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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

Pepper Keenan: Hahaha! Oh, I don’t know! There’d have been some head-buttin’, I’m sure. Hahaha. You know, I love what James does, man. He’s got a great right hand and a great sense of melody. Sometimes I think there’s too much thought put into it nowadays, because it’s such a giant band. I think Trujillo’s got it covered though. I think he’s doing a great job.

I guess they’re dealing with a whole bunch of weird issues now, like all that stuff about trying to resuscitate themselves from 25 years ago.

I mean sometimes you can do that. I think the main thing that happened was that they had Trujillo back in the band. So by having Trujillo, they could do things that they were doing with Cliff Burton that they couldn’t do with Jason Newstead before, if that makes any sense. Because Trujillo plays with his fingers and they could really ATTACK it. I think it brought some nostalgic thing to Lars and James, where they felt like they had the energy and the attitude maybe to go backwards now and start doing that. I think that’s the main thing. I think they do it well. They ought to. Hell, they started it.

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Originally broadcast on 3RRR FM 20 Oct 2008.
Comment via Blabbermouth.net.

“One thing I would do is to dance with a table or chair in my mouth while they were doing their act. I’d seen Barry Lee Gill doing that at the Dew Drop Inn when I was young. I used it when I felt I wasn’t coming across to the people. I’d pick up a table with my arms straight out and let kids stand on the table and dance. I would do anything, and truly in my heart I did feel that nobody could take a show from me. I didn’t care how great they were, I didn’t care how many records they had — I would say, This is my house.”

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Originally broadcast on 3RRR FM 13 Oct 2008.

Mia Timpano: Haha, no, I would have been surprised to get any dirt out of you.

No, there isn’t really. I mean, I think with Mark’s book, which … you know, he was quite negative in his book. But he was as hard on himself as he was on the band, and where the band got to and where it should have been and all that sort of thing. So some people have come up and said to me, Oh gee, Mark’s book’s pretty bleak about the rest of the band. And I’ve said, Well have another look at it, because he’s pretty tough on himself as well. He’s often critical about himself as much as he is about other people.

And that seems to often be a trait of frontmen, I think, is this perfection that drives them, and is also what –

It scares them too, I think. I sometimes wonder, if we had been a lot smaller band in terms of personnel, like if there’d only been three people in the band, I don’t think we would have lasted as long. Because the beauty of having so many people in the band is you can go on tour, and if somebody’s giving you the shits, you can avoid them without it being obvious. That was one of the great things … wait, we’ve finished the interview, what am I doing?

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Originally broadcast on 3RRR FM 13 Oct 2008.