Interview
taken from HermAphrodite #3.
This evening, The Flaming
Stars are set to be supported by a local band called ‘The Coyote Men’. Whom I
realised to be Dick Dale-esque surf-guitar with lots of shouting and a
three-person-mosh. Whom Max described as being “ great... like a really amped
up early 60’s garage band...” And they were good. I’m glad I had a forewarning
though.
Max - “ They play in Mexican fighting masks.”
me - “ Which are...?”
Max - “ They’re tight fitting, highly decorated: wrestlers in
Mexico compete in them, they guard their identity very carefully, and you’re
never supposed to know who it is. But they do make anyone who’s wearing them
look very ugly and 
threatening. And strange.”
And, um, kind of like Power Rangers. ( Making this kind of music
??? )
The Flaming Stars don’t
wear masks when they play. They aren’t out to distance their audience. Or freak
them out. But then, I know that now.
When I was talking to Max, I’d never seen the band play. So I
asked him to describe their live set.
Max - “ Noisy. Very noisy.... One of the many things which bugs me
about people like Oasis is that they just stand there. I think it ( the
entertainment factor )’s part of it; if somebody’s sat at home listening to a
record then you’re just listening to the music - if you’re at a gig you should
be watching something as well.”
me - “ So you’re more Jerry Lee Lewis than anything else ?”
Max - “ Definitely yeah, that end of the spectrum. He didn’t need
to play the piano with his foot, or with his elbows, nobody needs to but it
helps...”
And to that end Max’s broken around ‘twelve or thirteen’ keys on
his piano...
Max - “ It doesn’t necessarily sound any better, it just ‘fits’,
you know ? So yeah, we do try and make it interesting, we don’t want to .just,
um, yawn into the microphone...”
me - “ With an anorak on...”
Max - “ Exactly.”
me - “ You do all look like I’d pictured you to ... Is this you
normally ( gesturing to the suited and booted man before me )...”
Max - “ Mmm. It’s not like I walk around in jeans and a T-shirt, I
never have done, I like wearing jackets. And sometimes that’s fashionable and
sometimes it’s the last thing that’s fashionable.. and I couldn’t care less
about that. What you want to wear and what you enjoy wearing doesn’t
necessarily affect the kind of music that you’re making...”
Well yes, but there is a direct link between the two.
A band that get on-stage looking like they’ve just stepped off the
street / out of the audience ( though to a certain extent, those two examples
DO depend on where exactly you are... ) are going to make that kind of
lowest-common-denominator music, basic chords and universal lyrics and OOPS,
we’re talking Oasis again...
me - “ So it wasn’t a conscious decision? The music didn’t fit the
clothing, or the other way around...?”
Max - “ No. I mean if you saw a picture of me ten years ago, when
the band didn’t even exist, I looked exactly the same...”
I tell him that most of
the people ( male ) I saw outside waiting to come in looked like Mark Lamarr.
Is that a consistency for their audience? 50’s Throwbacks...?
Max - “ It varies actually - I’ve given up trying to figure out
who actually comes to see us...”
Cos not everyone on the mailing list is from the same part of the
country. Or even of the same country. He says they get a mix of fans. ‘Generic
indie-kids’, ‘greasers’ and ‘heavy-metallers’. Not all of whom might be at
their gig intentionally ( I would think that those folks with hair to flail
around on THAT evening were there to flail it at the support... ) but most of
whom do stick around...
Max - “ If people have bought one record they tend to
go chasing after the others; which is nice... And that’s the reason why we put
the singles compliation out, people couldn’t get some of those early singles...
Most of the people who’ve heard of us, they’ve done so via the radio... John
Peel’s been really really good to us, Mark Radcliffe when he had the evening
show gave us two sessions... so a lot of people have got into us from what
they’ve heard, so to begin with they don’t know what kind of haircut or
anything...”
me - “ But then the pictures of you do ‘fit’ the way that you
sound.”
Max - “ Well I hope so, yeah.”
They don’t want to be putting on a ‘costume’ for the stage - ,
though they aren’t truly preoccupied with sincerity and doin’ it ‘4 REAL’ - how
they are when performing is how they are when not. That is Max’s true speaking
voice, those are his normal clothes.
Max – “Though people whose records I like, you do like to feel;
that the way that they come across is actually something of them. Um... you
imagine if Bob Dylan in 1965 had just kind of come home and taken this wig off,
bloated to 25 stone and started wearing a serious of dayglo paisley outfits (
giggles ) d’you know what I mean ? You’d think ‘no’.”
me - “ Does the music or the lyrics come first ?”
Max - “ It’s about fifty / fifty actually. Sometimes you come up
with a title - like you mentioned ‘The Face On The BarRoom Floor’ - and then
you go and write a song about that... sometimes you get the music figured out
from an idea... I was staggering to work one day with the worst hangover in
history, and an old phrase went through my head from a film ‘...a burnt out
wreck of a man’, and I thought.. ‘Aha’. And then you go off and write a song
around that title, and the song doesn’t really have anything to do with you or
your day...”
Oh, and…
Max - “ ‘Bring Me The Rest of Alfredo Garcia’ was about watching
the ITV Chart Show...”
me ( incredulous ) - “ You can’t tell that from the title...”
Max - “ Mmm; it was about wanting to basically just kick the
television screen while watching it... The joke there was Sam Peckham once said
‘well bring me the head of Alfredo Garcia’ and you think ‘alright, you get the
head, can we have the rest now please? ’ Because so much of what I’d seen on
the television was shallow and stupid, and you’re left thinking ‘well they look
alright; if they had a song, you might have something there. I mean, Jimi Hendrix was not just something that looked
good; he could play, he could sing, and he could dress well. Which isn’t what
you get anymore... The Spice Girls, Kylie Minogue, they don’t need to be able
sing for their career... They are a product; they are Disney, they’re
McDonalds.”
And ‘Bring Me The Rest Of...’ is thus a plea for something more
substantial: the meat, not just the pretty face.
Max then apologises for
removing the mystery from the song - he’d rather they were something which
everyone could apply their own meaning to rather than something either
painfully obvious or explained to the minutest detail in interviews.
He doesn’t ever want to write anything OVERLY specific.
Max - “ If it’s saying ‘oh they’ve left me, they were four-foot
tall they had a wooden leg, my god that stubble used to drive me crazy and why
on earth did they dye their hair tartan...’ ( grins ) that’s narrowed it down
too much. Whereas if you just say ‘they’ve gone’ then anybody in that situation
can identify with it.”
me - “ How much of it is you in the 
songs ?”
Max - “ It depends, it varies from song to song. But it’s gotta
ring true to people.”
So only write of what you know or what your imagination can cover
without holes in your knowledge glaring through.
For this reason, The Flaming Stars will probably never put out a
song about ‘hunting yaks’.
me - “ Quite a lot of your songs seem to be about alcohol, and
dying for love: is that a kind of universal theme...?”
Max - “ I think so... Some people write songs about something
completely trivial, but I’d rather something that means something.”
It has to mean something to you before it can to anyone else. He
says. (Sound. )
Plus ‘alcohol’ does feature quite strongly in his life. In the
band’s life.
Max - “A lot of my favourite songs ( blues, country ) are drinking
songs. And there’ve been a lot of great books written about drink.”
Oh, and talking of books...
Max writes stories.
Most recently - ‘ I Was A Teenage Warehouse.’
And yes, he likes doing it.
Max - “ You don’t need anyone else’s participation. You’ve got
total control over it.”
The pure undiluted channelling of this thoughts to realisation part
is, I think, very important to him.
And yes, his stories do come from the same pool of ideas as the
songs do.
Max - “ I think so... Though some of the stories are funny, and we
don’t do comedy songs.”
me - “ No Cockney knees-ups ?”
Max - “ No. ( pause ) You’ll notice that’s one thing missing from
our set...”
Ah. Yes. True.
Max - “ What we’re trying to do with the songs is something
essentially serious... But in ‘Bring Me The Rest Of Alfredo Garcia’ most of the way through that song the line
that gets repeated is ‘bring out your dead’. The second to last time it’s
‘bring out your dad’. That’s just me having a bit of fun, basically :it’s there
if people notice it, but if they don’t it doesn’t matter... In ‘The Face On The
Bar Room Floor’, the last guitar solo, I’m sort of yelling something in the
background, and what I’m yelling is ‘Give me a break !’, cos there’s a guitar
break coming up... I like things that muck around with the language... You know
when you’re first walking down the street when you’re a kid, and you look up
and see ‘Family Butcher’ and you think ‘AARGH !’ and you realise the English
language is just this twisted thing and everybody is actually conspiring just
to hear things one way and rule out all other possible meanings.”
Conclusion. Max has a
very black ( bleak ? ) sense of humour.
( His favourite recent ‘feelgood’ movie has been Mars Attacks.
)
Twisted. And that’s what the songs are. Essentially. A twisted
form of melancholia.
But that isn’t all their songs are.
The Flaming Stars don’t make music of The Holy Bible esqe
proportions.
Cos when their songs play, I see three minute movies. ( Shot with
much use of shadow & light. )
me - “ Do you have a black and white television ?”
Max ( tries not to laugh ) - “ No.”
me - “ Do you tune it to black and white ?”
Max - “No.”
me - “ Have you ever thought about doing that ?”
Max - “ Yes, I’ve done that in the past. ( pause ) I mean, do you
think that I ought to...?”
Mmm.
He looks like the sort of person that would. Because that was the
way it was once. Because other people would deem it pointless. Because most
everything looks better - more sophisticated - in black and white.
And - hey - he’s that kinda guy...
I could leave you with a tidy conclusion
to the interview
but life isn’t like that
and neither are this band
so instead I’ll give you one
of Max’s favoured Max’s Woody Allenisms
“ I don’t really want to live on in people’s minds, I just want to
live on in my apartment.”
I think the Flaming Stars want
both. ( And for people to take note of them having said so. )
Last revised:
26/07/01