Interview
taken from HermAphrodite #3.
Max Décharné of The Flaming Stars has also
written books. ‘Beat Your Relatives To a Bloody Pulp’ (’89), ‘The Prisoner Of
Brenda’ (’91) and the short story collection ‘I Was A Teenage Warehouse’.
Recommended. Thirst Editions, PO Box 14405, London, SW17 7ZU
It was my birthday last week.
With part of the proceeds I bought myself a 2nd hand giant furry Manics-esque
tart coat. And some Malibu. Am
discovering the two together make a cosy combination...
The air in Newcastle this
evening is spiked with frost, but I’m impervious to that. It’s gonna be a good
night. I can feel it. And I’m not going to get lost.
the world fell apart / brick by brick / my guardian
angel took the day off sick
it takes one
hand to hold the bottle / and the other to pour
but I can’t seem to get up off the floor
This evening I ascend a
fire-escape in order to break into a building, and interview a band.
Ladies and gentlemen: The Flaming Stars.
Have you met ?
Allow me to introduce you.
The Flaming Stars are
three years old. ( As a band / unit. )
They do like their drink. They
did used to have their own t-shirts, but the design would fade after one wash (
and the material itself would start to disintegrate... ) so they don’t do that
no more. During soundchecks they’re
usually told to turn it down by the sound-engineers ( going deaf 
for a living... )
They’re more Gary Larson than Snoopy. ( Visual and aural surrealists,
rather than observationists. ) Their
lead singer has a ‘big problem with organised religion’. And had a ‘heavy duty
Catholic background.’ They don’t tour
with a team of either dancers leaping about behind them or young women dressed
in black playing the violin. And won’t. No matter how much Top Of The Pops they
( have to ) watch. One of their videos
was once shown on the CMTV on their Rebel Country Slot. They do not moon. When their songs play, I see three minute movies. ( Shot with
much use of shadow & light. ) When
they play, I see 45 minute movies. ( Shot with much use of shadow & light.
)
Welcome to the Flaming Stars, a band so called because it’s the
only name that they could all agree on…
Max - “ It’s from an Elvis Presley movie, 1960, 1961 called
‘Flaming Star’... not that we sound like we should be playing in an Elvis
movie.”
I seem to like their name
more than they do. ( Though I do have a thing for starrs... )
The name is functional to them, and appreciated, but not integral.
Not defining.
Max - “ After a while it doesn’t matter whatever the name of the
band, people will just think of you as the music that you play, they won’t even
think of what you’re known of...
It’s like ‘The Clash’ -
nobody ever thinks ‘what a crap name for a band’ - which it is - but it doesn’t
mean that any more...”
me - “ Did you decide on the name before you started the band ?”
Max - “ At the same time. Uh... the way we started was very
low-key; we knew somebody who could get us a gig in London, I think in front of
about 30 or 40 people and it was like ‘oh, okay we get ourselves together and
what are we going to call ourselves???’ And that was at the very end of 1994.”
me - “ Are you happy with it ?”
Max - “ Yeah... To be honest I don’t really think about it...”
Though how it is presented is important to him ( as is the subject
of how the band themselves are presented... )
Max just happens to have
his own band’s new record’s promotional stickers in his pockets. Which he then
gets out to show me, as an example of how their name is written.
As he explains, it’s always in the same style, always the same
font.
Max - “ It makes it... ( searches for right phrase ) hang
together. And because it’s fun to do it that way...”
This ‘uniformity’ of sorts can also be seen in the band’s
sleeve-art, the continuity between releases. Which is, apparently, also
intentional. Most of their sleeve art
is images from ‘books and film-posters and stuff like that.’
me - “ Do you get stuck for ideas as to what you want on the
single covers, or have you always got a stock of images that you keep... so if
you were to write a song about... cabbages, you’d be alright...?”
Max - “ Yeah ( giggles ) that’s pretty much it.”
Though Max did paint the picture for the cover of ‘Bury My Heart
At Pier 13’ cos he couldn’t find one that he liked AND that was fitting to the
record...
Anyways. Lets
get back to those stickers. Why does he have them in his pocket ? Not just as a
suitable visual example to illustrate a point, one thinks. Nor probably just to
accost old-people with in bus-shelters. Nooo...
Max - “ It’s just when I get really drunk, I start sticking them on
things.”
me - “ So you are one to leave your mark in that way...”
Mmm. But usually just in grotty rock ‘n’ roll dressing rooms.
Plus that way…
Max - “ It’s nice to come back 6 months later and find some of
your old stickers in the dressing rooms...”
So yeah. I do think that they want to leave their mark...
When I asked Max what he
wants for the band - world domination / small loyal core of fans - I was
told...
Max - “ Just to make good records really.”
He wants the band to endure. Through quality rather than
over-exposure. And shies away from fulfilling the old phrase ‘Up like a rocket,
down like a stick.’
Max - “ If it doesn’t sound good to us, we wouldn’t put it out.”
me - “ So you do have a sort of quality-measuring-stick...?”
Max - “ If you can go home and put it on your own stereo and not
cringe with embarrassment, and play it to your friends who haven’t heard it
before, and they like it then yeah, you do think you’re on to something. But we
don’t sit around patting ourselves on the back going ‘aah, we’re fucking
fantastic!’...”
They don’t all do that a lot. Nope. Uh-uh. No way.
No air-guitaring along to their own records in the bus.
And no trying to be fashionable.
They’d rather be consistent. And playing for themselves rather
than to a scene...
Max - “ There’s that old thing of - ‘If you stand in one place
eventually the whole population of China will come walking past you...’ And I
think if we keep doing what we’re doing, and it doesn’t relate to what’s going
on in the music business in any one year, eventually, it might be fashionable.
Which, you know, would be fine, but it’s not That important. I mean, we started
this band in late 1994, if we’d been cynical about it we’d have gone ‘Aha,
Britpop, let’s get some nice bowl haircuts and start riding scooters...’ ”
me - “ So you don’t lig in Camden then ?”
( touched a sore point there, I think )
Max - “ We’ve been drinking in Camden for a lot longer than any of
them... it’s more that it’s got to the stage where there’s less places we can go
and drink because the bars have filled up, literally filled up with Japanese
tourists looking for Damon, which is quite tragic really... It comes and it goes: and it’s a bus we
didn’t get on... I think that our sound comes very much from everything that
everyone in the band has listened to all of their lives. And we’re talking
about a LOT of different things - like a major pile-up on the M1. Whereas some
people will join a band and say ‘we want to be whoever’ : if you look in the
adverts in the back of the Melody Maker - which is a very sad SAD thing - you
can tell who’s big at the moment, of
every year, because most of the adverts will say that that’s the sort of
influence that they’re looking for. They can see somebody at the top of the
charts and they say ‘we want to sound like them, and that doesn’t 
really get you anywhere..”
Which could be indicative of the SORT of bands that do need to
advertise for a player.
That haven’t just naturally drifted towards each other.
You can’t force it. And you can’t manufacture it.
( And not all pop music needs be synthetic anyways... )
The Flaming Stars steer
clear of all that. They’d rather be...
Max - “ Playing on a more unconscious level... what sounds good...
so you’re not trying to be fashionable so much as just enjoying yourselves...
And it’s gotta come from what you know, what you listen to.”
And from that, I just wanted to know if they had all been friends
before this band, whether they were united by their music tastes and that was
why they joined...
Max - “ Yeah, we knew each other beforehand; most of us were in
other bands... The band that we all got together in was just like a hobby,
something to do when you’re taking time off... I was in a band called Gallon
Drunk playing drums, and we were touring a lot... But we started this band
called the ‘Earls Of Suave’ just in order to have fun and play songs that we
liked... and that was just cover versions, and us just getting drunk and
getting up and playing in a pub in London in front of our mates, and that was
all it was supposed to be. And a couple of years after when we were no longer
doing that, I’d been writing some stuff and Paul ( also ex of Gallon Drunk )
and most of the people in ‘The Earls Of Suave’ wound up getting involved in it,
just in order to do original material... So that’s where the band came from. It
was very much that we knew each other and then started this band rather than
the other way around...”
And he’s happier doing
this than the Gallon Drunk stuff.
( Oh, and he doesn’t go to their gigs now and air-drum. I checked.
)
And he’s happier singing rather than drumming.
David from ‘The Bigger The
God’ used to drum for Ride. But now he’s graduated himself forward to the
position of singer. Where he’s happier. Plays occasional keyboards. And is
gleeful in the extra attention. ( so shoot me for seeing parallels... )
Were there motives like that in Max’s mind, behind his progression
?
Does he NEED to be the focus ?
Um, no not really... (
Though it is quite nice, and all... )
Max - “ If you play one instrument that doesn’t mean to say you
can’t play another... ( Mark Linkous = point in case. ) ... but I didn’t want
to sing and play the drums, because that looks... ( searches for a suitable
word ) ...crap... I mean Phil Collins... And if you’re stood in front of people
they haven’t come to watch paint dry, they’ve come to actually see a show of
some description...”
They don’t want to be a band that are boring to look at.
>>> Part 2
Last revised: 26/07/01