Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince are rock stars. THE KILLS’ sound is raw, dirty, and so damn cool you just give up trying. They’re the real fucking thing.
Their route has taken them through various bands and what can only be described as the closest thing to the modern day travelling musicians – road weary and dusty. But now they are finally there, sort of; standing still would never be a desired state for them. A chat with Jamie brings that ‘rock star’ perspective back to earth with a bump.
Following a successful tour of the States following their March released and much anticipated album Midnight Boom, they are now touring the UK and Europe, and have last night played the cavernous Koko in Camden. ‘It was weird’, says Jamie, ‘I felt nervous. There’s always such a build up before a London gig. Besides, I get even more nervous when I know my friends are there’.
Asked about adapting to their fairly sudden burst of commercial success, he seems oblivious that any noticeably big changes have taken place in the last 6 years.
‘We’ve been going since 2002, when we released our first album, and nothing much has changed’, he muses, ‘there’s always been interest from the press, from the music industry’.
That’s no exaggeration – The Kills first recordings resulted in them being aggressively courted by various labels, and their eventual debut release with Domino Records of Black Rooster EP was extremely well received in the critical press. Particularly in light of another minimalist girl/boy duo The White Stripes setting a trend at the time.
Asked about their pre-Kills ventures, Hince is quick to relay the standard reply: ‘ I was playing with a band called Scarfo, then started my own studio project Fiji, which was basically just me playing a sort of bluesy guitar. Alison’s band Discount had just broken up and I was just finishing recording. She was in a hotel room underneath mine when she overheard me practicing.' And the rest, as they say, is history…
Recently, their fame has upped to levels of almost inevitable inconvenience. Rumours and speculation has arisen about the two partners’ lives being pushed apart due to relationship changes and celebrity. Has this affected the writing and creative process?
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‘Well,’ he remonstrates, ‘ Alison and I have never had a relationship - we were never a couple, we’ve always had boyfriends and girlfriends, so nothing there has changed – including the way the creative process works. We still live and work and socialise together. And i hope that doesn’t change!’
But has his lifestyle changed at all – is he shifting into that all-things-bourgeois existence that many successful bands end up succumbing to? – ‘I squatted up until we got our record deal. Only now have I finally bought a place in Dalston – which is still not exactly the lap of luxury. There are all these preconceptions about bands and money - it’s really not like that’, he says. In fact, he volunteers – he’s broke. An offer to borrow a fiver is welcomed with glee ‘I might take you up on that!’, he laughs.
So what’s next? ‘Well, we were touring the States and we played South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, which was great – so we’re going back there, then continue around America and play the festivals in the summer. We’re then back in the UK in autumn for more touring.’ Is the next album in the works? ‘ It’s an ongoing process - I don’t wanna be in a situation where we have to write a record from scratch after touring for a year with no break. We couldn’t afford that anyway – we prefer to get stuff written as we go. In the last year and half we’ve written 30 or 40 songs, mostly acoustic – we might be releasing an album of acoustic tracks next.’
The Kills unplugged? – now that, with that blood-stained gritty feel and those vocals which make you reach for your old PJ Harveys, is undoubtedly something to look forward to.
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