You guys have been together for awhile now.
Tomas Høffding: It has been 10 years since we first got together to make music – maybe more than 10 years? We should have our Jubilee soon –
You formed in Copenhagen?
TH: Yes, but we are from the countryside.
You’ve been quite prolific, in terms of output.
Tomas Barfod: Well, one album every second year isn’t that crazy.
TH: Well, then there is the solo stuff.
TB: I’m not saying that we are lazy or slow or anything, but what we do as a band is not that aggressive.
I encountered something on your website you’d mentioned that is pretty unusual – the ‘double or die’ motto? Either you double your fan base with each album or you quit? That’s an interesting sort of goal for a band.
TB: Well, the band started very sideways. We met Monday evenings and produced the album. We drank coffee – it was super – and we just made this for the sake of getting out and playing.
TH: The music comes from rock and songwriting, and, honestly, I’m always embarrassed to tell the story – but I knew nothing about electronica, I was into rock and songwriting and I was like: ‘Electronica?!?’ I thought it was so stupid – I thought it was just this guy standing with the DJ. Then we met one night and we recorded this cover version of Satisfaction and Tomas sent me the files but he accidentally sent me the original of Satisfaction and I didn’t actually know the track so I thought: Hey, that’s pretty cool, like – we made it fast! And that’s how much I knew about electronica. It was so much fun, though – for three years we never rehearsed and we’d always just get drunk and dress really strangely and when we farted everyone was like “Woo-hoo! Fantastic!” – but after a few years, well, you know how it is cool if you do stuff when you are a small child but then you are a teenager and your feet start to smell then you need to pull yourself together.
TB: And we stopped farting.
TH: At some points we farted and it didn’t work. Have you seen the movie Anvil [full title: Anvil: the Story of Anvil, a documentary about a Canadian heavy metal band]? About this band that fucks up? We just got this nightmare vision of us going down down …down-
TB: They’re actually a good band – there’s nothing wrong with them except they made the wrong choices and they ended up sucking. They had bad jobs and horrible gigs and I was just like: That’s what happens with many bands. They go down slowly and nobody notices it because they like playing and they like attention and slowly less and less people show up for the concerts and I was just like: guys! Let’s go double or die. I think also being a hyped band in the beginning – like GWAR – it’s very easy to get hyped in the beginning and end up with cool gigs: when you start like that, you run the risk of losing perspective on what it is to be a band or to fight for it [recognition] because it was so easy. We made a demo, got a deal, and the best gigs you could dream of for a band like us.
TH: And we actually just shit on the gigs.
TB: Yea, but at some point it wasn’t fun anymore. For the audience or for us. We still had our fan base – they kept on, and the journalists liked us but it was unclear where we would end up.
WHOMADEWHO: The funny thing is, about four years ago we told ourselves everything was going to double or we would quit. We were quite serious about it.
So it seems like you imposed some restraints?
TH: The funny thing is, about four years ago we told ourselves everything was going to double or we would quit. We were quite serious about it. It doubled and that gave us a new perspective, not just an “Uh, whatever’ – we are kind of more serious but we also realized that we couldn’t make double or die for many years.
Before – exponentially – I guess eventually everyone would inevitably have to be in your audience?
TH: Right.
TB: We succeeded in integrating it as a part of our thing because it got us to be serious. Now we think: if we want to do something, it is possible IF you do it right, and that is how we do music and move forward with our career now. We think about what we do and we set some goals and go for them instead of just ‘Yea, – we’ll do that, go to a strange city and play some fucked up gig – that’s fun!’ We’re more strategic now.
Do you think this also has something to do with – literally – growing up together as a band? Even the new album sounds very grown up in a way…
TB: I think the reason we changed the style a bit from the last album has not so much to do with age but with us just realizing that the first album was just kind of chaos, the next album called The Plot we really hated.
TH: Total chaos.
TB: Chaos. Fucked up. And on the two latest albums – Knee Deep and Brighter – we focused and we actually made them sound good and we could make one more but it would just be kind of boring. Also in the double or die spirit – where would that lead us? Just consolidating stuff. So we thought we’d like to take a chance and to do something else. All the crazy production things we did on the previous albums with a lot of quirky songs and really left wing sounds – clever choices – kind of – in a way cast a shadow over the real songs inside. So we thought it would be a good thing for us to be brave enough to take out all the crap – well, not “crap” but all the details and things we were hiding behind and just say: this is our music. Listen to it.
TH: I guess if you only leave the important stuff then maybe sometimes you realize it’s not good enough. If you take all the essential parts of the song – lyrics and melodies and the chords – then they have to be really good – and if you have a lot of different, strange ideas and production details that cover it up – like a delay or reverb on the vocals and distortion and all this stuff – it covers it all up so you don’t really know if it is good or bad. Now we have some things that have to be perfect in our eyes.
Who are you guys speaking to as a band?
TH: That’s a good question… some of the songs are very communicative. The song Your Better Self was like about being one of these guys in the scientology office looking out at the streets thinking “She looks kind of confused and weak. Let’s pick her.” I always thought that was so fucked up. To be honest – the way we write I think we are actually still in the process of learning to write good lyrics.
TB: It’s a bit chaotic every time. Even with the first album we had big arguments and people helping us. It works for us that sometimes one of you guys just does something and its really good.
TH: There’s always room for improvement! I’m always really fascinated with John Lennon for instance. He wrote like 150 songs. A few of them are like weird bubbling but the rest of them are pure stories and somehow they work. When I try to write like this it just gets pathetic. I have succeeded a couple of times in making a love song that didn’t make you puke, but it is so hard! We all have a lot of opinions about love and stuff and I would love to write songs about all that but I cant! When I do it too concretely it kind of loses the magic and I think it WHOMADEWHO what works for us is that it is a bit more like an abstract painting. We aren’t painting some woods or a lake. The skill lies in making the right chaos so it gives people something but with a lot of our songs its not like I can say: this is about this. And I would love to be able to make songs that way (and I can) but they don’t work in this music.
What do hope and passion mean to you?
Both: EVERYTHING!
TH: What I have realized is that we have hope way more than the average Danish guy. One time when we ha a layover in Copenhagen we drove to Tomas’ house and I messed up and aid that the flight was at 3 o’clock but it was really at quarter past two and we started driving back to the airport and Jeppe called “Where the fuck are you? The gate is closing!” – this was like 10 minutes before departure – and I remember Tomas saying “We can make it! and putting the foot on the gas, getting back to the airport and running through security and we made it with one minute to spare. I think that is the spirit of the band. That’s hope to me.
TB: In the music business you have to have hope because there is a lot of struggle and every part of the process involves a lot of waiting time and things that are annoying. But the thing that is driving you for many years and bad pay is that you hope for something. Every time check my mail it is exciting because you have tried so many times to get a message back saying something like “your music got selected for an ad – you get 10,000 Euro.” but you also get messages that say “sorry, this fell through!” so it is like the lottery.
TH: The passion makes it all work because if you weren’t passionate about sitting in the studio – as a musician like us you don’t get any pay. You work 300 days or more a year in your studio for – concretely – most of the time – no pay at all. You travel for 24 hours to play for an hour. And I think that is where the passion comes in.
TB: I think that what makes us make good music is that we have passion because I have tried a lot of different stuff –
TH: He has already had a long career-
TB: I even had a Japanese pop album for a Japanese record label – it was easy money BUT I didn’t have the passion and it sucked and it never got released and I didn’t get all the money and after these kinds of things I realized I have to have passion- every time I put my passion into something I earn more – it is a win-win. It took years to learn that.
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