We asked them to "look cool"...
"WE HAD ONE [PIANO] THAT EXPLODED ON THE STREET OUTSIDE THE CLUB IN BIRMINGHAM. WE LAUGHED! REALLY HARD, THEN LEFT IT ON THE STREET." - THE WALKMEN
Bizarrely, if you bring The Walkmen’s return up in conversation, we tend to arrive at three same responses. One fellow will drop their jaw, bulge eye-popping stares and mutter nonsensical delight at their next live show. Another Walkmen sap will gaze to the ceiling and ponder that time in their life they flailed about to dancefloor hit ‘The Rat’. Yet the often, blurted out retort “They’re still going?” sums up the longevity of the brotherly five-piece. The Walkmen have pretty much done it all, from the covers album, being used in hit movie OSTs to playing with their music heroes, The Pogues.
A decade later, them and their beaten up piano still fight the curse of clapped out European touring vans, arriving in barely enough time for their sold out Islington show. Joined by towering lead singer Hamilton Leithauser and drummer Matt Barrick, SUPERSWEET briefly discovers the extent of the humble, po-faced act. They avoid detailing ideas behind their fifth record Lisbon, but instead trawl off into their European mishaps, their next Daytrotter “Led Zeppelin” session and why they play “crappy, crappy music.”
Recently blurted out at Lollapalooza, the band reveal that apart from the hailed Lisbon they have a bit of trouble getting The Walkmen message across to a European audience. So after today’s stint of watching their tour-van drive off on a “flat-pack truck”, Matt and Hamilton spark alive when asked if they had any other bad experiences in the UK. Shouting a mighty “YES!” in unison, Matt complains first about the stress they’ve faced “for like ten years!” “Every time we come here” he continues, “something always happens to us. Our car broke down last time at night. Somebody came along and tied a rope to the front of the van and towed us down the M4.” While Hamilton smirks that’s they’ve “relived a couple” of experiences, these moments seem to help rather than hinder their touring spirits, “It was perfect” he supports “standing in the rain this morning with the broken down van trying to find a cab. It was just perfect.”
Whether using a succession of terrible rental vans, (Hamilton joins in with a grumble “I guess so man! That’s all that they have over here!”) Matt frowns about their continuous piano torment “We also have problems with pianos, ‘cause we always bring an actual operating piano. We had one that exploded on the street outside the club in Birmingham. No one was watching it and it fell over, and literally exploded.” Crikey. But yet again, the band wear these moments as medals of their touring history, “We laughed! Really hard, then left it on the street” boasts the front man “I was so happy to see that thing go. It was just a crappy one we bought on Craigslist”.
Playing with the same band members (more or less) throughout the entirety of The Walkmen’s career, it’s remarkable how the smart-shirt wearing gents have kept their creativity on a high, particularly when Matt declares “We just have crappy pianos…” and Hamilton sneers “We stay in crappy hotels, and play crappy, crappy music.” The lead vocalist reveals their secret is just possessing honest approval of their work “You actually have to find a way to actually like the music and it is hard ‘cause it’s the same thing over and over again. You have to find a way to make yourself truly like the songs.” Hamilton explains how even routines fail for the band, “Nothing really consistently works and that’s the problem; you try to do something like the last one and it’s just instantly is boring and honestly don’t wanna have to ever hear it again in your life.”
One month before the fifth studio album hits UK shores, we wondered why on record they wanted to remain as raw and natural as possible, from the loose snare drum to the blasting trumpet, even the album art is a ghostly print. Admitting “Well, I guess they are the ones that made it”, Hamilton reveals "We had a bunch of songs that were meteor and ROCK and really loud, but they were pretty boring overall. Sometimes, these days, when we do the huge, “everybody brings their max-power!” it can sound really boring to us so we have to try and find a new angle on it”. Ah, (to all-knowing Walkmen fans) this explains the pained faces the band morph into when they play ‘The Rat’ over and over again…
Now, on to their recent single release ‘Stranded’, who else has noticed how it rings like a cross-breed between the carol ‘Silent Night’ and The Pogues’ ‘Fairytale of New York’? We couldn’t help ourselves and posed this question to Hamilton. Chuckling “no ‘Silent Night’, I’ll listen out for it next time I play it” he exposes “that was the second one we wrote for this record. The first was ‘Blue As Your Blood’. But it’s the only one with the big horn section we kept and we had a bunch of them.” Similarly, ‘Woe is Me’ takes Walkmen into a new direction, with hits of Caribbean reggae from the rhythm guitar assured by the lead vocalist, “It's just another musical part we had. It was fun having something fast that was light enough that we all like it.”
After racking up almost twenty tracks recorded - some that didn’t make the final cut - Hamilton was content to conclude how those with crude working titles “actually made it on the record!” Uncovering a few in a quick fire round - “'Circle Jerker' is ‘Blue Is Your Blood’, ‘Eating Puppies’ is ‘Woe Is Me’”, the lead songwriter admits, “We always have stupid, little titles that we call them…we try to make it as stupid and offensive as possible.” Their “stupid and offensive” antics trail off into the band’s writing of a book John’s Journey, a novel, according to the blurb, about “something far more elusive, nothing”. Hamilton dug-up how it probably will never be finished, some is fiction about a man who “sounds like a shmuck” while parts are the mere rants of himself who “at some point or another”, typed a day of what he had done. Fancy a taste?
“When it came down to it, John didn’t really care what went on inside of Emily’s head as long as she stayed at enough of an emotional distance from him that he could dump her at any moment and not feel like he was actually losing anything other than a bed buddy.” – Chapter 2 (Head over to an excerpt on their website’s hidden page for more.)
Wiping his forehead, the iconic front man closes the interview with just a few promises. Divulging that the band are already cleaning the brain-cogs for their next album, they meanwhile, will bear the brunt of touring (including to a South London dive the next day) and hope to record another session for the Daytrotter clan, a Led Zeppelin recording, “It will be so funny” muttering his intentions under his breath “but I get the raw, short end of the stick on that one…”
Words: Gemma Dempster