As I have already mentioned, Ben and I went to offset in September on behalf of Esper magazine. One of the best things to come out of the weekend was the meeting of the lovely Joe Prendergast of Tubelord/Bear Gami who is now our official associate/ lover/ roomy/ etc etc but at the time, he was the singer in a band, and for that very reason, we interviewed him - as music journalists (chortle chortle).
The reason why the interview is so short, is partly because all I had was a small notebook bought that day and a red gel pen, and there were two of them speaking at a relatively speedy rate, and also because we got off the topic of tubelord pretty quickly and onto the exciting discussion/realisation of all the things that Bear Gami and Clinic could do together in the future - but of course, none of you want to hear about any of that...
Clinic: How do you feel to be playing offset this year? What are your thoughts on the festival?
Tubelord: We’re very humbled to play and we were gonna go anyway so it all just kind of worked. The festival itself seems discombobulated, there’s this merry style and everything kind of fits together in this odd mix. It all sits together, hardcore and electro are side by side but no one judges each other. Like, there’s a sense that hardcore is still important, and the festival seems to celebrate this. It’s so great that there’s a holy roar stage. Everyone’s beautiful and cool but still people aren’t judgemental on any of the bands.
C: What’s it like to be with such recognisable pop sensibilities and be so frequently playing with the far more hardcore scene?
TL: It’s weird cos sometimes we do feel like we’re not welcome, and we get the feeling that no one really likes us, and the truth is we’ll never know if people do really like us or simply just put up with us. Getting into the whole friend group or ‘scene’ is difficult, because we’re not digging fully-fledged hardcore or fully-fledged pop, we kind of sit in the middle somewhere. Orally our drums don’t sound anything like hardcore but it works for us.
C: How has coming from Kingston affected your music in terms of playing with other bands, ie. Colour?
TL: Amazing. Colour were recording us while we were writing our first ever songs and we were constantly bouncing ideas off each other. We had this side project called Brapple and it was just cups of tea and loads of fun. There was a nice bit of competition, like, Colour had to step up their game. We were all so supportive but really honest at the same time, but a lot of what was said was just ‘man that’s sick’. It was just healthy to be working alongside people that really understood what we were doing. Del Noble mad a massive contribution to our music. But it took a while to realise that we’d actually become a scene. Like, if you ask any of the bands they’ll tell you there’s no scene, they’ll say we’re all just mates. I guess we are part of a scene but the name for that scene needs to change.
C: Come up with one now…
TL: Fuck you dickheads we are Tubelord! We could just say that? How about a metaphor instead…I guess you could say we’re all just croutons in the same pot of soup.
Anyway, no one ever decided what scene we’d be a part of, bands just hear each other and say “that was sick”. It kind of just happened. We got associated with what other people were doing and we said fine and it’s all good.
C: How has it been working with Kraffhics this year? How did you get involved with them?
TL: Yeah man, awesome. They invited us to their house party and they said “we’ll do your artwork for you”. It just made sense, and from then on it was like, “you’re doing out artwork”. There’s such a great D.I.Y ethic, and we all came up with this love story for this album concept. It was a lot of fun, Kraffhics are class; they know what they’re talking about and play a lot of Halo. Actually to be honest he Leemun needs to get out of his room. But he is a massive crouton in the soup.
C: Who do you say we should look out for at this festival?
TL: Bit late isn’t it? It’s the last day…
C: Okay then, who should we look out for in general?
TL: Look out for Everything Everything when they come about. Diggable Planets, Shit Sexx,Have you heard Poker Face by Kid Kudi? I love the videos for that shit, you can just smell the money.
C: Okay, quick question?
TL: Why quick?
C: Okay, sorry, generic question… best thing about being in Tubelord?
TL: Conversations about sex. Being a massive sound experiment. Just generally thinking ‘what can we do that’s a really crap idea?’ We do it and people think it’s cool just because we’re a band. Like, the label gave us fifty quid to do a t-shirt with, and obviously you can’t get anyone to do anything serious for fifty quid so I (Joe) ended up doing this moose thing with squares and they approved it.
I asked Joe to draw me this design and he started but it quickly turned instead into a portrait of me, as you can see below. This is about as much of the interview as I can make from the haphazard scribbles on the Silvine jotter.
