I wanted to ask you about when you were playing in DC at, I believe, an event for Martin Luther King. How did you get to play there, what was that like? All you can see from the footage is the needle (monument) because it was from the back of the stage. Was it a proper stage set up? I was just really amazed by that whole section of footage...

It's a small ampitheatre right there at the base of the monument. They've been doing shows there for a number of years... you can rent that, or like you can get a permit for that space. You seem to say we were doing like a protest or a demonstartion but it was a legitimate event, we got a permit from the park service and everything. It's amazing to look out on the film and see how many people there were there. Well, it's sort of an illusion I think. I actually can't believe there were that many people there!

Do you want to do more stuff like the quieter stuff on Instrument?

Well, we don't have a direction. We just work.

It's weird because the stuff that ended up on End Hits that was demoed on Instrument were demoed as really quiet, I'm thinking about Slo Crostic in particular, and then it turned out much louder on the record. I wondered if you felt a need to, and I can't think of a word for this, kind of Fugazi-fy what you do and make it more rocky when it goes to a proper album. I don't know if it's for the crowd or for yourselves or if you're even aware of it but do you feel a need to rock it up?

(Big pause)

(Apologetically) I can't think of a better word to describe it with...

No, no I see your point, I'm just thinking about it. I don't think we think of it as a need to "rock it up" but I think that we...every song we write we go through, like a dozen different versions of it. We just fool around with it. When you first write a song you tend to be more tentative because you're just fooling around with the actual parts and how they fit together. I think that we probably do have...there's probably somewhat of an iclination to kind of overly structure. I think we're kind of freaks about structure. We will take a song, a perfectly beautiful, simple song and chop it into so many pieces and rearrange it so many times that we'll eventually drop it. We drop so many songs you can't imagine. There's so many pieces of music that never made it just because we just...we beat it to the ground, we just kept fucking around with it until it just doesn't exist anymore: literally. So, I think that in some ways, for instance like Crostic, that was recorded that way on purpose, that slow weird version. That's not the way it was originally. Originally it was a lot more like the way it was on the record.

You recorded it specifically for the soundtrack?

We just recorded it because we thought it would sound cool. And it did...

Yeah, it did...

But like, you know...with the more tentative stuff like the Rend It thing, that's just Guy by himself on a 4 track in his room so he can't "rock it up". He's just trying to work out the lyrics. But it's a fair question, you're right in some degree that we do... Put it this way: some songs we write are really unorthodox and I think they're really cool because of that but then by the time they end up on the record they've become more normal.

I think as well it's because I guess you see yourself as a live band more than anything...

It has to somehow work yeah...It has to translate. We play almost everything we've ever recorded.

Yeah, I was going to ask you about that. I was watching you tonight from a lot closer than I did in Wolverhampton, because you don't have a setlist are you mouthing what's going to come next to each other?

Sometimes we mouth it and sometimes, you just know. You know every little click and chord and every sound, every rhythm; you just know. I can't...it's just...I dunno. Hang out with 3 other people for like 12 years and you begin to get a sense of it.

In theory yeah! (laughter)

OK gimme one more and then I have to pack up

Do you practise much these days?

Well, when we're at home we never practise our old songs. We only work on unwritten stuff and we usually practise 2, 3 maybe 4 times a week 2 or 3 hours a day. We sit in the afternoon, we sit in Joe's basement and just fool around with ideas and sometimes we'll just get together and just sit around and talk for 3 hours without even playing. We just get together... That's the way we do it.

OK thanks Ian...

Thank you.

This interview was first published in Damn You! fanzine

See also:
Guy Picciotto interview
Dischord Records interview

interview and photos by Chris Summerlin
Fugazi website