The Luminaire, Kilburn High Street. Talking hairstyles, standing still, forearms vertical, like shields. The jubilant gay couple in front of me bounces like it's mardi gras but for the most part Liars are a freakshow this crowd are party to but won't party to, too busy chasing the secondhand smudge of cool by association. Angus, Julian and Aaron are onstage, pounding stuff, chanting, making noise, forcing the air around them into unreasonable shapes. Aaron in particular is contorting his extraordinarily simian face into something resembling an African witchdoctor mask, lower teeth bared, eyes back in their sockets. But why break a sweat when just being here is enough to get another stamp on your hipster card? Who gives a fuck about music anyway?
Who indeed. A few weeks from now I will spend the night of my 30th birthday in the moshpit at a Mastodon/High On Fire gig at the Scala. The audience, although that seems far too sedentary a term to use in this case, are genuinely losing it and themselves, blurring their bodies into a writhing mass of flailing flesh, building a savage utopia out of untrammeled physicality. Liars' music - and that’d be rock music, not punk-funk or no-wave or whatever might make it sound more palatable to the faithless - is propulsive, kinetic, visceral. It should generate a similar kind of feedback loop between band and audience, but the evident desperation on the part of many of their punters to be a face cancels out any possibility of becoming faceless, abandoned to mind-wiping ecstasies of the music. Heaven forbid that music or anything else should have any power over the most important thing in your world. You.
You spoiled brats. You never had it so good.
"We went to Cork, Limerick, Galway, Belfast... all those places where it's not like you're playing to a thousand people. Sometimes in Limerick we played to fifteen. But, you know, there are some kids there and often it's like a group of kids who are actually a band, you know? And they're like, 'Dude, I didn't know people were doing that! I never heard of your band before!' That's what they say! That's awesome! It's like, 'I saw this name 'Liars', I just thought you were some crap or whatever and we were just down for a pint, but I flipped my lid, man! We're going home now to figure it out!" And that's great, dude! You don't get that when you play in New York or London." - Angus
The new Liars album is called Drum's Not Dead. It is the sound of conflict, resolution, more conflict, further resolution, an endless jagged spiral of success and failure, the hardcore and headstrong giving way to the uncertain and unstable and vice versa. It's nothing so obvious as The Sound Of Total War. It's more fractured than that, and often tender. It's furiously telling someone you want to fucking kill them only to immediately regret both the sentiment and the needless schism that led up to those words leaving your lips and you'd do anything to suck them back through your mouth into the pit of pain churning in your stomach and now everything's fucked and you have to build something out of betrayal and broken promises. It's war, yes, but shattered and scattered and stamped into the bloody fabric of our everyday lives. It’s the comfort of simplicity smashed into a million pieces you cannot keep track of no matter how you try. This, of course, is only my interpretation. And what do I know?
"I'm not lumping you into this category, but I view press and reviews as a technicolour version of what people may think or may be influenced to think. I think it's a very exaggerated and very animated version. There are these terms that are developed and these tie-ins to other more interesting and more enticing things that may have influenced the music in this kind of cartoonish way. And I'm not discounting it at all, I think it's just that it's an over-exaggerated idea of something I don't know how to think about or know how to gauge or put in a container. I don't think we pay any attention to it when we make things, but certainly, you know, you have to be aware of that." - Aaron
Drum’s Not Dead is a conversational record. It centres around relationships fractured and re-established, and allegorises these in form of two polar characters, Drum and Mt. Heart Attack. Drum is humanity at its most confident, capable and unintellectual. Drum sees only cause and effect. Drum can always be trusted to act without reservation or reluctance. Drum does not fuss over the details. On the other hand, Mt. Heart Attack is the fretful sort. Mt. Heart Attack points out the drawbacks. Mt. Heart Attack feels guilty about the past and is fearful of the future.
"Drum became a sort of elemental part of our band. It was almost like it was another member that needed constant attention. Both Aaron and Julian play drums, y'know? So it really felt like Drum was a person and a representation of something that worked for us, the instinctual hitting of something, where you don't really need to know that much about it. You can hit it soft and it sounds different to when you hit it hard. And that's great. And then we developed the idea of this alternate element, Mt. Heart Attack, because everything isn't so easy like that. I mean, in some ways we wish it was all that instinctual but sometimes we do think about it too much. And it can swap in the same way that your mood changes, like, you can be Drum now but then in ten minutes you might be Mt. Heart Attack." - Angus
So, Angus. You decided to move to Berlin and tour Europe, right?
"Yeah,” he affirms. “We did it for financial reasons and to explore, and the opportunity came up with the European Union and all that. We went to Budapest and Croatia and Slovenia and Slovakia and Poland and then we went to Turkey, even though they're not allowed in the EU yet. We went there to make our thoughts felt about the whole situation there."
What kind of impressions were you left with from your travels?
"I came from Los Angeles,” confides Julian. “You know, the dry wall capital? So it was just a whole different world to come into places that so much history right there in your face, you know? The first time you visit it you look outside and there's this Swiss cheese building, just bullet-ridden, and then when you look for it it's everywhere. Then the more you learn about history and the more... it's really kind of intense, each neighborhood, each street, sometimes you're just going to get a doughnut then all of a sudden you're like, 'Oh my God, there's bombs dropped, and thousands of people marching down the street, going to die!' So much of that has happened. It's really a weird flip-flop, you know?
There's an element of leaving the comfort zone, then?
"Yeah, yeah, yeah!” Angus is nothing if not enthusiastic. “And trying to open up a bit. And this is a bit stupid, but maybe it's the same as the EU opening up. It felt to us like these places are there to go to and honestly, it really makes a great deal of difference to a tour if you're going to somewhere new and also if you're going to somewhere where people don't always get a chance to see the type of stuff that you do. It really feels like you're bringing something and you're doing something, not like just the average day-to-day club show, you're going to Slovenia and people there haven't seen you, and you blow some kids’ minds, and it feels kinda cool. It makes it kinda worthwhile."
"For some reason I'm just thinking of Belgrade when we were in Serbia,” begins Julian. “And you get there and then you meet the promoter, and the promoter wants to take you to somewhere to get something to eat, so he takes you to get something to eat and you have this really nice meal and you're talking all about Serbia, and you're talking about Belgrade and you're talking about Croatia, and you know, 'What was the division back then?' and 'How do you say ‘thank you’ here? Oh, it's the same in Croatia? Oh really? They said it was totally different...'"
"It's really important for people like us who've grown up in colonies to get a sense of history that we haven't had before,” states Angus. “It makes a big difference to go there and have a guy who was living there tell you, 'There were tanks pointed there, and we were scared.' You know? It was like, 'Wow!’ There's a real sense of inspiration you can draw from that. In the same way, you can draw a lot of inspiration from Los Angeles, and the way that is. It's a different sense of what you're looking for at the time and this time for us it was a sort of European experience."
Do you feel that the US and Western Europe are kept at arm's length from history? That it takes something like a natural disaster or a terrorist attack to wake us up to the fact that history is in fact a continuous process that doesn’t just end when we put down our high school or sixth form textbooks?
“Oooh, yeah! It's the insulation that's the scary thing. I don't know what it's like particularly here, but in Australia and America it's difficult for people to tell you where these countries are! You know? Or name these countries! And it's like, damn, man, this is your world! How can you not be interested in what's going on in the other neighbourhood? Y'know? So it's really insular, and that's what's scary, and that scared me out of being in that climate."
Early on in the band’s career, you were lumped in with the whole NYC art-punk-funk kind of thing. Maybe one thing that separates Liars from all of that is that you have a broader perspective.
"Well, New York was really important to us too,” says Angus. “Just to make that clear."
"But you can do it anywhere,” counters Julian. “It's not so much about New York City. That's not the only place where things happen."
We’re back at the Luminaire. Liars are tearing through a version of Nirvana’s ‘Territorial Pissings’ and I’m sure they’re doing it for the hell of it, not because they’re faced with a crowd that are nodding politely when they should be ripping chunks out of the air and stuffing them in their mouths and growling and slavering and shaking their heads from side to side. The gig is almost over. Drum’s not dead, and we’re all still alive, so everything’s cool. No-one’s getting out of hand. We’re safe. Real fucking safe. Especially compared to a band who constantly make life difficult for themselves, pushing themselves further from home with everything they do. Do you understand how rare that is? How brave? Rather than stand still and allow the universe to coalesce around them, to solidify and become familiar, Liars act on the knowledge that a new environment creates new personalities and new relationships, demanding reinvention and readjustment. Sure, I’m presenting an exaggerated and animated view of all this. I know Angus moved to Berlin for financial reasons, to take advantage of the cheap accommodation and studio time offered by the city. I know this, but I can’t quite believe it. I believe Liars make it all up as they go along, and that’s exhilarating.
“I think we've been kind of lucky. From the interviews we've done, which are a good source of feedback as to what people outside of the three of us think, the kind of consensus is that people don't really know what to expect. If anything they expect us to change now. So that's really lucky for us, a very fortunate position to be in. Almost to the sense that if we made another record that was similar to this one, that would be the more shocking... not shocking but surprising, thing. And that's kind of cool. I'd rather be in that position than another one." - Aaron
During the interview, I do something no music writer is ever allowed to do. Not ever, or you get shot in the back of the head and all traces of your existence, which basically amount to a bunch of articles, interviews and reviews, are wiped from the face of the earth for ever and ever, amen. What is this heinous act? Well, I get something wrong. Apparently. Or perhaps I just get it my kind of right. I remark that one of the songs on the new album, ‘It Fit When I Was A Kid’ sounds like a dream. It’s something in the way the sections of the song fit together, the way it makes sense when you’re experiencing it but then you try and explain it to others and it falls apart in the telling.
"I think dreams are a great subject and still one of the great mysteries of the world. Isn't it so weird that we don't know what's going on? I mean, people tell you that it's the brain in neutral or whatever. Have you ever done, like, a dream diary? Where you keep a pencil and you write down things you've been dreaming? That's interesting. But no, hahahaha! 'It Fit When I Was A Kid' is not a dream. But I guess maybe the imagery could be imagined, and in that way I can see what you're saying. That's the great thing about dreams, right? There's no concrete interpretation. And those are the possibilities of a dream diary, that you go in tangents, and with a word you could say five different other things and maybe I think in our lyric writing we find an interest in that. Making things available for interpretation rather than a dictation." - Angus
Drum’s not dead, we’re all still alive, and everything’s cool. But there’s one song left tonight and just as I’m about to give up on all these damn spoilt kids there’s a glimpse of what could have been. Scratch that, it’s a glimpse of what is, but until now has been held in check, mollified, shut away like the madwoman in the attic. Liars are pounding stuff, chanting, making noise, forcing the air around them into unreasonable shapes, Angus is screaming, “I am a BEAR! Give me a TAIL!” and suddenly we’re united in our desire to tear away our skin and expose the sleek fur beneath. The Luminaire becomes a menagerie. With what is left of our human voices we chant for something we forgot we wanted so badly.
“Blood! Blood! Blood! Blood! BLOOD!”
Who indeed. A few weeks from now I will spend the night of my 30th birthday in the moshpit at a Mastodon/High On Fire gig at the Scala. The audience, although that seems far too sedentary a term to use in this case, are genuinely losing it and themselves, blurring their bodies into a writhing mass of flailing flesh, building a savage utopia out of untrammeled physicality. Liars' music - and that’d be rock music, not punk-funk or no-wave or whatever might make it sound more palatable to the faithless - is propulsive, kinetic, visceral. It should generate a similar kind of feedback loop between band and audience, but the evident desperation on the part of many of their punters to be a face cancels out any possibility of becoming faceless, abandoned to mind-wiping ecstasies of the music. Heaven forbid that music or anything else should have any power over the most important thing in your world. You.
You spoiled brats. You never had it so good.
"We went to Cork, Limerick, Galway, Belfast... all those places where it's not like you're playing to a thousand people. Sometimes in Limerick we played to fifteen. But, you know, there are some kids there and often it's like a group of kids who are actually a band, you know? And they're like, 'Dude, I didn't know people were doing that! I never heard of your band before!' That's what they say! That's awesome! It's like, 'I saw this name 'Liars', I just thought you were some crap or whatever and we were just down for a pint, but I flipped my lid, man! We're going home now to figure it out!" And that's great, dude! You don't get that when you play in New York or London." - Angus
The new Liars album is called Drum's Not Dead. It is the sound of conflict, resolution, more conflict, further resolution, an endless jagged spiral of success and failure, the hardcore and headstrong giving way to the uncertain and unstable and vice versa. It's nothing so obvious as The Sound Of Total War. It's more fractured than that, and often tender. It's furiously telling someone you want to fucking kill them only to immediately regret both the sentiment and the needless schism that led up to those words leaving your lips and you'd do anything to suck them back through your mouth into the pit of pain churning in your stomach and now everything's fucked and you have to build something out of betrayal and broken promises. It's war, yes, but shattered and scattered and stamped into the bloody fabric of our everyday lives. It’s the comfort of simplicity smashed into a million pieces you cannot keep track of no matter how you try. This, of course, is only my interpretation. And what do I know?
"I'm not lumping you into this category, but I view press and reviews as a technicolour version of what people may think or may be influenced to think. I think it's a very exaggerated and very animated version. There are these terms that are developed and these tie-ins to other more interesting and more enticing things that may have influenced the music in this kind of cartoonish way. And I'm not discounting it at all, I think it's just that it's an over-exaggerated idea of something I don't know how to think about or know how to gauge or put in a container. I don't think we pay any attention to it when we make things, but certainly, you know, you have to be aware of that." - Aaron
Drum’s Not Dead is a conversational record. It centres around relationships fractured and re-established, and allegorises these in form of two polar characters, Drum and Mt. Heart Attack. Drum is humanity at its most confident, capable and unintellectual. Drum sees only cause and effect. Drum can always be trusted to act without reservation or reluctance. Drum does not fuss over the details. On the other hand, Mt. Heart Attack is the fretful sort. Mt. Heart Attack points out the drawbacks. Mt. Heart Attack feels guilty about the past and is fearful of the future.
"Drum became a sort of elemental part of our band. It was almost like it was another member that needed constant attention. Both Aaron and Julian play drums, y'know? So it really felt like Drum was a person and a representation of something that worked for us, the instinctual hitting of something, where you don't really need to know that much about it. You can hit it soft and it sounds different to when you hit it hard. And that's great. And then we developed the idea of this alternate element, Mt. Heart Attack, because everything isn't so easy like that. I mean, in some ways we wish it was all that instinctual but sometimes we do think about it too much. And it can swap in the same way that your mood changes, like, you can be Drum now but then in ten minutes you might be Mt. Heart Attack." - Angus
So, Angus. You decided to move to Berlin and tour Europe, right?
"Yeah,” he affirms. “We did it for financial reasons and to explore, and the opportunity came up with the European Union and all that. We went to Budapest and Croatia and Slovenia and Slovakia and Poland and then we went to Turkey, even though they're not allowed in the EU yet. We went there to make our thoughts felt about the whole situation there."
What kind of impressions were you left with from your travels?
"I came from Los Angeles,” confides Julian. “You know, the dry wall capital? So it was just a whole different world to come into places that so much history right there in your face, you know? The first time you visit it you look outside and there's this Swiss cheese building, just bullet-ridden, and then when you look for it it's everywhere. Then the more you learn about history and the more... it's really kind of intense, each neighborhood, each street, sometimes you're just going to get a doughnut then all of a sudden you're like, 'Oh my God, there's bombs dropped, and thousands of people marching down the street, going to die!' So much of that has happened. It's really a weird flip-flop, you know?
There's an element of leaving the comfort zone, then?
"Yeah, yeah, yeah!” Angus is nothing if not enthusiastic. “And trying to open up a bit. And this is a bit stupid, but maybe it's the same as the EU opening up. It felt to us like these places are there to go to and honestly, it really makes a great deal of difference to a tour if you're going to somewhere new and also if you're going to somewhere where people don't always get a chance to see the type of stuff that you do. It really feels like you're bringing something and you're doing something, not like just the average day-to-day club show, you're going to Slovenia and people there haven't seen you, and you blow some kids’ minds, and it feels kinda cool. It makes it kinda worthwhile."
"For some reason I'm just thinking of Belgrade when we were in Serbia,” begins Julian. “And you get there and then you meet the promoter, and the promoter wants to take you to somewhere to get something to eat, so he takes you to get something to eat and you have this really nice meal and you're talking all about Serbia, and you're talking about Belgrade and you're talking about Croatia, and you know, 'What was the division back then?' and 'How do you say ‘thank you’ here? Oh, it's the same in Croatia? Oh really? They said it was totally different...'"
"It's really important for people like us who've grown up in colonies to get a sense of history that we haven't had before,” states Angus. “It makes a big difference to go there and have a guy who was living there tell you, 'There were tanks pointed there, and we were scared.' You know? It was like, 'Wow!’ There's a real sense of inspiration you can draw from that. In the same way, you can draw a lot of inspiration from Los Angeles, and the way that is. It's a different sense of what you're looking for at the time and this time for us it was a sort of European experience."
Do you feel that the US and Western Europe are kept at arm's length from history? That it takes something like a natural disaster or a terrorist attack to wake us up to the fact that history is in fact a continuous process that doesn’t just end when we put down our high school or sixth form textbooks?
“Oooh, yeah! It's the insulation that's the scary thing. I don't know what it's like particularly here, but in Australia and America it's difficult for people to tell you where these countries are! You know? Or name these countries! And it's like, damn, man, this is your world! How can you not be interested in what's going on in the other neighbourhood? Y'know? So it's really insular, and that's what's scary, and that scared me out of being in that climate."
Early on in the band’s career, you were lumped in with the whole NYC art-punk-funk kind of thing. Maybe one thing that separates Liars from all of that is that you have a broader perspective.
"Well, New York was really important to us too,” says Angus. “Just to make that clear."
"But you can do it anywhere,” counters Julian. “It's not so much about New York City. That's not the only place where things happen."
We’re back at the Luminaire. Liars are tearing through a version of Nirvana’s ‘Territorial Pissings’ and I’m sure they’re doing it for the hell of it, not because they’re faced with a crowd that are nodding politely when they should be ripping chunks out of the air and stuffing them in their mouths and growling and slavering and shaking their heads from side to side. The gig is almost over. Drum’s not dead, and we’re all still alive, so everything’s cool. No-one’s getting out of hand. We’re safe. Real fucking safe. Especially compared to a band who constantly make life difficult for themselves, pushing themselves further from home with everything they do. Do you understand how rare that is? How brave? Rather than stand still and allow the universe to coalesce around them, to solidify and become familiar, Liars act on the knowledge that a new environment creates new personalities and new relationships, demanding reinvention and readjustment. Sure, I’m presenting an exaggerated and animated view of all this. I know Angus moved to Berlin for financial reasons, to take advantage of the cheap accommodation and studio time offered by the city. I know this, but I can’t quite believe it. I believe Liars make it all up as they go along, and that’s exhilarating.
“I think we've been kind of lucky. From the interviews we've done, which are a good source of feedback as to what people outside of the three of us think, the kind of consensus is that people don't really know what to expect. If anything they expect us to change now. So that's really lucky for us, a very fortunate position to be in. Almost to the sense that if we made another record that was similar to this one, that would be the more shocking... not shocking but surprising, thing. And that's kind of cool. I'd rather be in that position than another one." - Aaron
During the interview, I do something no music writer is ever allowed to do. Not ever, or you get shot in the back of the head and all traces of your existence, which basically amount to a bunch of articles, interviews and reviews, are wiped from the face of the earth for ever and ever, amen. What is this heinous act? Well, I get something wrong. Apparently. Or perhaps I just get it my kind of right. I remark that one of the songs on the new album, ‘It Fit When I Was A Kid’ sounds like a dream. It’s something in the way the sections of the song fit together, the way it makes sense when you’re experiencing it but then you try and explain it to others and it falls apart in the telling.
"I think dreams are a great subject and still one of the great mysteries of the world. Isn't it so weird that we don't know what's going on? I mean, people tell you that it's the brain in neutral or whatever. Have you ever done, like, a dream diary? Where you keep a pencil and you write down things you've been dreaming? That's interesting. But no, hahahaha! 'It Fit When I Was A Kid' is not a dream. But I guess maybe the imagery could be imagined, and in that way I can see what you're saying. That's the great thing about dreams, right? There's no concrete interpretation. And those are the possibilities of a dream diary, that you go in tangents, and with a word you could say five different other things and maybe I think in our lyric writing we find an interest in that. Making things available for interpretation rather than a dictation." - Angus
Drum’s not dead, we’re all still alive, and everything’s cool. But there’s one song left tonight and just as I’m about to give up on all these damn spoilt kids there’s a glimpse of what could have been. Scratch that, it’s a glimpse of what is, but until now has been held in check, mollified, shut away like the madwoman in the attic. Liars are pounding stuff, chanting, making noise, forcing the air around them into unreasonable shapes, Angus is screaming, “I am a BEAR! Give me a TAIL!” and suddenly we’re united in our desire to tear away our skin and expose the sleek fur beneath. The Luminaire becomes a menagerie. With what is left of our human voices we chant for something we forgot we wanted so badly.
“Blood! Blood! Blood! Blood! BLOOD!”
