luke mcgarry

Download: The Duke Spirit “Lassoo”

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(from Neptune out now on Shangri-La)

The Duke Spirit are now and will forever be the only band both to cover Alex Chilton and open for Incubus at the Hollywood Bowl. They have the sort of overcranked British sense of humor that generations of misfit high school freshman dream nightly of developing and they meet over hummus the day after Sky Saxon passed away. This interview by Dan Collins at the Urth Cafe.

So Liela, are you jealous that Marc and Toby ordered food and you didn’t?
Liela Moss (vocals/harmonica/tambourine): Your plate looks good! I might need to stick my finger in your hummus plate.
Hey, we just met! And anyway, I need this food because I’m grieving. You know that Sky Saxon died yesterday?
LM: Oh, that was the other character! I have seen him—at the Royal Festival Hall! Unfortunately, he’s kind of like the third death down on yesterday’s tally of Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, and Sky Saxon.
I know! Our photographer Lauren was saying it will be just like Darby Crash dying the same day as John Lennon. Who’s going to know?
LM: What happened to him?
The theory is that Darby Crash killed himself intending to get immortalized, and then John Lennon died, so he didn’t get any press.
LM: God, eclipsed even in fucking death. Where’s the justice in that?
In 2006 you did an EP of covers of a bunch of greats who had recently died, such as Desmond Dekker and Arthur Lee of Love. In that spirit, would you be willing to play a Seeds song when you play L.A. on the 13th?
LM: Shit, maybe we should!
Toby Butler (guitar): There’s not enough time.
LM: We’re not good enough to learn it quickly.
Marc Sallis (bass): We’d rather do the Charlie’s Angels theme. That was the plan.
Oh, come on! The Seeds are not that complex. Maybe you could play ‘Evil Hoodoo?’
LM: I don’t know each of their songs by name. I’m pretty rubbish on them. I wouldn’t know—I’ll leave it to the guys to select this.
Liar! You are totally into garage rock. I saw some video clip of you at South By Southwest, Liela, and you were saying the guys in the band went to see Metallica, but you went to see the Sonics.
LM: Fuck, man, that was so good. They were so brilliant! They still had this weird commanding presence onstage, even though they were old dad dudes. I really enjoyed that. But these guys enjoyed Metallica, and it was a good time for us to just go our separate ways for a few hours, and I just walked around feeling very superior. But I think they had a really awesome time at Metallica!
Do you think Jerry Roslie could sing a good version of ‘Master of Puppets?’
TB: I reckon he would!
LM: I don’t know. That suggestion makes me feel a bit sick!
I’ve noticed that you guys have a lot of nautical themes in your songs, like ‘Neptune’s Call,’ and ‘This Ship Was Built to Last.’ I was actually in Greece one time at this site where the poet Byron had written his name on a column of a temple to Poseidon. Do you think your songs are going to cause people to do graffiti on monuments to popular nautical deities?
LM: That would be perfect! Not defacing it so it totally ruins it and destabilizes it, but charge it with emotion! Like—I wouldn’t want to go to Stonehenge and fuck with it so much that it all fell down, but I think there’s something really beautiful about finding little human fingerprints on everything.
What’s the most defacement or destruction you guys have ever caused?
MS: We tried to throw a TV out the window once, but they’re all hard-wired now, so you can’t actually get them off the wall. It’s quite difficult to trash things these days.
LM: There’s little routes that you do on tour, and you find that you’re in the same hotel again and again, certainly in the U.K. And there have been times when you’re in the same hotel, and over time, I’m like, ‘I’ve been in this room before! I definitely have!’ So I’ve thought about leaving myself little messages, like maybe leaving a little note in the wardrobe.
Most U.K. bands have electronic elements nowadays, but you guys seem to avoid that. Do you think of yourselves as an atypical U.K. band?
TB: At the moment, lots of the British bands are using lots of synths. That kind of sound is very prevalent at the moment. We’ve always been into that more natural, live band kind of thing. We like bits of electronic music, but we never really wanted to do that. We’re more organic.
LM: There’s quite a thin sound coming out of Britain. To my ear, I don’t really hear the rounded, fuzzy, fuck-off tones of good rock ‘n’ roll bands. That said, I really enjoy bands that are using quite a lot of digital stuff. But maybe it doesn’t seem that natural to work with those materials at the moment. Not right now.
Analog music is good, too! Marc, you’re the ‘touring’ bassist, right? Are you like the Bruce Johnston of the band? At home they have another guy do your parts, but you play them on the road?
MS: Toby has been the bass player up until now—on all the recordings, live, everything. Literally I just came onboard and have been playing live with them since October of last year. Toby’s still writing bass lines and still playing, but he can’t do both live, see? Just not quite talented enough to play bass and guitar. It didn’t work.
TB: I’m just not quite good enough to do both at the same time. I just can’t quite get the coordination.
LM: It’s because Toby’s not actually from the mainland. He’s not strictly English—he’s from the Isle of Wight, and so is Marc. We noticed that he needed a kindred spirit, because there was this sort of alien separation between us from the band who are from the mainland, and now they’re paired up.
So you’re saying two wrongs make a Wight?
All: Ha ha ha ha ha ha!
A recent critic on YouTube said that when he saw you play, the bass was too loud, and the vocals were too soft. Marc, when you play are you like, ‘Fuck these guys. I’m going to let the ladies hear my bass tonight!’
MS: Absolutely! Yes, absolutely.
LM: They’re not just going to hear it—they’re going to feel it!
TB: That critic on YouTube must have seen every show we’ve ever done then! He’s a retard! There’s supposed to be some kind of push and pull with the vocals. The vocals aren’t always designed to just pop! The idea is that the guitars can envelop everything, or the music can wrap itself around the vocals. It’s something we’ve always been interested in—that kind of My Bloody Valentine and Jesus and Mary Chain kind of thing where it’s a wall of guitars. We’re in kind of a transitional phase where someone kind of left the band sort of unexpectedly. So we did just the quickest and easiest thing we could do, which was me switching to guitar and bringing in Marc on bass. But we don’t really know what’s going to happen in the future. It might well be that Marc will become more of a permanent member, but for the time being, we’re just doing what we know best.
It was Dan Higgins who left the band, right? Why did he leave?
LM: He just had a beautiful baby daughter, and just had a bit of a crisis about the fact that, you know, we travel all the time. And he didn’t want to be a shit dad. He wanted to be, like, a dad. And we’re all such good friends—it was absolutely awesome that we could just be truthful with each other. ‘We don’t really want to slow down what we’re doing. You’ve got a kid. We don’t want you to be unhappy. What do you want to do?’ He was pretty upset, but he did the right thing. And I saw him the other week, and he was being a super cool dad.
What was he doing that was dad-like?
LM: Chopping up carrots into small batons and feeding her. But also playing me Wire albums that I didn’t know, and having it really loud, and the kid was like air-drumming with the batons of carrot, and I was like, ‘This is pretty perfect, really. Listening to post-punk and still being paternal.’
You guys worked with a producer a couple years ago named Flood who had produced U2 and a bunch of bands. How did that happen?
LM: We thought of a few people that we’d be interested in working with. We thought he would be a little bit inaccessible and too busy and too big. But he just responded to the phone call, so we met him. I think he got our influences—he got our personalities. We did three tracks with him, maybe four? And I loved the fact that he came with no pretensions of grandeur. We straight away got into the work. And he also told us a lot of good stories, mostly about heroin-fueled front men. Not naming any names…
Not Bono!
LM: God, no. I wish there was a heroin Bono story!
You guys recorded with a U2 producer and then you also recorded an album in Joshua Tree. Are you guys just raging U2 fans?
TB: Luke is!
LM: Luke, who’s not with us, will be really pleased to see in print how much he loves U2—ha ha!
In the photos, we’ll superimpose his face over the Edge’s body.
LM: Can you please do that? Ha ha ha! No, the Joshua Tree thing was really about the majesty of the desert, and the mythology that comes out of the Queens of the Stone Age records, and liking the Desert Sessions records as well, and hearing about this peculiar, small, charming place. We were invited by the collective UNKLE to play on their record and they were making it in Joshua Tree. Once we’d been there for 24 hours, we just really wanted to go back. It was an incredible yet humble place. We did a little gig at Pappy & Harriet’s in the middle of recording the album. It was legendary!
You guys seem to love California! In the latest Nylon, it said you also wear fashions by a local L.A. designer named Suzy Yun. Are you wearing her stuff right now?
LM: No. It’s in the wash, that’s why! Otherwise I would wear it every minute. She was the girlfriend of the guy who used to play piano with us! Our love affair with Los Angeles started in about 2006, when we had a young guy tour manage us—he was going out with Suzy for a while. She was making some amazing clothes and she showed up at this gig we did at the Hammer Museum with like a paper bag and said ‘I brought you something. You don’t have to wear it, but I make clothes, and I can picture it up there onstage. You sort of inspire me.’ And I remember thinking ‘Fuck, I hope it fits!’ Because I’ve got a really broad ribcage. I was really stressed. But I put this beautiful creation on, and yeah, I’ve been wearing it most of the year. I love how that comes together—that one person can be in a band and wear her stuff and get her some praise where it’s due.
You’ve also been described as fashion designer Alexander McQueen’s ‘muse.’ What do you make him muse upon?
LM: I don’t know anything about fashion. There was a project going on where Alexander McQueen and his company, McQ, were launching some clothes and they just wanted to hinge it on someone—to have an anchor for this sort of story. They were thinking of the spirit of, ‘The kind of a woman who might be in a band would wear this sort of stuff.’ And they phoned me up and said, ‘Look—do you want to be part of this project? You’ll get loads of coverage and you don’t have to do anything. We’d just like you to play some shows when we launch it. We’ve been thinking about you and your band—we’ve got pictures of you in the studio. What do you reckon?’ And I just said, ‘As long as I can go to the Paris fashion show and lord it up a little bit, I reckon it’s on!’ I don’t have anything particularly insightful to say about fashion or clothes. I enjoy them. I’m inspired by them. But I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about when it comes to fashion and I wouldn’t like to pretend that I do. It was a random compliment, and it’s over now. But it was funny as hell.
What was the most ridiculous part?
TB: They flew us first class everywhere.
LM: We just walked around, slurping up every privilege available and laughing about it! But I really love his work. He’s one of the most operatic and majestic characters out there. He also definitely has his roots in London and punk rock music. It felt right and proper!
You guys seem to have a sense of humor that isn’t much chronicled in the press. You’ve even said in an interview once that you’d love to share the stage with Bill Hicks and George Carlin. Is there a sense of humor in the way you guys play?
TB: Yeah! It’s funny that people come to see us play.
LM: Someone said early on from all our photos that we looked really moody. And I hated that! I was like, ‘What, people look at us and think we’re really pretentious and moody?’ That’s not the case. I guess when we’re playing the songs, we’re in it—semi-seriously. And as soon as it’s over and the soundboard’s down and we’re backstage, we’re fucking laugh-a-minute. It’s like a holiday camp!
Some of your songs do evoke childhood, though. I love your song ‘Sovereign,’ which is very delicate in a way some of your songs are not. Can you explain the lyric, ‘Bathed in green, my heart is Kathleen’—is that Kathleen Turner?
LM: No, that’s my mother.
TB: Kathleen Turner’s your mother?
Why is the landscape ‘green?’
LM: It’s about the landscape I was immersed in when we were writing that melody. We were in the heart of the Welsh countryside. We often find ourselves there when we need to go and write and be out of London. It’s very beautiful. I guess Wales is our muse.
I’d go there just to see John Cale’s house! Who is the ‘Jean’ in the song?
LM: Ha ha, that’s my stepmother!
I thought you just picked those names because they rhymed with ‘green.’
LM: Yeah! I think I’d got as far as green and I was like ‘Fuck, Kathleen! And Jean! I’m on a fucking rhyming rollercoaster!’
Is that where your song ‘Lassoo’ comes from? I have a theory that it’s Cockney rhyming slang for ‘Go to the loo.’
LM: That’s how I thought it was spelled. Before we went to put the album to print, someone did say, ‘Do you want to check that, because I don’t think it’s spelled like that.’ And we did and I realized that it was wrong. But I wanted specifically to say ‘Lass-ooooh’ instead of ‘Lass-ow’ because I know some people say that over here. I wanted people to feel a bit fancy when they said it. Someone said recently that they thought it was code for a poonanny, which I’m happy to go with, but it wasn’t the inspiration behind the song!
What’s the craziest audience response you’ve ever had?
LM: This crazy middle-aged guy had come to see us in Amsterdam. The son’s 25 and the dad must be like 45 or 50 and they’re both totally stoned out of their box! And the dad comes on stage next to me and says, ‘Eye vont to fack you.’ And I was like completely astounded and just stopped and made everyone in the audience laugh at him for being such an asshole. And then we all gave him like a slow round of applause and Toby pushed him off the edge. It was kind of outrageous and really sad on his behalf, I thought. Then at the end, the son came and found us and was so apologetic! ‘I’m so sorry about my father—I don’t know what happened. He’s really stoned!’ It was Amsterdam living up to a perfect cliché!
Wow! Such a good story, and I think I’m out of questions. Um, do you like Mike Leigh films?
LM: Yes! What’s your favorite of his movies?
Naked.
LM: Is that the one where this guy goes into an office all night and talks to another guy all night who’s like a security guard?
Yeah. And he goes and almost has sex with a woman, but she’s really old.
LM: That happens a lot on tour, doesn’t it? Ha ha ha! We’ve got old men on stage—let’s get some old ladies on stage! We’ll leave that as an enigmatic ending.

THE DUKE SPIRIT WITH INCUBUS ON MON., JULY 13, AT THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL, 2301 N. HIGHLAND AVE., HOLLYWOOD. 7:30 PM / $39-$75 / ALL AGES. HOLLYWOODBOWL.COM. THE DUKE SPIRIT’S NEPTUNE IS OUT NOW ON SHANGRI-LA. VISIT THE DUKE SPIRIT AT DUKESPIRIT.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/THEDUKESPIRIT.