INTERVIEW : Nick Wheeler

Fresh from an impromptu vaction, (the result of lead singer Tyson Ritter's unexpected leg infection), and raring to get back on the road, we join The All-American Rejects' lead guitarist Nick Wheeler, on the second stop in their sold-out U.K tour, to talk about travelling, Timberland, and tattoos...

How are you guys doing?

“Ok, just had a very large Indian meal, from urm... Al Babi? ‘A-l-b-a-b-i’ or something like that, I can’t pronounce it but it was very delicious.”

Good, that’s a good start to the show...
“Yeh, well we’ll see if I can keep it down.”

Have you guys been travelling much?
“Yeh, well we just had a couple weeks off, which is the most we’ve had off in the year that we’ve been touring on this record, last night in London was the first show back out, it was really fun... a little bit of remembering how to play parts, two weeks can take its toll, but we had a lot of fun last night, and this venue is always great" (Manchester Academy), "We haven’t been here since they re-modelled it but we did a sound check earlier and it sounded great, felt great, so we’re excited.”

When did you get into Manchester then?
“I woke up and we were on this bus", (He laughs), "it was about 2.15 and yeh... pretty much went right into sound check.”

Fair enough! So you haven’t done that much sightseeing?
“No, I mean we had the curry earlier but that’s about it.”

So how did you spend your two weeks off?
“We went to Florida, Tyson and I have a place there, we hung out, watched a bunch of movies, it was cool.”

Just relaxing...
“Well we’re so busy on the road; people say ‘what do you do when you’re not doing this?’ you know what I do? I do NOTHING, absolutely nothing!" (He laughs).

Well I bet it makes a nice change from everything being so hectic?
“Yeh, the other half was in LA, kind of spread-out all over the place, but it was good, then I think we all got a little stir crazy, and had to get back out here...”

(Tyson Ritter, the band’s lead singer enters in fancy dress)

Nick: “Is it headdress night tonight?”

Tyson: “yeh I think i’m gunna go full-on native.”

Nick: “Halloween is all-month long by the way, you know like ‘birthday week?, it’s your birthday all week long? Well Halloween is a month-long deal.”

Do you do a different outfit every night?

Nick: “Last night he was a ...”

Tyson: “Jailbird.”

Nick: “Jailbird, yeh, in the old-style, black and white striped stuff.”

So, you guys formed when you were still in high school, and got signed up pretty quickly, how did that kind of over-night fame affect you?
“Well I guess it seems over-night but we definitely put in some time, we were in a van playing birthday parties for quite a while, it’s been baby steps with this band. The first record made a little bit of noise, we got to come over here for the first time, with the second record we went a lot more places, sold more records, and the third record we got a number one song, ‘Gives You Hell’, that’s the first time that’s ever happened, but there’s still a lot more things to do, so baby steps. We’ll get there... but to us it doesn’t seem over-night, it’s been ten years now.” (He laughs).

No I guess not then, in those ten years you’ve done a lot of travelling, a lot of touring, have you had a favourite tour?
“Favourite tour... we were talking about this last night on the bus, about this tour that we did through South Asia, like Malaysia, Indonesia, Taiwan... really South Asia, you get it. Then we went over to Australia and it was a really fun tour, and wonderful to look back on that, on this album cycle. Then again, it’s only day two on this one, there’s potential for this to take over but we’ll see...”

You’ve got a huge fan base, people are already queuing up out there to get in, some of them have even made posters, have you had any particularly spectacular run-ins with fans?
“There has to be one more recently... we have a couple of classic ‘creepy fan’ stories, but I’m trying to think of something more recent...” (Calls to Tyson), “Hey what’s the fan story we decided we were going to start telling?”

Tyson: “... I forgot.”

Nick: “Urm... we did have a new one though, I forgot what it is...”

Tyson: “it was a good one too...”

Nick: “well y’no, there’s some crazies, but there’s also some ... ah ok, here you go, last week there was this bunch of kids on Twitter, and there was this one kid who was sending me pictures of tattoos they’d gotten with our lyrics on it, or pictures; there was one ‘Straightjacket Feeling’, there were several with ‘Move Along’, and I just re-tweet them, sent them back out like ‘here everybody check this out, fucking bad-ass’ and that was really cool, that’s not crazy, that’s devotion to a band and to music. That’s something that’s way bigger than any of us individually, that’s us together impacting a person enough to put something permanent on their body, that’s wild.”

You said you had your first studio album out last year, do you think your style has changed at all?
“We’ve never been a band that’s set out to try and make any type of music, we’ve never tried to fit into a scene, we just do what we want to do, write songs that we have fun playing, we’re not trying to put anything on, I think it’s just a good, natural progression of the band trying to find it’s place, and just have fun doing it. We’ve played around with a lot of things this time, y’no, third record, on a major label and we sold three million records before this so we had a nice budget and some money to play around with. We got to bring in like a full-on orchestra, we got to bring in a choir and go up to Skywalker Ranch, where George Lucas has all his movies scored, and we used the biggest live room in North America, to cut the drums for ‘Back to Me’, ‘Another Heart Calls’, and ‘The Wind Blows’, and we got to do the whole thing to tape, which ... most records are recorded on computers these days and manipulated, and what not, tape is not only time consuming, but... it’s fucking expensive!” (He laughs).

So you’re given more opportunities as you go along. How about your videos? You won an Award for ‘Move Along’, do you enjoy making them?
“You know, when we first started doing them, the first one or two videos were exciting because it was all new to us, but then we had to start fitting them in in the middle of tours, and it got really inconvenient, and I personally, hated making them, but then during ‘Move Along’, we really started to embrace them, and we felt like we were doing something really special, with ‘Dirty Little Secret’ and ‘Move Along’ especially, and now ...’Gives You Hell’, well, people have talked about that for a long time, they’re definitely important and we take pride in them now, it’s still not anything that I would ever do unless it was part of it, I would never want to act or be on a set of any kind, it’s the most boring thing, it’s so much sitting around and waiting, but yeh, the end result is worth it.”

Well ‘Gives You Hell’ kind of turned into the anti-Valentine’s Day theme, is that something you set out to do or did it just happen?
“No, our band either has great timing, or God-awful timing, and that just happened to be the right song at the right time, or the right video at the right time... and yeh, it’s funny that you say that because we said that before, it came out earlier this year, and was the anti-Valentine’s Day song, and people have said it’s the guy’s version of ‘You Oughta Know’”, (by Alanis Morissette), “I don’t know, I don’t want to discount the song but a lot of it was good timing.”

Ok, you’ve toured with a lot of bands, are you planning any collaborations in the future?
“Well we just wrote with Rivers”, (Cuomo, lead singer), “From Weezer for their new record, it’s not like a ‘featuring’ or a collaboration of anything, it was just something really cool we got to do, and we might do some more stuff like that, We’ve never been the band to go ‘oh let’s go do a song with, I don’t know... Timberland’ or whatever, so yeh, nothing on the Horizon.”

Are you working on any new material at the moment?
“We’re just starting to talk about it, we’re so... this records a monster, we’re still on this ride, it’s hard to find time but we will.”

You’re obviously spending a lot of time on the tour bus right now, what do you do for fun on there?
“Well we got our new tour bus last night, and it’s really nice, I’m excited about it... we spend a lot of time laying about.”

Fair enough, so, any words of advice for wannabe rock stars out there?
“Yeh, being good at guitar hero doesn’t matter, when you rely completely on MySpace and the internet to get your music out, it’s not going to help your band grow; it’s a great tool to gain and expand on your fan-base, but you’ve got to get out there and play music, you’ve got to hone your crafts, there’s so many bands these days that get signed and get so popular so suddenly, that fucking suck and they can’t play!” (Laughs).

Thinking of any bands in particular there?
“...Ah, too many to name!”

What can we expect from tonight’s show?
"Tonight’s show? ... Like I said, last night was a really fun and exciting show for us, and it was a long one too, so you can expect a lot of fucking songs, you can expect a show, you can expect peaks and valleys, and we’ll definitely hold your attention, and we’ll rock your fucking faces off too, by the way.”

By Beth Cook


The All American Reject's latest album 'When The World Comes Down', released on Doghouse, 16th December 2008, is available from online stores : http://hmv.com/hmvweb/displayProductDetails.do?ctx=280;0;-1;-1;-1&sku=761427

INTERVIEW : Matt Skiba

Alkaline Trio's frontman Matt Skiba takes a breather before their show in Manchester to discuss inspiration, drugs, Twitter, and up-coming solo project, 'Demos'...  

Hey, how’s the tour going?
“It’s good, everything’s good, we’re having fun we started four weeks ago, so we’ve been out here for a little bit.”

This is quite a long one isn’t it, lot’s of dates in the UK and the US. What’s touring like for you guys?
“It’s good! I mean the shows are really good, sometimes we’re in really cool cities, like today. We pretty much like everywhere in Europe but we’ve been in some smaller towns, which is cool but it can be a little slow.”

Yeh... have you managed to do much sight-seeing around here yet?
“Yeh, we were here all day yesterday so we went out and had some drinks last night.”

Is it difficult, touring for this long, being away from your friends and family?
“Well I’m with most of my friends right now, my best friends are my band mates and our crew, but yeh, I mean it’s hard to be away from my girlfriend, but I just miss her, it’s not like we’re at war or something, so y’no it’s not that bad!”

Right, your new album, ‘This Addiction’, has been really well received, some fans are saying it’s a ‘return to your roots’ is that something you set out to do?
“Not really... just the way that we wrote the record, and we recorded it with the guy that did our first couple of records, so we did that on purpose but we didn’t set out to remake our first record or anything. There were elements of our early records that I think contributed to the way that it sounds, but it wasn’t altogether on purpose.”

Ok, what was the concept, the inspiration behind the album? There seem to be quite a few reoccurring themes; addiction, love...
“Well luckily none of us are heavy-duty drug addicts or anything, but it’s more of a metaphor for love, mostly like lost love, so the addiction theme or the drug references are not necessarily... well, it’s a metaphor. There’s definitely a few different subjects that inspired the record; the loss of a loved one; we had a really good friend pass away while we were writing the record, and a couple of us had some personal issues in our private lives that definitely influenced them at the time.”

So your work really comes from personal experience then?
“Urm... yep.”

You recently left Epic Records to form your own label, what’s that process been like?
“It’s been pretty easy for us, I mean we started the label with Epitaph, but since we’re out on tour we haven’t really done as much work as far as the label’s concerned, we just haven’t had a chance to, so we’ve just been focusing on the touring aspect and then hopefully we’ll start signing other bands, and that’s when we’ll probably get busier.”

Why did you decide to start your own label? I know it’s something a lot of bands are doing at the moment...
“Well it’s something that we’ve wanted to do, we didn’t know that we were going to be partnering up with Epitaph, and I mean we’ve worked with them in the past, so we always want to work with people that we trust and like, and Brett Gurewitz, (Bad Religion guitarist and owner of Epitaph), is a good friend of ours and he’s a fan, so we were talking to some companies that were going to help us start the label and they were people that we’ve never really met before and then Brad came along and asked if we want to do a label together rather than us doing our own thing completely, which is something we can’t really do; we don’t have the staff, we would have to hire people, so Epitaph basically made it possible for us to tour full time and still release... well kind of release our own records. Epitaph’s doing most of the work.”

Well they actually used Facebook and Twitter to promote your new single, do you think the social networking aspect of publicity is useful now?
“I think so, I don’t really do any of that stuff...”

...So you’re not a ‘Twitterer’?
“I am, I mean we have a Twitter account and it’s fun but yeh, I don’t sit there and follow it like some people do...”

How do you guys come up with your songs?
“They just kind of feel like they write themselves, y’no, you’re usually just sitting down with a guitar and something’ll come out of it.”

Is it a group process then or do you do it individually?
“We do it individually initially, and then bring the ideas together and then we make it sound like Trio together.”

Ok... you’ve got a solo project, ‘Demos’?
“'Demos'? Yeh, there’s a 'Demos' record coming out and that’s exactly what it is, it’s just demos of some Alkaline Trio songs and just some ideas that I had floating around that I recorded on my laptop, so it’s pretty lo-fi recording, I did it all myself so it doesn’t sound that great but I think it’s fun.”

So is it along the same lines as the Alkaline Trio sound?
“Not really, it’s a lot more low-fi, it’s a lot more... there’s some electronics stuff on there and it’s way more stripped down.”

What do you do in your spare time, if you get any?
“On the road? I read quite a bit, right now I’m watching a thing about Navy Seals, so I watch a lot of Military Channel and History Channel, and I read quite a bit... try to do push-ups" (He laughs).

If you weren’t in Trio what do you think you’d be doing for a job?
“Uh I’d probably be in design, I went to school for design, but then the band got busy and I put that on hold, but it’s still something that I... I still paint, I still like doing art stuff so I’d probably be in graphic design.”

Do you have quite a heavy hand in your album covers and stuff like that then?
“Yeh, I don’t physically put it together but it usually comes from an idea that one of us has, usually it’s me, I just love doing artwork and stuff like that... with the exception of ‘This Addiction’, that record was ... it took us forever to find cover art, I had no idea what should be on the cover so this last record I didn’t have as much input, but we were lucky that it looked really good the first time around.”

Is it the same case with your videos?
“Yeh, we usually have an idea given to us, directors will send in video... they call then ‘treatments’, like scripts, and usually we’ll take like a basic idea of someone’s video and re-write it to fit us a little bit more. I’ve written our last couple of videos and given them to a director and then they embellish on it and make it kind of more cohesive.”

Ok, cool ... what can your fans expect from your live shows?
“We usually try and switch-up the set, we play different songs, but there’s not a whole lot of urm... we just go up there and play our songs and a lot of time we have a good laugh up there, we don’t have any crazy pyrotechnics in the show, we haven’t had to coax the crowd into singing certain parts or whatever, there’s just certain things that have happened over the course of time that now have become staples in the show, people sing and stuff like that so, really what we want to do is show the crowd as good a time as we’re having, we want everyone that comes out to have as much fun as we are.”

Well you’ve got a huge following, have you had any incidents with your fans?
“Nothing too crazy, I mean I’ve had some friends of mine deal with some pretty weird shit but I, personally, never have and I’m thankful for that. Usually our fans are really cool and really nice and we’re all kind of similar kind of people so we’ve been lucky.”

Ok, last words I guess, do you have any advice for young bands out there?
“You know it’s weird now to start a band, it’s so different to when I started this band, with the internet and with everything , I think, if anything, a new band could probably tell me how to do it! Back when we started this thing we were sending out demo tapes and cassette tapes, so a lot has changed since we started, now I don’t know that I could give anyone advice other than you should play music with people that you like and you’ll be together for a very long time.”

By Beth Cook


Alkaline Trio's new album 'This Addiction', released February 23rd 2010, on Heart & Skull, is available from online stores :   http://hmv.com/hmvweb/displayProductDetails.do?ctx=280;0;-1;-1;-1&sku=227080

Tour dates and ticket information for their current tour : http://www.ticketmaster.co.uk/Alkaline-Trio-tickets/artist/730716

INTERVIEW : Barry Hyde

The Futureheads’ frontman Barry Hyde takes ten minutes out of their sell-out UK tour to chat about cannibalism, coffins, and new album ‘The Chaos’...

So, how’s your tour going?
"Great, this is the sixth date on the tour, and all the gigs have been great, it’s been a couple of years since we’ve been out on the road, this is the first proper, ‘get on the road and do lots of gigs’ tour since the last album."

This one’s massive isn’t it? The UK, the US, Canada, Poland, and loads of festivals...
"Yes, they keep coming in, it’s great, we’re really excited about going to America for the first time in four years, we’ve got a new record deal out there so you never know really, but that’s the place to tour, it’s real touring, the romantic version of it."

Do you get sick of being on the tour bus all the time?
"I get more sick of being on a tour bus than staying in hotels, because, the thing about being on a tour bus is you’ve got your little pit, which is like a coffin! That’s your bunk, and personal space is very minimal on a bus. For this tour, we’re doing it in a split of van and staying in hotels, you can do that in the UK a lot easier, the drives are relatively short so you don’t need to drive through the night, but then again, certain tours are logistically impossible in a ‘splitter’ because if you’ve got to get from Amsterdam to Paris, you’ve got to have someone driving through the night."

Your new album, ‘The Chaos’, came out last week, would you say it’s different from your others?
"Yeh it came out, a week today, it’s different in that it’s got different songs on it", (he laughs), "but obviously it’s made by the same people, so... it’s not so different that it wouldn’t be recognisable, but it’s not so similar that it would be boring."

Ok, that’s a good mix! You guys set up your own music label didn’t you, have you found it easier?
"Yeh there’s fewer people involved, and that is only going to make it easier, because it concentrates the energy and the ambition of the group. It was very liberating, to get out of our record deal with a major label, which, to be honest, was never really where we belonged! We’re kind of a bit too DIY punk, to be ever really be considered to be a pop band, but a little bit too melodic to be considered to be a DIY punk band, so we’re in this funny area and that’s why we ended up not really knowing where to go, we just got offered a deal and took it. But signing up Nul Records, (the band’s label), has been fantastic, because our original intention was to do that, but we got carried away, we got given an opportunity to go on an incredible adventure, and tour the world, and play on Top of the Pops and stuff like that, so we just took it, we were teenagers. But we’re happy to have done that, we’re not regretful of anything because we’ve come full circle, this is our tenth year together, and we’re still going strong, we have a good fan base who want to see us play, and ...yeh, it’s good."

Actually i’ve noticed that you do quite a lot for your fans; freebies, downloadable tracks etc. is that easier on your own label?
"Yeh, i think it is, then again, it’s hard to know, because we left Warners in... 2006 i think it was, and a lot has changed, so who knows, by now we could have been having the same experience, they could have been as tuned-in as we are now... but i don’t imagine that would be the case" (laughs).

What’s your favourite song?
"At the minute, it’s probably Jupiter, which is the last song on the new album, it’s our most, ‘epic’ song, it’s four and a half minutes, which is very long for us... our first gig was only seven minutes, so it’s like almost a whole gig!".

Have you had any ‘crazy fan’ experiences when you’ve been on tour? You know, people throwing their underwear at you?
(He Laughs), "we’ve had a bit of that over the years, but what really freaks me out is when we’ll turn up at a gig in, i dunno, Nottingham, and there’ll be two Japanese fans that’ve flown over and they’ll just be at every gig, it’s crazy, because it’s very far, and very expensive to do that, and their tour has probably cost more than ours because we’re not paying for flights from bloody Asia!"

I suppose it’s flattering though...
"Oh it’s amazing, but you don’t really know what to do, you feel like you should invite them in, you know, ‘do you want to come and stay in our hotel?’, you feel so obligated to show your appreciation that it actually becomes slightly awkward."

Yeh, and it’s probably not the safest thing to invite strangers to stay with you...
"Well little Japanese girls, they’re never any bother", (laughs), "they’re very polite and nice."

You’ve toured with a lot of bands, have you had a favourite tour?
"Well the Pixies are the one that kind of blows my mind the most, I guess out of all the bands that we’ve had the honour to play with it would be them... but then again maybe supporting Oasis at Hamden Park, because me and our Dave, (younger brother and the band’s drummer), were originally in an Oasis covers band when we were teenagers, so that was kind of odd, watching them do songs that we used to play in mum and dad’s dining room on a Sunday morning, it was great, but all the bands; Foo Fighters, Pixies, Pearl Jam, they’re all... well it’s all an honour, it’s wonderful."

Wow, I can imagine ... ok you’re on a desert Island, who would survive and who would get eaten?
"Well, Ross and Jaff are vegetarians, so they’d probably go... Dave will win, Dave would take this opportunity to beat me to death, which i think is something he’s considered many times."

A nice bit of brotherly love there?
"Yeh, that whole brotherly hate thing", (laughs), "no but we wouldn’t need to, we’re clever boys, we could grow something, find some nuts or berries..."

Ok, then, last words, sell us your new album...
"Ok, well the real core of this album, the message, is that there’s too much apathy in the world, there’s too much laziness and ignorance, these things are the real enemies of the human race and we contribute to these things by doing nothing. So this album is about empowerment, it’s about independence, and cooperation, and mutual respect. This album came together though us creating that for each other, and that’s what we hope it’ll do to people who really get into it. On the other hand, the album has some very simplistic songs on it that people seem to be responding really well to, so yeh, ‘The Chaos’ represents what i think is, our natural way of being, and the idea of normality is just insane to me because there’s no such thing as normal, so don’t try and be normal, because when you try and be normal you deny your own individuality, and you become a sheep. What we really need is individuals who care about other individuals, and that’s all you’re about."

By Beth Cook


The Futureheads' latest album 'The Chaos', released 26th April 2010 on Nul Records, is available from online stores : http://hmv.com/hmvweb/displayProductDetails.do?ctx=280;-1;-1;-1;-1&sku=431965

Dates and ticket information for their current tour : http://www.thefutureheads.com/tour/