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From PJ Harvey to the Velvet Underground, Alison Mosshard and Jamie Hince of The Kills discuss their influences, passions and their new flat with Will Hodgkinson.
Friday February 4, 2005 The Guardian
The Kills 'PJ Harvey made it all seem possible' ... Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince.
Photo: Pete Millson
"Sorry about the mess," says Alison Mosshart, also known as VV and one half of the Kills, with a nervous laugh as she leads us through an assault course of storage boxes and instruments to get to the kitchen table of the large north London flat she shares with the band's other half, Jamie "Hotel" Hince. The pair moved into the flat almost a year ago, but they have spent a total of eight days in it and haven't got round to unpacking their belongings. "Most of the stuff in boxes is writings, photographs and pictures that we do on the road," says Mosshart, a Florida native who moved to London in 2000 after meeting Hince while on tour with her old band. "We don't really own too much else."
Article continues As Hince pours us coffee and apologises for the lack of milk ("we're chain-smoking vegans"), a picture emerges of the duo's life. Inspired by the Velvet Underground's dedication to their art, the pair formed the Kills as a complete entity where writing, drawing and the approach to life is as important as the music, which is as lean as the pair themselves. Their second album, No Wow, was made in a little over a month and features angular, impassioned songs that strip rock'n'roll down to its beating heart.
"We're both quite introverted - Alison in particular is extremely shy," says Hince. Mosshart confirms this with a bashful smile. "But we discovered that we could communicate with each other through music. She was already in a band and I was amazed at this transformation from someone who would sit in a corner with her sketchbook and go bright red if you talked to her to this amazing performer on stage. So we formed a two-person social group that encompassed everything."
Hince and Mosshart were given a lifeline in 2001 when a neighbour died, leaving a huge collection of recording equipment. "We owe a lot to the David Brenton One Man Band," says Hince, handing me one of their former neighbour's business cards, which announces the late Brenton's specialities: country and pop. "We were really frustrated that we didn't have microphones or cables or anything and we couldn't afford to buy them. Then the next morning, there was a skip full of everything we needed. David Brenton's wife had thrown out all his stuff." "It was incredible," adds Mosshart. "It was a music shop, basically. He really saved us."
The David Brenton One Man Band allowed Hince and Mosshart to start translating their various ideas into music. "I liked simple electronic music like Suicide and Cabaret Voltaire because they proved that ideas and resourcefulness were more important than ability," says Hince. "Alison would make tapes of people talking and send them to me from America, and that's how we started. We were looking for ways to articulate ourselves."
A lot of the pair's records come from charity shops, but Hince grew up listening to the Velvet Underground and Mosshart was obsessed with US post-punk band Fugazi. "When I was a kid, the high-school kids next door built a skate ramp and played music on a boom box," she says. "I used to hide behind the bushes and listen, and one of the bands they played was Fugazi. So when I was 15, I went on tour with them, all over America. That changed my life. For years I only listened to Fugazi." Her dad's second-hand car business also helped. "People would always leave tapes in the car. That's where our family record collection came from."
Like many introverts, Mosshart and Hince project an image of being far more cool and aloof than they really are. They are inspired by PJ Harvey, another singer to smokescreen shyness with an ice-cool facade. "Her record The Four-Track Demos really showed us what could be done with so little," says Hince. "It was about the power of her voice, with rhythm relegated to the tapping of a foot and an abrasive guitar, and everything was designed to create a space for her ideas. It made us realise that what you leave off a record is as important as what you put on."
"It made me feel like I could do anything," adds Mosshart. "I didn't really know how to play guitar or how to make music, and at the time a band like Nirvana sounded smooth and commercial and distant. PJ Harvey made it all seem possible. She captured the sound of energy, the sound of a moment."
THE KILLS
BY STUART BERMAN
They say a little rain never hurt no one. In the case of Alison Mosshart, it arguably saved her.
Three years ago, Florida-born Mosshart was feeling "pretty low"; with her once-promising pop-punk band, Discount, dissolved, she grappled with the idea of being washed up at 20. On vacation in London, she met equally disenchanted guitarist Jamie Hince, and their subsequent transatlantic correspondence led to the mutual realization that the two were soul-mates, resulting in Mosshart buying a one-way ticket from the Sunshine State to the rainiest place on the planet.
"We were both supershy," she says on the phone from London. "We had this weird curiosity about each other -- it took us a long time to figure out if we were friends or enemies. But then we were like children playing together all the time, listening to records. For a year and a half, we didn't have any money and we didn't have an idea to be in a band, but we wrote music anyway. One day we went back to stuff we recorded and we were like, 'Whoa.'"
The surprise was palpable -- on tape, Mosshart had transformed from teen-punk princess into an ashtray-voiced vixen. With the new persona came a new name -- VV -- while Hince rechristened himself Hotel and assumed the soul of a bluesman who drowned in the Mississippi swamp and washed up in the sewers of Camden. Backed with a drum machine, the duo hit the stage as The Kills and recorded their 2002 EP tease Black Rooster, for upstart California indie Dim Mak, whose enthusiasm gave the nervous duo a crucial early morale boost.
"We sent Steve [Aoki] from Dim Mak a CD-R," Mosshart says, "and he said, 'Fuck it, I'm not going to graduate school -- this is what I want to do.' The next day he got accepted into NYU and threw the letter in the trash. I was like 'Fucking hell!'"
But while both Mosshart and NYU's admissions officer may have questioned Aoki's sanity, his faith was justified by what followed: Reading Festival appearances, a Rough Trade deal and raves for The Kills' killer 2003 full-lengther, Keep on Your Mean Side.
Despite the album's titular threat, there's something strangely romantic about it -- that is, if Wild at Heart is your idea of a first-date flick. While Mosshart refers to Hince simply as her "best friend," on record they play lovers on the run, shacked up in motels that charge by the hour, fucking and fighting before exchanging vows to "get my name stitched on your lips so you don't get hitched."
The songs traverse a marshland full of blues iconography (superstitions, cat scratches) stuck to riffs so filthy, you can practically feel the dirt scrape off from under Hince's finger nails onto the strings, while even Mosshart's most subtle suggestions -- like when she begs her driver to "Pull a U" -- could turn bible students on to a life of crime.
But the album's clanging drum-machine rhythms lend what would otherwise be an archeological exercise a primitive futurism. And while The Kills recorded Mean Side at London's proudly lo-tech ToeRag Studios -- where The White Stripes spawned Elephantand proved you can make a top 10 album with just $10,000 -- Mosshart says The Kills look to the past not out of purism, but as a way to cultivate something completely lost in our 500-channel universe: mystique.
"The way Jamie got into blues was by listening to PJ Harvey, who turned him onto Captain Beefheart, who turned him onto Holwin' Wolf, who turned him onto Dock Boggs," she says. "Both of us are really into bands that aren't around or alive -- there's nothing left except the music and some books, so we get to put our own imagination into it because there's not enough information to satisfy us.
"We didn't do interviews for a long time, because it's important to control how you're put across. So many band photos look like advertisements."
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