Interview taken from HermAphrodite #2.

The Beekeepers have also found that, having watched their own baby-bands grow older, they’ve realised that there is a limit - there has to be - as to how long you should keep going.

Gaz - “ I love The Stones, but I wish they weren’t doing what they’re doing now. A band that’ve gone right down that Rock’n’Roll path, and invented that hedonist thing; when they denounce all the most interesting parts of it, and then come back to be business men, career men... I think they should just be given a lot of money by a government somewhere and not have to do the records or the touring anymore. Mick Jagger’s an embarrassment now - I don’t think Steven Tyler is so much but he’s not the man he was... Johnny Rotten was my hero, but now he’s not.”

Tree and myself agree that some bands ought just to be kept as past memories.

Tree - “ You know when to stop, don’t you... I think we should actually have a referendum in this country, to decide what band should reform. Cos whatever band you go and see, you catch a moment in time; you can never relive that.

Gaz - “ The Buzzcocks were a band of the moment like that. And when that moment’s lost, it’s time to stop.”

Some bands or artists are capable of surviving, but they always have to change to do so. I cite David Bowie, the master of reinvention, as an example. Gaz tells me he wouldn’t stop Bowie, but agrees there are times when someone should have done. But then, as Tree said, it’s not like he hit the jackpot and then disappeared before unleashing tired new material upon us in the interests of self-profit.

The Beekeepers seem to have less problems with reinvention than cynical cash-based reforming.

They all share roots in the punk bands of the late seventies, but all would rather not have lived to see bands like The Buzzcocks, Pistols or Stiff Little Fingers reform. No matter how well those bands are playing now, they’ve lost the essence of why they started in the first place. And good musicianship was never a reason.

And though The Beekeepers formed in the punk tradition, within which they are wholly absorbed, I don’t think they see themselves as true punks. For one thing, they were born too late...

Tree - “ When you’re talking about bands of the punk era, you’re really talking about the ones before the punk thing fizzled out, which it did effectively in ‘79. The new punk bands of 1980, like Discharge and Exploited weren’t anything like what the thing about punk was all about. They latched on to the anarchy thing, and the making of noise essentially, but it wasn’t the spirit of what punk was about in ‘76.”

Gaz - “ The original punk was media literate, and a lot of punk things since have been media illiterate. And to make any difference, however loathsome the media is - I mean the mass media, not honest media like yourself - if you can deal with it and get it out the way, then you can eventually make your point. The bullshit - I’m afraid it has to be done if you’re going to matter at all.”

That I can see, given a band like the Manics’ vitriolic sloganeering at the start of their careers. But they truly did have the supremest confidence in themselves and their ability to make a million-selling first album, and then implode. The idea that in order to make it you have to sell yourself to the music industry, and simply give them what they want is just wrong, and they fiercely walked against that.

The Beekeepers are less likely to threaten to set themselves on fire on Top Of The Pops.

But would still be able to make an impact just doing what they do on there. Mothers might find themselves as nervous of Jamie and their music as a good proportion of his audience do. But they’d be doing what they love for us. And it’d be fun, wouldn’t it...? Just think of them in the land of The Spice Girls...

Ooh, which reminds me, The Beekeepers do have Spice gossip to share.

Gaz - “ Now, she ( - my bets are on ‘Baby-gro Spice’, though he refused to tell me... ) is known to the general public as the much loved ‘something’ Spice but she is in fact ‘Smack Spice’... And Geri Spice, she’s thirty four years old, and she’s had a face lift.”

me - ( bitterly ) “ In the Our Price pop star election, it was between her, one of the Gallaghers and Keith Flint to be Prime Minister. And she won.”

Tree - ( ruminatively ) I think the Gallaghers’d be quite interesting - we’d be at war quite a lot. ( he thinks about it a bit more ) With Noel, mostly.”

I also took the opportunity of asking them about their single covers, which have been getting progressively more freaky. Now on their third for Beggar’s Banquet, ‘Lunar’, we’ve moved from surreal distant shapes to a large eye with a moon for its pupil, backed with a large yellow growling scary beast. ( With organised measles, if you study it closely. )

Gaz appears very proud of the pictures though, even if he didn’t draw them himself...

Gaz - ( pointing to a scary yellow beast ) “What do you think that is ?”

me - “ I just figured it was some kind of scary beast.”

Gaz - ( interrogatively ) “ What type of beast ?”

me - ( pause ) “ I’m very bad on big scary beasts...”

Gaz - Now to the untrained eye, you’d think that was a werewolf...”

me - “ No you wouldn’t - I thought they were more beardy...”

Gaz - “ This isn’t going to work unless you agree with me.”

me - “ Oh, sorry. Yes; ooh, look at that werewolf, ooh...”

Gaz - ( smugly conspiratol ) “ In fact, it’s a CatBloke...”

Unfortunately, as he didn’t volunteer any more information, I had to seek an explanation from Tree.

Tree - “ It’s a well known fact that in South East Asia, when the moon’s full, normal villagers turn into CatBlokes, and they go out weeing over everyone’s car tyres, to mark their territory.”

me - “ That isn’t just they get pissed, and go out peeing all over the place...”

Tree - “ And they eat all the food that’s been put down for hedgehogs.”

me - “ In South East Asia. Hmm.”

Are you getting an insight into their twisted minds with this?

These are people who tortured their siblings - Jamie remembers, at age thirteen, hanging his sister’s bra across her room when she was to have friends round. And Tree has a lovely little story about when he used to read his sister’s diary... ( me - “ You evil bastard.” ) and “found this code in the back. She’d write something, and then put a star next to it, and I realised that this meant that she’d had sex with her boyfriend. So it’d be like ‘Met Paul’ and there’d be a star next to it. So I sussed this out, got a pen, and went through her diary, so it’d be like ‘Went to work, had a meeting with boss’ and I’d put a couple of stars there... And she never came back to me on it. I thought, like, she must’ve wondered, ‘I did it five times that day!?”

These childhoods have served The Beekeepers as good preparation for those otherwise dull long journeys in the van, which can thus be made even more exciting by manipulating each others’ phobias and passions.

Tree - “ It’s no secret in the band that I like a bit of Kentucky Fried Chicken, and when we was goin’ down the Dartford Tunnel, Gaz told me there was a Kentucky Fried Chicken shop down there, and I believed it, because I wanted to believe it. I like Sunday dinner as well, and we’ll be driving along the road and Gaz’ll be reading out some signs, ‘York two miles’, ‘Sunday dinners, all day a pound?!?’... ”

There isn’t any venom in it though. They really do seem to be quite a tight unit within themselves. Well, they pick on each other in equal proportions. And even all quite like their orange band T-shirts, which I will never understand, though I did search for an explanation in my notes during the supports.

me - Why do you sell orange T-shirts ?

Tree - We don’t, we have loads left !

me - That’s because they’re orange T-shirts.

Tree - Yes.

And this is where we must leave them. Though they should be remembered by the following:

In the middle of the evening, I noticed that The Beecharmers were playing Fibbers the next day. I pointed it out to Gaz...

me - There will come a time when a witty tour-promoter books you 2 together.

GAZ - THE BEECHARMERS ALWAYS PLAY HERE AROUND THE SAME TIME AS US. I SUSPECT THAT THEY’RE A TRIBUTE BAND WHOSE DRIVING FORCE ISN’T MONEY. MUSICAL STALKERS.

me - You know you’ve made it then. ( How do you charm a bee anyway? )

GAZ - ACT LIKE A QUEEN IN FRONT OF IT. WE SHOULD KNOW.

Honeys in the making. You should know.

>>> Another Interview

Last revised: 26/07/01