Interview with Clockcleaner

Mia Timpano: I think that anti-depressants and mood drugs for kids is like, I don’t know —

John Sharkey: That’s fucking with a lot of serious things. Like, when I was a kid, if I was acting like an asshole, my dad would smack the shit out of me. And guess what, I responded to that very well. I was like, Okay, I will NOT piss on my little sister again. Never doing that. I responded to that very well. But now it’s like, Oh, my son’s pissing all over my daughter, I don’t know … I think maybe Ritalin or Zoloft, maybe like hang him upside down from a helium balloon, maybe like tickle his feet and then like draw a circle on his face and some Indian guy to chant — it’s bullshit. […]

Nathaniel (tour bassist): I was a son of bitch when I was a kid as well.

John: Everyone’s an asshole when they’re a kid, and everyone’s an asshole when they get older.

Nathaniel: I got a wooden spoon and sugar taken out of my diet. And it seemed to work.

John: You must have been really skinny. Who’s your dad? Hitler?

Stream interview part 1: posers, arseholes, Metallica, Guns n’ Roses

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Stream interview part 2: Yngwie Malmsteen, Hitler, AIDS, Carrot Top, killing people

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Originally broadcast on 3RRR FM 24 Nov 2008.

Rocket Science drummer Kit Warhurst reads “The Life and Times of Little Richard”

“It was an unexpected booking, because the big Vegas hotels had refused to book me before. The star that was to open at this time was ill, so they decided they wanted me. I had no time at all for preparation, and there was not much advertising, but I still opened to a full house. The owners of the hotel were a bit skeptical, because they had never had a rock act before in this particular room.

“Well, I was trying to think what I could do to be different. I said: I gotta be gorgeous. Mind, I’d always do that. I’d stand on stage and tell them how beautiful I was, and they’d agree with me.

“So I’d had this red jacket made, and it had inch-square mirrors sewn all over it. I made them put out all the lights except two little baby spots. With those spots jiggling above me, there was light sparkling all over the place bouncing off the mirrors. Man, they loved it. It was fifteen minutes before I could do my first number. They loved that jacket almost as much as they loved the show. And they thought it was fabulous.”

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Originally broadcast on 3RRR FM 10 Nov 2008.

Interview with Rocket Science drummer Kit Warhurst

Warhurst: Because of the accident, because we had to stop working as a band for a period of time, we all had to go off and do various different things …

Timpano: What were you doing?

I worked on Dancing With the Stars as music producer.

NO SHIT.

Yeah, yeah, on series four, which was just amazing. Absolutely one of the most hilarious things I’ve ever done.

Yeah, how?

[...] To be having conversations with Darryl Sommers about the musical acts that were coming on that night, and having him ask me questions like, “Ooh, which Veronica is which of the Veronicas?” And me going, “Well, actually I’m really sorry, I don’t know.” And him giving me the dagger eyes, going, “I can’t believe you put me as a professional in this situation, where I’m about to go on air and interview them, and I’m not going to be able to tell which one’s which — this is an absolute catastrophe.” And I thought, Well, is it? Really, Darryl? I’m really sorry, but you know, I obviously miss that one and I apologise. It was hilarious.

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Originally broadcast on 3RRR FM 10 Nov 2008.

Interview with Yngwie Malmsteen

Malmsteen: I have to think it’s great myself. Otherwise it’s not good. In fact, if I were to think it was great and everybody else said it was shit, I would still think it was great. I wouldn’t like it. I would lie if I said I would like it. But I’ve done songs or shows or whatever that I knew wasn’t as good as I could have done, and people say, “Oh, that was fucking great.” And I say, “No. It wasn’t.”

Timpano: Is a fully developed ego is a prerequisite to being a great artist?

Well [laughs] … what do you mean?

Well, you say that if everybody else said that something that you did was terrible that you thought was great, you would still say it was great. That’s the hallmark of a rare individual. That’s someone who has an unusual kind of ego.

I would call it confidence. And I would say that if I’m in a room with chimpanzees who don’t understand my equations, I’d know my equations are right. The fact that they didn’t understand my mathematical equations doesn’t make me think I’m wrong. You know? It may be a weird analogy — it’s probably a very weird analogy — but what I mean to say is that this is a very broad concept. Let’s say for instance a song or a solo or a show or whatever, if I feel it was executed with taste and with precision and with passion and melody, then it’s good. I don’t care what people say.

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Originally broadcast on 3RRR FM 10 Nov 2008.

Interview with Machine Head guitarist Phil Demmel

Mia Timpano: Have you ever experienced any great pain in your life?

Phil Demmel: Yeah. Yeah, I have. This past year has been really hard for me. My father passed away a year ago. And the circumstances in which it happened … it was really hard for me and I’m still … I’ve spent the last year drunk. Quit drinking a couple of months ago to kinda deal with it. So it’s been really trying for me.

I actually lost my grandfather recently, and it’s that weird thing where you go, Okay, I need to get really drunk right now.

[laughs] It was that. It happened to me while I was on tour. I was in Italy. And we were playing. And we were playing ‘Descend the Shades of Night’. It’s a song about death. His health had been declining, and I would think of him during the song, and I cried during the song sometimes when we’d play. […] So we had gone on to play the show, and during the show I passed out on stage, during the song. I’ve had a history of black outs. So they take me out after, and we were on our way to Zurich the next day, and I just kinda felt weird on the way there. Woke up to a call from my sister. And it was a voicemail, ‘Hey, we really need you to call home.’ Called home, and she gave me the news that my dad had passed. So it was kinda shocking. I knew that it was coming, but you’re never ready. You’re never ready to hear that news.

Dave, my drummer, he kept asking me, ‘What time did it happen? What time did he die?’ And I said, ‘Man, I don’t know.’ And I did the math. So what happened was that he got out of his dialysis, sat in his car, and he took they keys and set them on dashboard. Just went to sleep. So it happened at the same time I passed out on stage. And just knowing that he touched me in that way was just … it was a blessing but, it still was hard to deal with. It’s amazing, but it’s just really hard to know that.

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Originally broadcast on 3RRR FM 3 Nov 2008.
Comment via Blabbermouth.net.

Interview with the Primitive Calculators

Mia Timpano: Did behaving in this way [i.e. destroying private property] ever concern you in any sense, or were you truly that bad?

Stuart Grant: I don’t know about the other guys, but for me, but when I first heard the first Ramones album, and the morning “Anarchy in the UK” came out, it was profound change in my life. I felt like all of the sense of rebellion … ’Cause we came off the tail end of the hippy movement and the tail end of the Vietnam War movement. And I personally had a taste that the rebelliousness, the potential for social change had gone sour, and had turned into a sham. And that was reflected in rock and roll through the mega-bands — Yes and ELO, people who had once been in bands in the sixities. They were older than us, but I felt like I didn’t have a voice for my own need for rebelliousness. When I heard that first Ramones album, I felt like something clicked. There was a nihilism, a malicious stupidity and a destructiveness in it that chimed with me. I believed in the Primitive Calculators firmly, with passion, that we were changing the world, that what we were doing was of such cultural and social import that it was a very, very, very serious thing. We were that stupid. And so every time we smashed stuff and broke property, I firmly believed that we were doing good in the world. And that it was a creative act. Propety is theft. We were young.

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Originally broadcast on 3RRR FM 27 Oct 2008.
This interview was also selected for 3RRR’s “Best Of” Music Interviews podcast.

The Cheats’ Julian Tovey reads “Ronnie”

“Freebasing also makes you paranoid. You end up on your hands and knees looking for little crumbs that might have fallen out of the pipe. I banned my children eating meringues in the house after I ended up smoking sugar for the umpteenth time.

“Jo was walking through the house one day, found the bathroom door locked, knew that Bobby and I had been in there for two days, and started banging on it. ‘Come on! You’ve got to get out of there! You’ve got to have something to eat!’ A few minutes later she looked out the window and spotted Bobby and me crawling through the bushes. She went outside and demanded to know, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ We told her, ‘We know you’ve got a stash out here, and a pipe hidden in the bushes. We know you have, and we’re trying to find it.’

“Over time, if you do it enough, you start seeing ‘them’. Dark figures in the bushes. Shadows just around the side of the house. People sneaking around inside your house. They’re out there. And they’re trying to kill you.”

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Originally broadcast on 3RRR FM 27 Oct 2008.