65daysofstatic: Robert Smith, Pop Remixes & ‘Post-Rock’
Chris Cope catches up with guitarist Paul Wolinski.
65daysofstatic are one of the UK’s most prominent underground bands. Their instrumental nature has won legions of devoted fans across the world, along way away from their hometown Sheffield. We caught up with guitarist Paul Wolinski to speak about working with Robert Smith, pop remixes and being labelled ‘post-rock’…
How’s the new album been going down?
We left to tour before any of the press had really kicked in - literally this morning some CDs turned up at the venue. But from what we can tell it’s gone down really well. Certainly live when we’re playing it, it’s been received pretty well.
I see you’ve got Robert Smith on one of the tracks – how did that come about?
We did a tour with The Cure in America and got to know all of them quite well. They’re really, really good guys but there was no big masterplan really – we were in the studio, working on some vocals with some other people who didn’t make the record in the end. We sent him an email and he was like ‘yeah, yeah alright I’ll give it a go’. He said we could do whatever we wanted to his voice and he wouldn’t mind. It just kinda made sense for the track.
So you tried out other guest vocalists?
We did a couple of things with Andrew from Youthmovies, but we didn’t quite finish that – some great things going on but didn’t have enough time to make it work as well as we wanted to, but maybe in the future we could get that working. We almost managed to do something with Eva from Rolo Tomassi but they were in L.A doing their recording.
Are there any vocalists you’ve got in mind for the next album?
Maybe, there are loads of guys I’d like to work with in theory, like Saul Williams, he’d be amazing to work with one day, or Tom Waits, he’d be pretty cool. Rihanna, that’d be a good one. Someone with an awesome female pop voice - I’d kill to get that on record one day.
Am I right in thinking back in the day you used to remix pop bands?
Yeah, we still do actually. Back in the early days we’d make un-releasable mix-tapes and mash-ups and remixes and stuff. We still do it – we always make a changeover mix on tour. As soon as the band on before us finishes, we’ve got 25 minutes or so of us getting the stage ready, so we’ll put on the latest pop music, but with glitches and distortion all over it, make it nice and loud. It’s a lot of fun doing that, but loads of people do it better than we do.
Are you ever worried that your instrumental nature might scare off some people?
Yeah it might do, but we always try and make our music as concise as possible and as accessible as possible. We’re never tried to be a worthy experimental band, or regarded in that kind of elitist way, we just like to make music that moves people. That being said, we try to be more calculated about it – we’d probably fail straight away at writing hits because we’ve found what we’re good at and that’s what we do. It would be great for people to not disregard it immediately because there’s no singing, but I suppose there’s nothing really we can do about it.
Do you think with the new album there will be a lot of potential to win new fans?
I would like to think so, but I couldn’t say for sure. We always have a knack of being resolutely unfashionable in the ever-changing scenes of popular music and we’re really thankful for that, because if you get caught up in that then there’s a good chance you’ll be thrown about and left behind - as soon as it stops being cool. I think certainly as being concise goes, we’ve come a long way on the new record - we’ve tried very hard to make the arrangements tight and like pop songs I suppose, but they’re still gonna sound abrasive next to Bloc Party or something. But certainly when we’ve been playing the new songs live, despite the fact that people haven’t heard them before, they’ve taken to them quite quickly, which is a good sign.
Have you ever been surprised at popular you’ve become?
Well I’m not sure how popular we are. We definitely consider ourselves very lucky and we’ve done some amazing things, but it does seem to have been a slow but steady climb that we’ve been on. It kinda gets harder and harder because with a little a bit more success, everything gets a lot more expensive to pull off. But the money doesn’t really change, so it’s always been like a fight for survival from the inside. There are plenty of moments though - like a couple of months ago we were in Japan, and walking out onto the stage, it was like our own small show but seeing 5-600 kids from Japan pay like £30, £40 even…it’s amazing.
If you could pigeonhole your music into one genre, what would you put it as?
That’s a tough question. This new record, it’s kinda like noisy dance music. It’s very gritty, like electronica. For a long time we got called post-rock and that confused us, because apart from not having any singing, which seems to be in common with a lot of other bands that get called post-rock, we don’t particularly think we sound like any of them, especially with the new album. But if people want to call us that, it helps people hear of us who wouldn’t have heard of us.
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