Ahead of what is surely going to be a festival set that will go down in Welsh history, we caught up with Bristolian bangarang boys Lice. We talked Mark E Smith, spring reverb, and Farr’s School of Dancing in Dalston. Lice are one of the best bands around at the moment, creating part-heady fusion of the Country Teasers (Sorry, Alastair), The Fall, and maybe even the Butthole Surfers, and part- Cramps on diazepam. But there’s more to them than that. I advise you to listen.
Did you meet Mark E Smith? If so, what was he like?
Alastair: When we scored a support slot for The Fall, we discovered that everyone in music seems to have a Mark E. Smith horror-story, in which they’ve said hello to him and gotten bollocked/blanked/punched in the chest. Between that and my rather transparent idolization of him, I was scared shitless when The Fall’s tour manager waved me into their Green Room to say hello. However, he was warm, polite- even gentlemanly. He shook my hand and thanked us for doing the show, chatted with me for a bit, gave me a can of Holsten Pils, and even let me take a photo with him. A gentleman, verily. Gareth: Ali met him and got a selfie and didn’t die so that’s an accomplishment
I suppose he just doesn’t suffer fools lightly, what a lovely story. Conversely, have you had any weird fan interactions? Tattoos? Odd presents?
Alastair: Well funnily enough, at that same show I was outside in the smoking area after our set speaking to The Fall’s tour manager, and this older northern gentleman came up and said “good job, I enjoyed that! Reminded me of the good old days…”. I thanked him and asked if he meant that he used to be in a band himself. He looked sort of confused, and said “… yes”. I said “ah great! What were you guys called?”, to which he replied “the fucking Fall!”. Then he stamped out his cigarette, called me a stupid cunt and walked off. I didn’t recognise him, but in fairness they’ve had something in the way of 70 members- even the tour manager didn’t seem sure if he was telling the truth or not haha. Nicer interactions include our first time meeting a fan called Jeremy, who showed up to a Bristol gig wearing this amazing LICE t-shirt that he’d made himself; a while later, a fan in London called Oliver came to see us at the So Young Issue 12 launch with another awesome homemade t-shirt, this one featuring the opening lines to ‘Little John Waynes’ and drawings of the man himself.
Collective top three least favourite songs?
‘Cheap Provocative Question’ by Music Journalist
‘Ripping On Bands’ by Snob Musicians
‘Culture Of Engineering Inter-Band Discord’ by The Mid-1990s NME
‘Suspicious Minds’ by Elvis? I was just trying to get an idea of your loves and hates!
Alastair: Touché haha- yes sorry about that. It’s a perfectly normal question and we don’t mean any disrespect to yourself- we just hate it when bands get asked which artists they dislike, and interview space is used to slag off other bands.
More than fair enough, I get ya. Collective top three favourite songs?
‘You Just Cover’ by Bo-Gritz. Brutal, minimalist noise-rock from London’s new patron saints of tinnitus. Fans of Girl Band, Spectres and A Place To Bury Strangers will find Bo-Gritz a straightforward distillation of all things good; strangers to those bands will be rather spooked.
‘The Imminent Return’ by Yowl. Featuring one of the greatest opening riffs and unique vocal performances in recent music, this is the standout track from Yowl’s debut EP ‘Before The Sleep Sets In’. They ended up doing a standalone single with Big Score just like we did, and in October we’re touring the UK together as co-headliners.
‘The Good, The Bad and The Ugly’, as performed by the Czech National Symphony Orchestra. When it drops, it fucking drops.
Album that you all bonded over?
When Silas got us into our first Teasers album, ‘Satan is Real Again’, that was a pretty big deal for us. When the Teasers came into vogue in the post-Champagne Holocaust period, it opened a lot of avenues for us and our future peers, and having Ben Wallers support us in Bristol is going to be a deathbed-reflection for each of us. While I prefer ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ as an album, the likes of ‘Black Change’ and ‘Panty Shots’ (from which ‘Gentleman’s Magazine’ takes its title and subject matter) make SIRA the record we’re most indebted to.
Worst gig you’ve played?
Alastair: Farr’s School of Dancing in Dalston, supporting Gang and a then-unknown-to-us Yowl. I genuinely get triggered when we’re offered a gig anywhere in that entire fucking district now. It was no fault of the venue’s, we were just heinously bad, and apologise profusely to anyone reading this who was there.
Gareth: Farr’s school of dancing with yowl and gang, we drank too many tinnies outside tesco before and everything broke on stage, it was a total mess. Needless to say we left immediately after we played.
Best gig you’ve played?
Alastair: Howling Owl Records’ ‘New Year: New Noise IV’ at The Arnolfini Art Gallery: this giant, pitch-black room. We opened it, then Vessel and Chester Giles of experimental electronic-music clique ‘The Young Echo Collective’ played as their project ASDA. This was followed by a drag-act called johnsmith, an industrial electronic artist called Silver Waves, and a headline set from Girl Band, who closed with the trio of ‘Lawman’, ‘Why Do They Always…’ and ‘Paul’.
Gareth: Last summer we played on a boat going down the river Severn through Bristol for howling owl records birthday party and it was dank. We upset a few kayakers and someone nearly fell in the river during Milo’s Planes’ set, it was a fucking great day.
What was the best gig you all attended? (Doesn’t have to be all together, individually is fine)
Gareth: I saw METZ play at Start The Bus in Bristol about 4 years ago and it was off the chain. People swinging from light fixtures and falling into broken glass made it amazing and terrifying at the same time. It was one of the first shows I went to after I moved to Bristol for uni and it blew me away.
One of your releases is called ‘Nutmilk: The Basement Demos’ – I was wondering whether recording in a basement was a stylistic choice or a mere necessity?
Alastair: A bit of both to be honest! We needed new demos but didn’t want to invest in studio time, and we certainly didn’t go into it thinking they’d end up being properly released; Charlie Williams, who later joined Goldenarm and founded Big Score, contacted us out of the blue around the time of recording and put it out on Wintermute Tapes. We couldn’t do it any other way at the time, but in another way it was just a fun DIY project and a bit of a challenge.
Gareth: Our drummer Bruce had a basement in his last house we used to rehearse in and we couldn’t afford to record elsewhere so I guess a necessity. But it was also a space we were really comfortable playing in so I think that helped with recording the songs.
Do you try and get your recordings to sound as close as possible to your live sound, or do you change things up in the different spheres of recording and playing live?
Alastair: So far, recording has basically been a process of trying to capture our live sound; the only real experimentation we’ve done in a studio so far has been the intro for the vinyl version of ‘The Human Parasite’, which you also hear in the music video. Silas brought in a broken amplifier, and our producer Dom Mitchison had a broken spring-reverb pedal and an old lap-steel which his (exceptional) band Velcro Hooks had used on their song ‘Leaves’. On that intro, Silas hits the lap steel with a drumstick, then Bruce smashes two highly-tuned snares, then I punch the broken reverb pedal and broken amplifier, creating a weird, delayed, squishy sound. We carry on that sequence over and over again, while Gareth screams into a microphone made out of a guitar pickup placed in an old soup tin with holes stabbed in it. Dom put it all together with the track and we were totally enamoured. We took it off the radio/ streaming version, but it’s still on the video, the physical record and (I think) the iTunes download.
What have you learned at university this year?
Gareth: Nothing of use.
Do you tire of the comparisons to The Birthday Party, The Gun Club, Country Teasers et al, or is this a compliment? Are there some influences on your fine band that people might not expect?
Alastair: We do take it as a compliment, especially as a lot of our older fans actually saw those bands in their heyday, but its recurrence in the press does have a ‘muddying’ effect. Admittedly, my vocal style obscures a lot of our more leftfield influences by making us sound a bit too much like The Fall, but I expect I’ll change things up soon. Musically, our sound is definitely already moving away from those early influences.
Gareth: No I still see these things as compliments seeing as we all revere these artists we get compared to.
What kind of thing are you moving towards? Or is it still a work in progress? Lastly, do you talk about particular directions you want to go in, or is it more a case of just always writing songs and seeing where they’re going?
Alastair: We’ve said before that we’d like to move into more industrial, experimental territory, but we’ll have to see where we go. Over the holidays, we’ve been on a break from playing, but are getting back to writing new stuff when we’re all settled in Bristol again. Previously we’ve been pretty focused on our own constituent parts: Gareth will have ideas for basslines, Silas will have ideas for guitar lines, Bruce will come up with the drums and I’ll just write the lyrics after the song’s basically done. On our new stuff we’re all going to weigh in a lot more on each other’s parts, so I think it’ll end up sounding very different.
Have you got any famous/notable fans?
Steve Davis saw us at Glastonbury apparently, which we we’re pretty stoked about. Steve ‘The Legend’ Davis’s Crow’s Nest DJ set will go down in history for sure.
What the bloody hell is next for you?
A campaign of enlightenment, through which we will chisel ourselves- and the glorious moment in Bristol music to which we belong- into the annals of history. We’re also headlining a show aboard Thekla, a moored ship in Bristol, on the 20th October. This will be both the finale of our co-headline UK Tour with our brothers-in-arms Yowl, and the biggest headline show we’ve done so far. Lice, thank you.