international acts would tour India in 2009 on account of the economic slowdown or the November terror attacks should take heart from the Black Lips’ visit this month. But then the garage/punk group is no ordinary band.
The quartet, which comprises guitarists Cole Alexander and Ian St Pe, bassist Jared Swilley and drummer Joe Bradley, is infamous for their raucous shows. Their stage antics, which have led to them being banned from several venues in their hometown of Atlanta, Georgia, have included such conventional shenanigans as spontaneous stage diving, stripping naked, breaking instruments and/or setting them on fire, as well as more novel embellishments such as vomiting, urinating and making out with each other.
Alas, Bradley told Time Out via email, they are likely to be on their best behaviour during their concerts in Mumbai and Bengaluru. “We want to respect the people and places that provide these shows for us,” he said. “You may have to wait for the after-party to see any of that stuff.”
Bradley told us a bit about the background behind the bacchanalia. “The stage is a free-zone for all types of expression,” he said. “Most of the time it depends on how the crowd is reacting to our performance.”
Even greater than their love for musical mayhem, he said, is their desire to perform in places that don’t usually see too many performances by big-name Western rock bands. They struck Israel and Palestine off their things-to-do list in 2007 and hope to conquer Uganda and Iraq in the near future.
“We really want to play [in] Iraq, but not a USO show,” Swilley told indie music website Pitchfork in June. “We want to play outside the Green Zone, because inside it’s just like a giant Taco Bell. We want to do India for sure and China on the same tour because they do have a burgeoning middle class coming, and with that comes kids that go to college and kids who have the luxury and the time to get into music and stuff like that. We’ve already gotten a lot of e-mail from Indonesia, India, and China which are three countries which could, in the next 10 years, be competing economies, which means for me, kids will listen to music besides, like, Kenny Rogers and ABBA and Michael Jackson.”
Their gigs will include hits such as “O Katrina” (written the day the hurricane struck New Orleans) and the “Bad Kids” as well as tracks from their new album 200 Million Thousand, due for release in February. Much thought went into naming the record. The title, explained Bradley, “is how many more days until the sun collides with the Earth. Two hundred million thousand sea creatures swim 200 million thousand centimetres every summer between June and July. Two hundred million thousand grains of salt is what it will take to purify the souls of mankind.”
Though they have an action-packed schedule during their two-week stay, the band has pencilled in some travelling. “I think we’re going to spend time in Gokarna and perhaps Hampi,” said Bradley. “We definitely want to see some ruins, temples, and jungles. It would also be nice to go swimming.”
If you bump into them, don’t commit the error of mixing them up with other US indie rock darlings with similar names. “The band has been mistaken many times for Florida’s Black Kids and many times for Ohio’s Black Keys, Bradley said. “It’s insulting to be confused with such awful bands,” he said. “But there’s not much we can do about it.”
On the other hand, maybe we shouldn’t take him too seriously. After all, Black Lips are the act who are described as “psychedelic/comedy” on their MySpace and who claim to have been influenced by themselves on 2007’s critically hailed Good Bad Not Evil. “Sometimes it’s funny to be overly egocentric,” said Bradley. “I can’t think of anything funnier than a band referencing their own past works as inspirational. It’s absurd!”
Source : Time Out Mumbai ISSUE 11 Friday, January 22, 2010
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