yves klein blue says...

On the back of their international experience Brisbane band Yves Klein Blue take some time out to talk to Kluster about their biggest fan, Curly, the begining and where things are headed, in the wake of the release of their debut album, Rugged & Ecstatic.

Jeff Yiu: Good to see you guys again and welcome back to our humble shores… You’ve been doing a lot with the new record, and it’s due to be released soon, but let’s start with some background on the band. Can you tell us a little bit about your early music influences?

Michael Tomlinson: To start from the beginning, the first CD that I bought was Limp Bizkit – then I started listening to rap music. My favorite record was Dr Dre’s The Chronic. Then I started to listen to a lot of bands like Nofx, Pennywise… I went to the Warp Tour. That was when I was playing in a punk band and mainly played Blink 182 covers. When that band broke up, I started in another band playing Nirvana covers, so we thought it was a good idea to get another guitarist. I didn’t know Charles then but (I) knew he took guitar lessons and I asked him what music he liked. He said Led Zeppelin – which is how we got together. We were once paid $100 to play at a birthday party, which was our crowning achievement.

JY: How did the band come together?

MT: Charles and I wrote songs for a year from being in a band previously, a year-and-a-half before we met Sean and Chris – which was the second year of uni. I’d met Chris in 2006 and Sean was in Charles’ music class. At that stage, it was near the end of school, we started to play a lot together; just jamming and getting into the Velvet Underground and the Doors.

JY: It’s interesting to learn what kind of music you were listening to before the band was established…

Sean Cook: Yeah, I was really big into Nirvana, and other more well known bands like Zeppelin, but when I first came into the band I really liked Elvis Costello. The first time I met Michael and Chris, I was thinking, “I am going to drop Elvis Costello into our talks; that is a good idea”. I thought, “they will be impressed and vibe it too”. Evidently they didn’t think it was as cool as I had imagined but they really needed a bass player so it was all okay and we had a laugh about it later.

Chris Banham: I didn’t really have phases, these guys all had different music phases during high school but I never really got into music. I knew of my dad’s music collection and he had a lot of records like The Beatles. I listened to them a lot and I really liked them. I suppose I was also into whatever phases else everyone was into. Like Blink 182 etcetera, but by the time I left high school, I started to get more into music.

JY: It is great that you can all vibe off each other, given there’s so much diversity in terms of musical influences between you guys.

Micheal: These guys also introduced me to bands like Television and Bruce Springsteen. SC gave me a whole bunch of David Bowie stuff as well. It is just a massive melting pot of music with us and Sean has been really into the dub lately through the Clash influences.

JY: That’s really rad though; if anyone has been to your shows I think those influences come out for sure. Not really in an obvious sense, but the energy of your songs is just so strong and you can definitely hear some of the influences you talked about earlier. You guys can create a mosh frenzy from happy pop music. How was the recent tour for you guys? It was a pretty big trip this time around.

MT: It was really good this time, we were more prepared and physically ready, knowing how taxing it was going to be on us and the audiences were really getting into our songs.

JY: Do you have any passionate or eccentric fan encounter stories to share?

MT: There was this one Irish fan named “Curly” – he is just this big Irish guy who kept on coming to our shows in the UK. He bought a t-shirt that was way too small for him (laughs), to show us some love.

JY: How did you meet Curly?

SC: Well he saw us on a MTV show in Brisbane like two-and-a-half years ago and he went back to Ireland. He stayed in touch through our Myspace then came out to see us in the UK. It was pretty amazing, he is totally fanatical. He came all the way to Ireland to see our show at The Social!

MT: Man, he is not crazy, he is just really happy about the music and passionate for our shows.

SC: I get friends who ask me, “When is your next gig in Brisbane?” I say, “Look, and check our Myspace”. This guy is from the other side of the world and he knows it all, he was so in tune with our schedule. He kept on coming to our shows.

JY: He is like the model fan that the record label dreams about. You should make a dedication to Curly and make him the head of your England fan club.

MT: Curly rules man.

JY: Where there any amazing bands you wished you had time to meet or see while you were on the road?

MT: We missed Glastonbury, which was a few weeks away. We missed Coachella as well. We kept on having shows on around the same time (as) shows that we wanted to check out - there were so many festivals in England and there are just so many established bands that you just keep on seeing on the bill. I guess for them it was just like playing another show in their country.

CB: We wanted to see Gang of Four but didn’t get to see them at the Great Escape in Brighton. We were there as well but we were playing the same night. It would have been very tricky to get there.

SC: We saw the Veils which was really awesome and Charles really likes them.

JY: How did you travel around, did you bus much or fly everywhere?

SC: We flew from LA to NY on the red eye flight, it was pretty tortuous and we had a lady driving us in a van around the UK.

JY: What's the best thing about having your own driver?

MT: Definitely not needing to have to hail cabs was very convenient and watching movies on the road was good too. We didn’t get to hang at the Stonehenge though, unfortunately.

JY: I hear that you had some pretty bad food experiences: was coffee in NY really that terrible?

MT: Oh, it is pretty bad! The US had bad coffee but, if you can believe it, the UK is even worse.

CB: I think the UK, you can get better coffee but you need to know where to go and pay decent cash for it.

MT: Like Brooklyn was terrible. But if you must drink coffee, go with the long black or Americana was what they called it. The milk just tastes different and they just prepare the coffee so strangely: they just leave the milk on for like 5 minutes, walk away and file their nails, then show you this monster of a drink.

JY: What was the highlight of being in a band and travelling together?

MT: Just doing it really, like living the dream.

CB: We have been to LA like three times since last year already and starting from rehearsing at Michael’s house and now that we are doing it over in the states… It is rather surreal and amazing.

JY: What was the recording experience like, being in LA producing your record, compared to being in Australia?

MT: Recording in LA... We weren’t really in LA, Hollywood, we were in North Hollywood. It was more like 40 bucks in a cab to get to the studio from central LA and we were literally just stuck out there. It was really full on. It was basically an industrial area, and we were living in a two-bedroom unit, which was like a shoebox. We’d walk into the recording studio every day and spend hours there.

JY: So it wasn’t very glamorous, at least not what one would expect when recording overseas, especially when Hollywood is mentioned.

MT: It was not the glamour that you’d expect to see. The studio and apartment unit became our world. There was really nothing to do but to focus on the task at hand: that is a huge deal. Recording and sleeping; that was what we were living. Even when recording the demo in Australia, we could record then go home to our families and friends or whatever. But in LA, when we couldn’t sleep, all you do is think about the record. I think recording in LA was different in the sense that the isolation made us all dream and live the recording process more intimately but it was intense. Whether it was a dream or nightmare, we still don’t know (laughs).

JY: Whoa. Lastly, how did you come up with the record title, Rugged & Ecstatic?

MT: My little brother suggested the record title to be called that – he got the idea from a book that I recommended to him, On The Road by Jack Kerouac. The quote is, “Rugged and ecstatic, the joy of pure being”. The quote reminded me of our band, that we have songs that range from being light and dark. And also in the sense that we have been through many trials and overcoming them and being stronger even though we have defeated several times. So we are learning from the hard experiences and by being rugged you finally get to become ecstatic!

JY: That is really nice reference and thank you so much for chatting with me for Kluster. All the best with the record launch and tours!

taken from: http://blog.kluster.com.au/post/yves-klein-blue-says.aspx#continue