If you’ve ever wondered how you might go about making rock music without guitars, you could do a whole lot worse than get some tips off Fight Like Apes. The Dublin four-piece have captured the hearts of Irish music fans this year with their distorted, shouty, synthesizer-heavy tunes and energetic live shows, all without a riff or power chord in sight.
“It’s bizarre – we’d love to hear a guitar in some of our songs but then you just think, is it really necessary?” reflects Jamie. Better known to fans by his nomme de guerre Pockets, he shares vocal duties with charismatic frontwoman MayKay as well as being the group’s chief synths and samples boffin. “We’re very influenced by guitar music,” he continues, “but when we tried them ourselves we just ended up acting like wallies and decided it wasn’t going to work at all.” The band instead decided to go down the route of, as Jamie puts it, ‘filling out sound by hitting distortion pedals and getting MayKay angry enough to scream her head off.’ “It just worked,” he laughs, “it was an unintentional decision, but the idea of going back on it at this stage would be ludicrous!”
He’s not wrong there. The popularity of Fight Like Apes’ unique formula was confirmed before Christmas, when the band played a sold-out headlining show in Dublin’s Whelan’s venue, confirming their status as 2007′s hottest new arrivals and capping off a year that saw them release two EPs, ‘How Am I Supposed To Kill You If You Have All The Guns?’ and the even more bizarrely-titled ‘David Carridine Is A Bounty Hunter Whose Robotic Arm Hates Your Crotch’. The latter refers to the plot of an obscure B-movie the band found while trawling the internet one day and gives a pretty good insight into the sort of pop-cultre touchstones that inform the Fight Like Apes aesthetic. While owning up to inspiration from the likes of Pavement, My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth, the band see no reason to restrict themselves to purely musical influences. “Maybe 50 percent of the entertainment we like is music,” explains Jamie. “When we were starting out, we realised that we could tell exactly what music certain bands had been listening to and that’s all it was – they’d literally just taken five or six different bands and derived a sound from that. We figured we’d rather just be ourselves. Anyway, we were only having a laugh at the time and found all these bizarre samples highly amusing!”
As 2007 drew to a close, the band secured their first live appearances in the UK, co-headlining the ArtRocker tour with Popular Workshop for nine dates in December. “It’s very different to Ireland,” says Jamie. “We don’t have much of a following there yet so it’s hard work, but it’s kinda nice to be faced with the hard slog again – we’re enjoying it!” The band have found big differences between playing to their home crowd and trying to convert new audiences. “It is fun trying to reach new people,” reckons Jamie, “but you do get the arms-folded, everyone-thinks-they’re-A&R crowd who want to size you up, which I completely understand. But when you come home to a Dublin crowd you see how all the work has paid off – it’s an amazing feeling to get so much back off the audience.”
One of the biggest factors in the buildup of this grassroots following has been the internet, specifically MySpace and various Irish music blogs. Jamie admits the band were somewhat taken aback by the power of the web in this regard: “We were just shocked that so many people read blogs!” he laughs. “Once one blogger catches on, suddenly they all do. The internet has been a great tool for us, I think it is for every band these days.” Despite this however, a Radiohead-esque online distribution model holds little attraction for Jamie and the rest of the band: “We still like the idea of a physical copy,” he declares. “That’s why we do the 12″ vinyl thing – we like the idea of people having a memento as opposed to a file on a computer that’ll be lost as soon as the computer crashes. It’s not that I’ve a massive problem with digital music or anything but I don’t really see us going down the internet-only route.”
Another UK tour, this time supporting Detroit garage rockers the Von Bondies, beckons in late February, before the band head into the studio to put together what should be a highly-anticipated debut album. With a release date scheduled for September, the plans are still in the early stages. “It’s been something we’ve been holding off on for ages because we really wanted to put a lot of effort into it and not just release something half-assed,” says Jamie. “We’re going to record the better part of 20 songs and choose from there. I imagine there will be some songs off the EPs on the album but we don’t know which ones yet – it depends on how we feel at the time and how the songs fit together.” Alongside the recording effort, the band have promised themselves they’ll put in as much work in the UK in 2008 as they did in Ireland last year, no doubt hoping for similar results. We can only sit back and watch…
This interview was originally published in MQ, the IMRO magazine.
