In 2003, a friend I adored for his impeccable music taste, handed me a CD and said: “You are going to love this.” It was The Kills’ first album, “Keep On Your Mean Side”, and damn, he was right. That summer my husband and I, fresh in love, spent a lot of time riding around in his Ford Fiesta, blasting “Fried My Little Brains” through the speakers of the new sound system he had just had installed, because he knew how much I loved listening to music in cars. We were like asphalt cowboys riding around the prairie between Berlin, the Baltic Sea and Bavaria. On one of those rides, we ended up in an industrial area in Munich, where we saw The Kills perform in a tiny back street club, on a stage that seemed too small for them, even though there were just two people on that stage, to a crowd that seemed far too small for this huge band.
Twenty years later, on a sunny late summer afternoon in the cozy back courtyard of a Berlin hotel, I’m meeting Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince to talk about the new The Kills album “God Games”. Amongst other things, we talk about full circle moments, and this very definitely feels like one of these moments for me. I tell them about that early show I saw them play, and they remember it too, Jamie instantly recalling the name of the venue: “It was an old slaughterhouse, and I think the name of the place was German for slaughterhouse…” Schlachthaus, yes! He guesses around 80 people were there, and Alison gives him credit for always remembering these kinds of things. I am their last appointment at the end of a long day with an insane schedule of 14 interviews, which you would never guess from talking with them. They are both just as fresh, attentive and fun as if this was their first conversation about their sixth studio album, and you can sense that they feel exactly the same about the process of making it.
“God Games” is an astonishing, extremely strong album, created over the course of four years. With it, the two challenged themselves to explore new creative forms, like mainly writing using the piano and working with new sound structures and production techniques. “God Games” surprises you with keys that almost sound like they were born out of Soul Music, which then meet riffs that give you the distinct sense that this, no matter how different from their previous releases, is a true The Kills album.
At the end of our conversation, when I tell the two how much I love the album and how much it excites me, that The Kills are still who they are, which is one of the most exciting bands of our time, they burst into honest, joyful cheers. And when the label representative comes in to tell us our time is up, she assumes our chat has gone well. “I heard you laughing all the time,” she says. Yes, playing God Games with The Kills was really, really fun.
You know, I’ve seen so many bands and acts, including great bands and acts, come and go over all the years I’ve been doing this job. And you are definitely sticking around. And doing so great! That’s wonderful.
Alison: We’ve been talking about this today. We were like: Where did everybody go?
Jamie: There were a lot of implosions. I mean, there are still those bands that are our friends, that started at the same time, like Interpol, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Strokes…
Alison: Jack (White) keeps going. There are a lot of our friends that are definitely still playing music. I don’t know. It was a weird time, the early 2000s. There were a lot of bands. There were just millions of bands. Garage Rock was everything. When something is that popular in a time, a million bands spring up. And maybe they are not meant to stay around for a lifetime.
Jamie: You could make a living. It’s much harder now to make a living with music.
Alison: It’s not a great economic choice (laughs).
Jamie: That was the reason for a lot of bands breaking up. “I can’t do this anymore! I’m gonna go and work at Home Depot.”
Alison: Somewhere that has health insurance.
Talking about the old times – what would you say has changed most significantly for you personally, and what has stayed the same?
Jamie: Since we started… It’s like my grandma was born in 1920 something. She’s seen airplane travel being invented. It’s almost like that, the past 20 years. When we booked our first tour, we were writing letters to people, putting them in the post and sending them. (To Alison) Do you remember meeting up with EMI in Australia? They wanted to sign us, and their big selling point was: “We have email!” That’s what they said in 2002! Fucking hell.
Alison: We were unsure about it (laughs). No, I mean, really, it’s been the most incredible technology explosion. We did not have cell phones.
Jamie: We were recording on tape.
Alison: There was no streaming. The whole entire industry was different. It’s been really a wild ride. When everything is changing so quickly, you are constantly adapting. But the one thing that has stayed the same is the fact that we love playing music and we love each other. We want to write music, we want to make records and we want to play shows. That’s the one remaining thing.
Jamie: I was living in London when we first started playing and there were a lot of bands. It was just coming to the end of Oasis and Blur and all that Britpop stuff. And I think when I look back at that, the way everything was filtered through a handful of music magazines and three TV channels in England… there was a lot of white male bands playing kind of lad music. And oh my god, I’m thankful that that’s fucking disappeared. Now there is a platform for anybody and everybody, and thank god it’s not just all this fucking lad music. That’s changed for the better.
To be honest with you, when we started FastForward Magazine 14 years ago, we just put a website on the internet, because it was so easy and didn’t really cost anything.
Jamie: Of course! That’s what I mean. That’s a brilliant modern fanzine DIY thing, that you could do that. And that has definitely had a positive impact on music, I think.
Alison: Anyway, everything is different.
Jamie: People think it’s such a privilege to be in a band and to play, that you don’t need to get paid (laughs). I heard someone the other day going on about: “Oh there is this great new thing, it’s amazing, I’m gonna get it. You get a little flash drive, it’s called firestick or something, you put it in and you get all the movies, as they come out, and you get it for free.” And I was thinking…
Alison: …what a dick.
Jamie: It’s just so funny. You don’t think about where it’s going. If you said that about music…
Alison: If you said that about anything that that person is doing as a job. And suddenly it would completely dissolve them making a living from it. They wouldn’t have this. I don’t know where empathy has gone.
Jamie: “There is this new thing, where you can go to this place, stay the night for free and just drink for free, so you don’t need hotels anymore…” They’d go fucking bananas, wouldn’t they! (laughs)
„Fuck off, that’s The Kills!“
The more we talk about this, the more I cherish you for how you keep going. And with this new album, for your courage to shake things up and try different ways of working. I read you saying, Jamie, and I love it so much, that you thought you were writing material for something that would more than likely become a side project, because it didn’t seem like it would fit The Kills to you at first. But then you realised, this is also The Kills.
Jamie: I’m always a little bit confused as to how much I’m sort of tricking myself. Because I do these things where it’s just like sort of a psychological experiment, because I’m not very organised. So, I trick myself like, if I start a side project, then I can free myself up and really make music that I should be making anyway (laughs). And then there was a point when I played a couple of those things to Alison and said: “This isn’t really the Kills, what do you think?” And she was like: “Fuck off, that’s The Kills! Let’s do it, now!”
Alison: “Right now!”
Jamie: She comes around, “give me a mic!” She loves a challenge.
But that’s the thing about you. I feel like you could be doing almost anything, and it would still very significantly be The Kills.
Jamie: When we first started, one of my biggest influences was PJ Harvey. I just love that she could make an album as raw as “Rid of Me”, a really raw guitar record, and then, a couple of albums later, make “Is This Desire?”, which is some weird glitchy electronic record with no guitars on it, and it’s still absolutely 100 percent PJ Harvey. That was kind of the reason we decided not to have a drummer. Because it felt like a drummer makes you into a certain kind of band, whereas a drum machine makes you into any kind of band.
Would you say that maybe music is the most unlimited of the arts? Compared for example to visual art, that you, Alison, are also making?
Alison: I don’t know. I think art in itself is limitless.
Jamie: It’s kind of in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it? If you’re a big fan of dance, I think dance can be the absolute most limitless form of art to watch. But if you don’t get it, maybe you need something simpler, music might be that. Sometimes when you are writing music, it seems a little bit limited. A little bit. Because the structure is there! As about dance, there is no structure.
Alison: What’s limiting is the audience, so you have that idea, that you need to have a chorus and a verse.
Jamie: Every piece of western music you hear, pretty much is like 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4… limited structure, straight away. And then you’re trying to express something, especially for me, I am trying to express something as a guy through an American girl’s voice… as a medium for expressing I find it bizarre, to be honest (laughs).
Alison: It’s interesting. As artists we are constantly trying to express something we haven’t seen happen before. It depends how open you are, when you’re making it. What kind of guidelines you think you need to follow to exist or to be successful or be liked.
Is wanting to be liked a very present thought?
Alison: Not really.
Jamie: Not when you’re making a record. But you’d be a liar if, when your record is being made and is being released, you said you didn’t think about whether people are gonna like it or not.
Alison: There is one thing. If I really like it, I know there is going to be someone who is going to really like it. I have to like it. Because it’s mine and I have to perform it. That’s where you begin. You’ve got to be excited and interested in it.
Jamie: I one hundred percent feel like that on this record. I am so completely happy with it. I feel a bit relieved from that kind of pressure.
Alison: The pressure is off. You did it for yourself.
Jamie: But when you go and do a show at the slaughterhouse and only 60 people come, I won’t be very happy.
Alison: But now we don’t care so much, what someone says about it. You’ve got to grow a thick skin. It’s not gonna stop us from making another record. It’s such an interesting transition, when you have something that is so private, when you’ve been working on it for so long and then you throw it out into the world. It is at that moment when I always kind of dissociate. It’s not my song anymore, it’s yours. Now it means to you what it means to you. I’m not gonna tell you what to think. I did that, I worked on that. It’s more exciting in the hands of an audience or a listener. Now it gets reinvented a thousand million times.
Jamie: Especially now when success is really gaged by popularity. Click, click, click. How many people? How many followers? How many likes? How many this? How many that? How many streams? You have to shake yourself out of that way of thinking.
„We wake up every day, we’re trying to figure shit out. Guess what: you’re never gonna!“
I feel like it’s very brave to put yourself out there in such an honest, personal way, in the music, the lyrics and the performance. But also, I think the more personal it is, the more universal it becomes.
Alison: Exactly. You have to give of yourself, if you expect anybody to feel something and to relate to it. You do have to go there. And it can be hard to do, but it’s also incredibly rewarding to do that. It’s why we make art. You know, it doesn’t scare me, I like doing it. It’s something that I feel very good doing. But I know when a song is really good by how I go “oh my god”. I felt that enough to feel strong enough to say it.
When I listened to your album, I thought a lot about the whole “God” theme. When my dad died a couple of years ago, for the first time in a long, long time I found myself back in a Catholic church. And I sat there and thought, I’ve rarely been to a place where I felt like God was more absent than there. Can you say where God, whatever “it” may be, is present for you?
Jamie: That is the point. I’m an atheist and God is present only in my creativity. In my normal life, God doesn’t exist, but when I’m writing songs, sometimes I play around with the idea of it. For me, that’s where that came from.
Alison: I think it’s just the unknown. You just ask questions all day, we’re gonna go through our entire lives and we’re never gonna get answers to most of them. We just have to be cool with that. The whole thing is the journey, you know. We wake up every day, we’re trying to figure shit out. Guess what: you’re never gonna! You’re just not going to. There’s always going to be another question, another thing. It’s just the shit we don’t know. It’s not like a dude in the sky, for me.
Jamie: Wouldn’t that be refreshing!
Alison: If there was a dude in the sky? Can it just not be a dude in the sky?! (laughs) Could it be a sweet puppy or something?
Jamie: Everyone’s always like: “I believe in God, but not God like that! It’s a force, it’s love, or whatever.” I don’t even believe that… So, it would be quite refreshing to be like: “I believe in God, he’s an old man with a beard, and he’s sitting on a throne on a cloud.” Go all in, if you’re gonna believe in God!
Alison: Do the cloud-chair-thing!
So God, whatever that is, is present in your art…
Jamie: Yeah, but I don’t mean it like: “I discover God in my art”. I find myself writing about God, when I’m creating things. Sometimes there’s references to it, where I just find it bizarre. Because I don’t naturally believe in that: I’m an atheist. Then I start questioning why it comes in. And I think it helps to explain a lot of life’s problems and issues, if you invent a God (laughs). Just someone to manipulate characters around.
To bring a bit of a worldy structure into this – let’s talk a bit about the timeline. Covid came, when you were in the middle of making the album?
Alison: We toured until November 2019 and then we took Christmas off, and then we started writing and then, boom…
Jamie: Lockdown…
Alison: And then it was as it was for everybody.
Jamie: You kinda felt like, everything’s really weird at the moment, let’s finish this, and then we’ll go into the studio in like two months. And then it just went on and on and on and we started to realise oh wow, the landscape has really changed. As well as feeling like real mortality. At the beginning of it, you felt like you could die if you got it straight away. It was terrifying! And then you start to realise, it’s gonna go on for a lot longer than you first anticipated. And that suddenly gives you a bit more of an open road for creating. Like, oh my god, we can actually spend some time, writing and making something, make the most of it.
Alison: And by the time it was okay to travel again and everything, we pretty much had a record. Then we had to figure out, how to record it. We finished doing it November last year. And here we are, it’s almost a year.
I always wonder what that is like, when you have so much time to sit with it, before it comes out!
Alison: To me it’s so long ago! Because even if I finished recording it a year ago, I wrote it two years before that. And now I’m answering questions about it and I’m like: “oh shit, great question…” I need to study myself before I get myself involved in these interviews (laughs).
Jamie: Some of the songs, seriously… I mean, “Bullet Sound”, 2019 we demoed that. That song is fucking four years old. “Wasterpiece” is three years old. It’s crazy.
And are you alright with it today? Or do you sometimes sit there and think shit, this or that, we should have gone back to that?
Alison: No, I think by the time we went to the studio, we had this group of songs, we knew what we were doing, we had our record. The production was done, the lyrics were done, the parts were done, and we were ready to go. It was just finding the right place to do it and the right person to do it with. And once we got to the actual work, it was really quick.
Jamie: It’s hard though to tell, when a song is finished. Some people can tell that better than others. I don’t think I’m very good at telling whether a song is finished or not, I either run out of time or someone tells me. When I get into the process of writing something, I don’t see an end to it, I just love it so much.
Alison: We really, really enjoy it.
Jamie: It’s like torturing a fucking mouse, like a cat. I don’t want it to die, I want to keep it alive and play with it (laughs). Oh my god, God Games!
„Music is cool. I agree with you.“
Honestly, to me, personally, music is so special, so magical. Making music is such a crazy craft to me. I feel there is something God-like to making it.
Alison: Honestly, that’s how I feel, even though I make music. I feel like that when I hear songs all the time. I think: How in the world did someone think of that? How did it come out of their mouth, their hands, whatever? It’s so extraordinary to me.
Jamie: It’s funny, because I know Alison feels like that. She’ll describe one of her own songs like that… she feels like she’s been a conduit to it, as if it came through her… She’s not like: “What I’ve done is amazing!”
Alison: I’m just totally amazed that I did this. I’m surprised all the time. Yeah. Music is cool. I agree with you (laughs).
„God Games“ by The Kills is out October 27th on Domino Records.
Photo © Myles Hendrick