Ash and We Are Scientists

First published on 6 May 2010. Updated on 5 Apr 2011.

Una Cruickshank gets the lowdown from WAS's singer/guitarist Keith Murray on touring, Splendour, human centipedes and Xmas sperm.

So you're coming out for Splendour in the Grass? Is there anyone there you're looking forward to seeing? Catching up with? Booby-trapping their dressing room?
I actually am not sure who's even playing. I know Grizzly Bear, who are also from Brooklyn, are playing. But I don't think we're on the same day. Fortunately our touring drummer, Danny Allen, who is in Youth Group, so my suspicion – if my experience with him in America and Europe is any indication – is that he's going to know positively everyone at Splendour so I'll just follow him around and do whatever he tells me to do.

Why isn't [former Razorlight drummer and newest Scientist] Andy Burrows touring with you?
Well, that stupid idiot decided that he needed to put out his solo record on Universal three weeks after our record. No, it's sort of terrible planning on our part. He has a solo record coming out literally within a month of our record so because he's on Universal, they expect him to do things like actually promote it. So his promotional schedule for the record overlaps exactly with ours. Hopefully, in the autumn when promotional stuff cools down he'll be able to come on tour with us full time. But for the summer he has to focus on his own record – understandably, I suppose.

Is it kind of strange having a touring drummer standing in for your regular guy?
It's a little weird. I feel like the outward chemistry – the chemistry of the band interacting with other people – is a little funny. It feels like we need to make up for the fact that the drummer is not the guy in the record. I think by virtue of the fact that we refuse to actually play music with anybody that isn't actually our friend - it is still super fun to go and play for an hour with Danny – it doesn't affect our temperament at all. I think occasionally there is something in that that is confusing to the audience. I don't know.

It's a great philosophy, only playing with friends.
Yeah. I'm pretty sure that if I had to ever be in a band with someone that I wouldn't be hanging out with at that moment anyway, then I just wouldn't be playing music.

How much fun was it for making the video for Rules Don't Stop?
It definitely was fun but the most fun portion of it was the post-production on it. Like standing in front of green screen is not that much fun. Even though in your mind you are picturing how glorious it's going to look, you do feel like a total jackass doing all the crap you're doing to your own song being played back to you on a green screen. But the post-production aspects of Rules Don't Stop were definitely an exercise in hilarity. Not to say total inanity. There was a period where Chris and I were really really demanding that a major theme be chocolate chip cookies and that there'd always be chocolate chip cookies spinning around and floating everywhere. And the shot where I take off my sunglasses there are no eyes, I really wanted there to be two chocolate chip spinning cookies. But the directors took an almost moral stand against that many chocolate cookies and instead only let me eat a chocolate chip cookie in the video.


I've been watching [MTV's We Are Scientists written/starring sitcom] Steve Wants His Money today, instead of working. I was wondering how that came about and how was it developed?
It sort of evolved over a really long period. I'll try to give you the incredibly brief version. Several years ago, at our Reading Leeds Festival, we did a Q&A session with Chris and me in a tent in front of a bunch of kids. And I guess because most bands are incapable of speaking intelligently at all, our label thought it was the best thing that they've ever seen in their lives and so they tried to get us to do a tour of UK universities just doing Q&A sessions, and we were like "Yeah, that sounds like the most boring thing of all time - no, we're not doing that. But what we will do is give a self-help course." So we wrote this comedy self-help course, obviously totally fake, called Brain Thrust Mastery, which then we titled our second record.

With you so far.
Our label's idea was then to film this self-help session and of course, because we're incredibly difficult and mercurial in our interests, we were like "no, no, we don't ever want to do that again, what we will do is a little sitcom thing about trying not to be in the music industry and trying to be self-help gurus and we'll still call it Brain Thrust Mastery." And they were like "OK that's great." So we filmed that with a production company, it was all very short, like Steve Wants His Money: it was seven three-or-four minute bits. And the production company wanted to sell it to television channels. But because the television business moves so glacially, by the time we actually came to an agreement with MTV, the album had been out for some time and so the idea of doing a Brain Thrust Mastery-themed thing was very out-dated. So we ended up writing Steve Wants His Money for MTV to replace the Brain Thrust Mastery which they had originally been interested in.


 

So how do you see it impacting the band? Is that project going to continue or is it a one-off gag?
We've talked to MTV about doing a more long form sort of TV show thing for them but I think our stated goal is not to let it really affect the business of the band. At this point we're not going to talk to them about it at least until the autumn when we're doing the summer festival touring. Like I said, we've sort of recognised how brutally slow and laborious the process of working in TV is and I think it benefits us to forget about it until they've worked out all those kinks and then come back to us and say "so now we're ready to do the show!" and we're like "ooh yeah, the show... this is going to be great!" I do really pity anyone that works in TV and is trying to make a show happen because it does appear to regularly involve a good year of absolutely nothing happening despite everyone saying that something is happening.

My colleague Andrew P Street spoke with you some years ago, and you recommended that he get a movie called Stealth, a bomb involving Jessica Biel. He emailed me today and told me in capital letters that it "transformed my life and my understanding of cinema." Do you have any new recommendations?
I'll give you our new band's fixation, but it's hardly a recommendation because I can hardly even convince myself to see it, but we are legitimately obsessed with a movie called The Human Centipede. It sounds to be the most vile use of celluloid in human history. We really want to make ourselves go see it. We have a burning need to know what it would be like to sit and watch a human centipede but we generally can't bring ourselves to do it and we will watch anything. I mean, Stealth was one of our favourite movies for a while – we will obviously watch anything. But we can't. The Human Centipede is like an albatross for We Are Scientists.


For fortunate readers that haven't heard of The Human Centipede, can you give them a brief run-down of the plot?
Of course it always begins with two American tourists. I guess they're in Germany, maybe Eastern Europe, might be confusing this with Hostel series. In any case, they're in the woods in some nearly Eastern European nation. Their car gets a flat in the rainstorm, in the woods; obviously they're going to some forest rave, whatever American tourists do in Europe. They run into this tiny village outside the woods and find refuge in the house of a man who initially appears genteel but it later is revealed that he is an insane doctor who's specialty is working on conjoined twins and separating them. And now I'm just interpolating it, I suspect he has been disbarred from practice because he's too corrupt and fetishistic. So he's decided that now his ideal is to connect humanity and his dream is to make a, well, the titular, human centipede that involves conjoining at least three humans but via their digestive tract. Which essentially means mouth to anus. So they all live as one organism. It seems like the worst thing of all time

That's a beautiful and romantic vision of uniting humanity. I've only seen the trailer, but it looks horrendous.
I can't really tell if what he's fixated on is just the idea of making a triple stomached-digestive tract. Is that the thing he's enamoured of? Because three people linked crawling around on the floor isn't that interesting visually. I can't imagine what gratification he anticipates in gazing upon his creation. It must literally be like: ‘I have made a stomach that will digest the previously digested product of two other stomachs' - which would be a scene in itself – but I don't. Spoiler alert: I hear that it's a failed experiment. Perhaps predictably, it goes poorly.

Any non ass-to-mouth recommendations?
I've been pretty fixated on a movie called The Room for some time now. It's not that recent - it's been about a year. I must say the writing of ‘Barbara' was hampered by my fixation on The Room, which for a period of 2009, I probably watched four times a week. And it's perhaps the most inept film ever made, maybe after Troll 2. The Room is meant to be a drama, a romantic psychological drama, but it fails on legitimately every front. I highly recommend The Room - it's pretty mind-boggling. My warning for viewers of The Room is that the first, maybe the first 20 minutes, the intent of the film appears to be like soft-core porn, but after 20 minutes they've totally forget that this was the idea and the rest of the movie is just a normal drama, thankfully.

I heard Birdemic is actually potentially worse than The Room.
I really want to see Birdemic. I think the guy that sells our merch on our forthcoming tour in the UK owns a copy of Birdemic so I'm very excited. But actually it seems like it could be boring in parts. Whereas The Room never gets boring.


For the Nice Guys video clip, did you have to undergo any kind of elaborate training or gruelling routines to get in shape for that that sweet skating action?
Unfortunately, the director was [bassist] Chris Cain. His philosophy was that he wanted to catch the purity of my art and not let it be tainted with a rigorous, or even basic, training. The weird thing about it was that the initial falls, which absolutely hurt the most, were also the ones that looked the least convincing because I was scared of actually dying. So I'd do things like brace myself and then end up destroying my elbows. So towards the end I was letting myself fall to the ground and let myself roll with inertia, it was OK. So for the training process occurred - and in fact many of those shots are not actually in there - so the training occurred on the job. I was not bit for any of it though.

It's a great video. I've got to say that little kid, he was stiff competition.
You know what, he's got a way to go. I would say his fall is pretty much the most delightful thing I've ever witnessed. I could watch his spill over and over. He's a true pro - it looks real.

Finally, I just opened your liner notes, and I have to ask for the real answer to this question: when is it ok to give a vial of your sperm for Christmas?
I would say as long as you've been dating for over a month - as long as you started dating at least in November. The sperm vial is – get this – a vial-able present.

We Are Scientists and Ash play at the Metro on Mon 2 Aug, with Last Dinosaurs