Beating A Canadian Toffee Bust: An Interview With The Dissociatives
By: Jennifer Wagner |
Friday April 22, 2005 |
| The interview had originally been scheduled for two days prior, but Mac, crying about "food poisoning," had actually taken a clandestine sojourn to Vancouver where he blew $65,000 in advance money on pharmaceuticals and toffee. His master plan was to turn over the goods for profit in the States, procure a dozen sex slaves, and copious amounts of Kentucky's finest sour mash whiskey. |
| Daniel Johns and Paul Mac, The Dissociatives, recently took some time to talk with Static writer Jennifer Wagner during a promotional stint for their self-titled album release. The interview had originally been scheduled for two days prior but Mac, crying about "food poisoning," had actually taken a clandestine sojourn to Vancouver where he blew $65,000 in advance money on pharmaceuticals and toffee. His master plan was to turn over the goods for profit in the States, procure a dozen sex slaves and copious amounts of Kentucky's finest sour mash whiskey. He then would bring the whole shebang home to Australia to start a new life under an assumed name. In the end, he was thwarted when Daniel, in an oxygen-induced moment of moral superiority, turned him in. Paul was arrested in a parking lot outside an Atlantic City casino, found attempting to force feed knockoff Welbutrin tablets to a bus full of senior citizens from Moline, IL. The seniors proved tougher than they looked, and after his release poor Paul spent several unpleasant hours having two pounds of toffee extracted from his ass back in a Manhattan emergency room. The wrappers were never found.
Armed with this knowledge and 20ccs of sublingual B12, Wagner had her plan for the interview in place - first warm them up with a little harlot talk; real trashy snippets stolen from those far more interesting than herself, proceed with the conversational focus on liquor and women, move on seamlessly to illegal search and seizure and then wrap it up with some motivating bits of nutritional wisdom from Andrew Weil. After a fair amount of heavy breathing followed by an excruciatingly long silence, things got underway. Let's start with congratulating you on the Video of the Year for "Somewhere Down the Barrel" (1st annual Australian MTV Awards); that must have been pretty exciting! Paul Mac: Yeah, very much so because it's hard; where we come from you don't really get that much (of a) budget so you've got to kind of have good ideas to compete. Yeah, well you guys are certainly chock full of those. Daniel Johns: Oh thanks, well we really love the director we worked with, James Hackett; he deserves props for that. He was really instrumental to the whole visual element of this band, so we can't take all the credit for this video. The album just got released in the US and Canada (March 29); how are you feeling about that? DJ: Kind of confused, actually. It's kind of like as you get older, you know how it never feels like Christmas Eve on Christmas Eve any more? It's kind of that feeling; you really don't feel it till later. It doesn't feel like our record's out other than the fact that we're doing interviews, but it does feel really cool to be over here getting a chance to let people hear it, and hopefully be able to come back and tour with our band. Recap for me a little bit on your roots together. Paul, you met Daniel by doing a remix of a Silverchair tune, is that right? PM: True. I was doing sort of more underground techno stuff at the time, and I was asked to do a remix for "Freak" off of Silverchair's second album. Daniel liked it, and we kind of started to spark up a bit of a friendship by playing each other music that we liked...then for the next Silverhchair album...Daniel asked me to contribute some electronic noises and sounds behind some of the songs. And then we just started sort of mucking around doing music and experimenting a little bit just to sort of test the waters and see what it's like to work with computers and work together; so this musical link was getting stronger. When Daniel did Diorama he had some more ambitious ideas and he asked me to help him record the demo tape so I went up to his house and....I ended up playing piano on a lot of that album. That time, that process was so enjoyable and inspiring for both of us that we just felt like 'okay, at some point after this we have to do something together,' which sort of became this album and this band.  Tell me, Daniel; has there been any kind of dissention with the other members of Silverchair on your union with Paul or has it been pretty organic and amicable? DJ: It's been really relaxed, they both know Paul because of the work that (he's) done on Silverchair records, and they just loved working with him. And...it's not like Silverchair's over, I've moved, I've got a new boyfriend called Paul. (laughter) They came to our show when we played live in Sydney, and Chris (Jannou) was the first person that I actually showed the record to outside of whoever was there when we were recording. So there's no hard feelings anywhere, and they've got their own things going on and we're all friends. So you all sort of held hands and sang "Khum-ba-ya" together?(laughter) DJ: Exactly, we had a little bonfire.(laughter) Tell me a little about the inspiration behind your band name, which...conjures to mind things like PCP and brain damage. (laughter) PM: I think that class of drugs called "the dissociatives" wasn't necessarily the inspiration for what we're trying to do; it was more the idea of when your psychological state is separate from your physical state. I just came across the word thinking it was really applicable, because we're trying to make music that does take you to another world or to view the world from another perspective. And without being sort of overtly druggy; it was more that it was a good description of what music can do and what we're trying to achieve with this album. DJ: The whole thing with The Dissociatives...when Paul said "I've got an idea for the band name, let's call it 'The Dissociatives'"... the reason it was such a perfect name is because exactly what its definition was is exactly what we were trying to do with the music and exactly what I was planning on doing with the lyrics anyway. I guess being called The Dissociatives just inspired me to go further down that road, like it almost gives you more license to explore surreal imagery and be a little bit more poetic and deliberately vague, just to keep the focus on the beauty that went into the music and the melodies. Some comparisons have been made between you and The Beatles, Brian Wilson, Pink Floyd, etc. That's big stuff to take on; how do you guys handle that; feel about that? PM: Other people's reactions to your music is kind of out of your control; we didn't release the album with a big sticker on it - "Reminiscient of The Beatles!" Oh yes you did. (laughter) PM: I think that the thread that's in common with all of those bands is that they all went for atmosphere; they all really pushed mood and atmospherics and color and that innocent, experimental headspace, and that's definitely what we're trying to go for. So all those comparisons, while though they bowl you over a little bit, we were trying to do something with that kind of ambition. DJ: I'm just reiterating what I said before, but we never had the intention of making a retro pop record. That was at the bottom of our list...there's so much current music that we're into, we were listening to a lot of really inspiring electronic music at that time and just trying to incorporate everything about music that we found stimulating and exciting and inspirational. We wanted to just do this complete mixed lolly bag of goodness. PM: Equally without trying to sound retro, we weren't even trying to sound "nowtro" (laughter) either...kind of like timeless in that sense that if you listened to this album in twenty years' time, you couldn't actually pick what year it was recorded in.  DJ & PM: Yeah. Totallly. And you are sticking to, not something I'd say was formulaic, but you want to keep a pop song a pop song. DJ: Yeah, the whole thing we wanted to do with this record was totally push the boundaries of pop music, but we implemented very strict rules and it was always like "okay we're gonna write a pop song but every fragmented section of this song has to be structured in a way that's palatable...we didn't want it to appear pretentious, we just wanted it to be really interesting and stimulating for someone to hear, something that, if we weren't in the band, if we heard it in a record store we'd ask who it is, and probably get it. It seems like you guys are launching two different singles between the US/Canada and Europe, "Somewhere Down the Barrel" here and "Young Man Old Man" there. Is this a record company question or can you tell me why (this is the case)? DJ: We didn't have a problem with it whatsoever...when we finished the album, when we handed it in to the record company we said "Whatever you guys want to single go for it, because we love all the songs equally and we really couldn't care less, so whatever. Doesn't matter to us, we like it all." Showing off your children, any one of them; you love them all the same. DJ: Yeah exactly, it's a happy family! Back to the singing "Khum-Ba-Ya," holding hands...(laughter) Well gentlemen...anything else that you want to throw in? DJ: (singing) "Khum-Ba-Yah my lord," DJ & PM: (both singing) "Khum-ba-yah..."!! (raucous laughter) Clearly, despite Paul's ill-placed scheming and Daniel's sporadic moments of ethical awareness, these two have pulled together something worth incorporating into your own creative space. Check out The Dissociatives when they visit your hometown but keep a close eye on your grandparents, not to mention all individually-wrapped candy. |
