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Written by Mike Thomas
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Wednesday, 05 September 2007 |
65DaysofStatic is not a household name. In fact, the UK-based four-piece instrumental monster is not a trendy underground drop either. So when iconic The Cure frontman Robert Smith walked up to the submerged underground act after playing a show close to home in Brighton this year it may have been the last thing the band ever expected.
“Basically we were doing some warm-up shows in the UK for our new album (The Destruction of Small Things) and we were in Brighton and Robert Smith showed up at the show and came and said he was a big fan of our band and that he’d like to do shows with us some day, guitarist/keyboardist Paul Wolinski said. “And then it came through the official channels if we wanted to do the U.S. Cure dates. When Robert Smith turned up, you know he looks exactly like Robert Smith, he doesn’t ever stop being Robert Smith, it’s just unreal. He wasn’t dressed down, he was in full costume, and well I guess not costume cause that’s just the way he is all the time.” But just as the band was getting ready for the highly anticipated tour, The Cure temporarily canceled it, with plans to reschedule it for the spring.
Wolinski is confident the tour will still go forward and highlights the opportunity that’s emerged as a result. “Basically, the tour being put back has left us with an unexpected chunk of free time for the first time since we started work on (The) Destruction (Of Small Things) over a year ago. We're itching to start writing again on some level, so that's what we'll do. But it's probably not a good idea to take this as an indication that album number four is right around the corner. The Destruction of Small Ideas is not ready to be put to bed yet - plans are afoot right and there are still some surprises to offer up.” But furnishing surprises has never been anything 65DaysofStatic has had trouble doing. So when handed the news about the postponement, Wolinski and company took the setback well, but acknowledges that some fans may feel differently. “Of course it was disappointing. But we are slowly learning about the logistics and risks involved in organizing tours that size, so bearing that in mind we understand that it is a decision The Cure can't possibly have taken lightly or easily. I know a lot of people feel let down and there is clearly a really fine line between doing right by your fans and losing yourself to your art and alienating people. But at the same time, music is more important that pretty much anything, right? There's so much mediocrity out there! Who needs another band doing the same old thing? I guess a band like The Cure could put out anything they wanted and be assured of a certain amount of sales, so the fact that they care enough about their new album to postpone a tour and take responsibility for the disappointment of their fans is probably a good thing. A sign of integrity? I suppose it might not feel like that if you've booked non-refundable flights though.”
Landing a tour with The Cure isn’t something that happens everyday to bands like 65DaysofStatic. But not for any lack of great music being released, there’s just a lot of stuff that never hits the radio. “There’s so much good music out there and bands down the chain who have tiny record labels behind them who just don’t have the money and means to get their bands a bit more exposure…it’s kind of reassuring.” Wolinski acknowledges that this is not usually the way things happen, but he’s thrilled to be given the opportunity. “Bands who have big labels would have to buy into a (The) Cure tour or something like that. It’s just the way it works; it’s all about the market and who’s sold out. I don’t think we’re going to bring any people to a (The) Cure show (says laughing), we’re just going to end up playing to a bunch of people who have no idea who we are. And Robert Smith thought of us, and we respect that a lot. I’d like to think that if I were in a position like The Cure, we’d go out of our way to take really obscure bands to tour with us or people have never heard of.” Just signing on to a tour like this is something the band understands the powerful significance of.
But well before a pop icon approached 65Days out of the blue, the band had to find its way. Spawned from humble and wholly inexperienced beginnings in 2001, Wolinski, a college student at the time and current member Joe Shrewsbury (a.k.a. Joe-Fro) formed a trio. They were determined about one thing for sure, that whatever it was, it wasn’t going to sound like anything else; 65Days would be unique. “There’s absolutely no point in trying to sound like a band that you admire. For one are you gonna be as good as them and why would someone care if you’re just rehashing the same old thing. We wanted to be in a band that had it own sound basically and when we started in the beginning I had no idea how to play the guitar. I came from this sort of programming background and we didn’t have a drummer when we first started cause it was a lot of electric beats going on.” The then trio was far different than the powerful four-piece of Wolinski, guitarist Shrewsbury, drummer Rob Jones and bassist Simon Wright that now lives. Vocals never came into the mix, and Wolinski admits some of that had to with the fact nobody could really sing. As far as what instruments each member plays, that can be somewhat ambiguous. “Computers, pedals, guitars, bass guitars, drums, pianos, glockenspiels, double basses, cellos. But we can't really play these things properly. Joe and Si (Wright) are a lot better than me, but if someone asked me to play A#7min on the guitar, I wouldn't know how. I can play what I make up though. So, by that definition, I guess we can all play anything we want,” Wolinski explains. This band received anything but any traditional music schooling, which helps explain the evolution of the hard-to-describe sound 65Days creates.
For a mostly self-taught band chartering new ground, the choice to be an instrumental band was more of a non-decision than anything else. What was a conscious choice was to be musical contrarians, taking a sound that had previously been relegated mostly to clubs by deejays, and parlaying it into an actual band. “It wasn’t a conscious choice to be an instrumental band and make this strange noisy music, we were just using what we had at our disposal I suppose. If anything we started projecting that we wanted to sound like nothing else. Also something that was really important to me was when we were first starting out there were a lots of really exciting things going on with electronica; people like Kid 606 putting out all this really cool laptop stuff. Things were getting a little bit cheaper so people could afford to do a lot more things on computers.
“That was a much more interesting scene at the time than anything else we thought. When you went to see something like that live, there’s kind of a limit to how much you could get into it because watching someone on a laptop is never quite as visceral or exciting as watching a band just tripping on the stage.” Wolinski saw a hole and a chance to fill it. “We didn’t understand the reason someone couldn’t somehow use all the stuff that was going on in electronica, but bring that to a live, sort of full band set up was stuff that we found really interesting as well. Those are some of the reasons we started and why we push forward.”
 That next step means making the transition to larger stages and filling amphitheaters and arenas with its sound — a sprawling electronica-influenced rock that should be well suited for such a challenge. In fact, Wolinski sees it as the perfect venue for the band to continue on a path without a predetermined destination. “To tell you the truth that’s (having to play bigger venues) not something we’re worried about; we’re pretty confident in our sound these days and when we did this Japanese festival last summer, which was this huge aircraft hanger type stage, but we had sound guys with us that know the songs inside and out.
“And because we have so many electronics and things going on live, we’ve worked very hard, spent a lot of time preparing the sounds and doing a lot of geeky stuff with EQ’s and sort of making sure that whatever venue, the sound fills it. I think our music is well suited to that kind of size. The louder, the bigger, the better as far as I’m concerned. But the club shows, the small venues are equally good shows for us to play, we enjoy that just as much because you get the kids right in front of you and it’s a bit rawer and a bit messier. Playing arenas I guess when you have that distance which is a shame from the band’s point of view I suppose. Hopefully the bigness of the sound will hopefully make up for it…What we lack in subtlety, we will make up in sheer noise.”
If the band seems rather shy or unorthodox in its attitude, it apparent right from its approach that status quo doesn’t sit anywhere in any of the members’ vocabulary. “We wouldn’t tone anything down to be poppier. As far as we’re concerned a lot of the stuff we’ve written is what god pop music should sound like, but it’s not what the general consensus of pop music sounds like. We never really talk about writing songs when we’re writing. We just sort of do it and stumble through; we certainly wouldn’t wanna tune anything down to be popular. I guess it’s tricky because pop music is such a subjective thing and as far as we’re concerned a lot of stuff we’ve written is good pop music. We try to write music as poppy and accessible as possible, we really do, but somehow it always comes out noisy and weird.”
But as offbeat and obscure as 65Days’ neck breaking drum and bass, hypnotic orchestral parts or thick guitar rock may be, the band has become part of an instrumental rock movement growing and thriving at a steady pace, like it or not. Something Wolinski will concede is how many good instrumental bands are out there now, but remains squeamish grouping his band in with any of them, or any other genre for that matter. “It’s a really interesting time for sure. One disappointing thing was that forever in interviews and features on us, the shorthand of Mogwai meets Aphex Twin has been used so many times over and over, which is fair enough I suppose, but it’s always a real shame that nothing had come out since then. Young Team (Mogwai’s 1997 debut) came out like ten years ago and Aphex Twin is like over a decade old. The fact that nothing has happened in so long to be a new benchmark and still have to go back to Mogwai and Aphex Twin has been a bit of a shame, so it’s been really good that there are these bands like Explosions (in the Sky) and Russian Circles and Pelican and it’s interesting cause they seem to be coming from more of a metal background this time around and I might be wrong, but with Mogwai and Godspeed (You! Black Emperor) it was really the quiet, indie kids that embraced that to begin with.
“Now with this new wave of bands, not necessarily with Explosions but for Red Sparowes and Pelican and Russian Circles, there’s definitely a heaviness, a metal heaviness there that we don’t have. I think it’s a good thing definitely, it’s all really good music that’s being recognized, however with 65 being contrary souls that we are, we’re very nervous about being in any kind of scene; we would prefer. to be out on our own. We don’t wanna dare be compared to too many bands, not in any selfish way. We spent so long in Sheffield going nowhere as a band really and I think it it’s made us a much better band because of it because we had to do everything ourselves and look after ourselves and put our first record out ourselves. I think it’s good to be self-sufficient.”
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When it comes to going on tour, the only but very much so with other outfits that are like-minded down deep. “It’s all about the spirit for us. This tour for example, we were just thrilled to be touring with Fear Before the March of Flames and we were down and South by Southwest earlier this year and we were telling people, well anyone that would listen that we were going back to America (in the summer) and most people we like ‘excellent, we really want to see you guys again,’ but there were a few people that were really confused that we would be touring with a band like Fear Before the March of Flames. So it’s like excellent for liking our band, but we’re not anything different. We all listen to as much pop punk as we listen to Godspeed you Black Emperor or stuff like that.” As he points out, it’s not as if he and his band mates listen only to bands that sound like they do. “All four of us listen to everything. Normally if you’re in a band, you can only be one thing, but as a listener you’re always listening to different things. Just because we were in a band, you know ,we didn’t want to be limited to a specific genre. “I think audiences are always much more open-minded than the way things seemed to have turned out in the music industry than what we give them credit for. You get so many tours that are like one band and then two supporting bands that are rough conversions of the same band.”
And 65Days doesn’t just happen to end up on tours with bands that sound drastically different — i.e. touring the U.S. in support of Fear Before the March of Flames just recently— it’s something the band consciously chooses to do, especially on its home turf. “In the UK when we tour, we’ve managed to reach a point where we can choose who we take on tour with us as support and we really try hard to take bands that sound nothing like us, but at the same time the spirit of the other bands is the same.” For a band so insistent on not getting grouped in with other bands and clumped into any scenes, going on the road with pop-punk, metal and even an acoustic country act — as it did in the UK — seems to make a lot of sense. But it’s those scenes that really seem to get Wolinski’s goat and worry him. “One thing that we don’t like is that elitism that can come out of those kind of scenes. And because we don’t have vocals and make this weird sort of music in all kinds of time signatures that sometimes is hard to listen to, we don’t want to appear like we’re one of those bands that thinks we’re intrinsically better than three minute pop music. I don’t like people stroking their beards and being all serious.”
Well he doesn’t have to stroke his beard, but having achieved the model of self-sufficiency for any band starting out — being able to quit day jobs —Wolinski is cognizant of the ideal place he and his band mates are in, even if they still are just getting by. “We realize how lucky we are to be in a band for a job because it’s the best job in the world, so we take it very seriously.” He admits that there was quite a lofty goal in place at its inception, but his summation of what 65Daysof Static’s true mission is speaks for itself. “When we started we wanted to be the biggest band in the world, so I guess we've got a way to go. At the same time though, we're fully aware that while we have always tried to make pop music, the stuff that comes out is sometimes perceived as weird, experimental noise. So any progress we have made has never been taken for granted. We figured that any band that didn't want to be the biggest band in the world wouldn't really have a reason to try hard enough. Not to sell records, or make money, just to be able to communicate the ideas inside our heads to other people. Cause that's all anyone wants to do, isn't it?”
65daysofstatic.com
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