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| Interviews: Ash |
Our Quick Chat With
Elastica Elastica: February 1995 This interview was conducted in the basement of the 9:30 club before the second gig of Elastica's first full U.S. tour. It was supposed to have been longer, but there were various problems - Justin didn't feel well, Damon Albarn phoned for Justine ... but it was fun, and the show was great. Who knew? This interview previously appeared in New Traffic Pattern #1, and was conducted by Hal Miller, Fritz Hahn and Allison Boland. NTP: After releasing "Line Up," your highly successful first single last year, you laid low for a while. How long did you stay out of sight until you released your second single? Justine: About seven months. We just realized that the hype machine is getting silly. We had enough faith in ourselves to feel like we should go away and get on with making a good album and not try to get involved in the rat race, getting as much press as we possibly can. I think that ultimately it's really damaging to do that. I feel like, the point which we got at first, we weren't really worth that. Y'know we only had about ten songs ... Donna: We didn't think we weren't worth it, but we thought that we needed to go and write lots of songs. I think we all knew that we'd be a good band but we weren't at the time. We needed to write some better songs so we'd be worth all the press we were getting. There's nothing worse than people coming to see you expecting that the hype is more important than the band. NTP: What songs did you have before you decided to lay low? Justine: The first demo we ever did was "Line Up," which actually ended up going out as it was, as a demo, but we had "Stutter" as well. "Connection" is much newer. NTP: That song kind of has a different sound. Donna: We felt that we had been put into a category, a "New Wave" band. But we didn't feel that we were New Wave because we were a lot of different things. We wanted to show that we are our own band, with our own ideas, don't tell us what we are, so "Connection" was our proof of that. Justine: "Connection" is the first time we ever actually had a bit of time in the recording studio, more than like, a day, and we had a 24-track as opposed to a 16-track so we had a chance to start messin' with keyboards and samples and stuff. In that sense, it sounds a bit different. NTP: So, what do you think of the labels "New Wave of New Wave" or the "New Wave of New Mod"? Donna: It means more over here than it does it Britain. It doesn't mean anything to British bands, really. There are so many different bands that are labeled New Wave. None of them are New Wave, and there's no scene of New Wave bands. NTP: Right, but that's what we see over here in the states. Donna: There's no really exciting British bands around at the moment. I think that the music scene in Britain is really dead. There's definitely a lot of bands that are really great. They're selling records, and maybe moving the mainstream a bit towards the left, and of course that's really exciting, but I don't think you can call it New Wave, because if anything, there's more variation in the British bands that are doing well, more than I can ever remember. I think that, bands like Oasis and Suede are just about as far from us [Elastica] as you can get. But we're all kind of enjoying, y'know, good press and chart success. NTP: But it's weird because all these bands, like S*M*A*S*H, Elastica, Portishead, and others are lumped together, but there are few musical similarities. Donna: It's confusing because the whole New Wave thing was sort of happening for about a month in Britain. It wasn't really like a massive movement or anything. There have been lots of really good bands breaking through this year, but I think the whole concept of new wave has gone out the window a bit. We're getting asked a lot of questions about New Wave, which is weird because it happened a long time ago. It was just an idea, a way to describe, perhaps, what it was like for a month with the bands who were in the press at the time. And I think that bands are good because they're different than other bands, not because they're the same. And the bands that are actually worth listening to have broken out of any particular sort of category. They're recognized as a good band on their own. Annie: There's been a lot of good albums that have come out this past year, like Stone Roses, Suede, Oasis and Portishead. I think the whole New Wave thing might have started with smaller bands making it on the charts, but it died really quick when the bands took over the New Wave label. NTP: Since American indie music is more popular than British indie music in America, how successful do you think you can get here? Donna: We don't expect Americans to totally get what we do. I think we're over here because people have asked us over to play. We don't expect to come over and say, 'Oh, we'll conquer America and America's gonna really like us,' because Americans do like different music and there is a different culture. But I think that the end of the grunge thing maybe has left a space for Americans to listen to new underground music. If they give British music a chance, they might realize it's all right. |