moodgusic got together with with Brian Borcherdt and Graham Walsh of Holy Fuck for an interview before their show at the Speakeasy bar in Belfast on November 18. We discuss their 2010 release Latin, the writing and recording aspects for their music, their plans for 2011, their favourite records this year and of course, the infamous name.
moodgusic: This is Matthew Larkin with mood/gusic interviewing Graham Walsh and Brian Borcherdt of Holy Fuck, they’re playing the Speakeasy at Queens Student Union today. They’re touring their latest album Latin, it’s been out since Spring. So you’ve been touring Latin steadily since Spring, how is this tour?
GW: Fine, it’s been long but it’s been fine. Yeah.
BB: Yeah, it’s good. We did seven weeks in the U.S. and Canada with very few, I mean pretty much no days off and that can be taxing on the soul, but we had a pretty good time. We were out with a band called Indian Jewellery and we got along with them really well, and you know having people on tour with you that you get along well with works, it just works in your favour and this time we’re out with our friend Rich, Buck 65. Things like that help.
moodgusic: How’s this tour been or how does it compare with the earlier tours for LP and Holy Fuck?
BB: Um, I don’t know it’s pretty good. I mean, we haven’t really, we’re not a buzz band anymore, I mean that’s just there’s no way, like that’s just not the way things work now. You really get that, that only happens once and then you move on from there. But in a way it’s better because, we haven’t necessarily seen crowds diminish. Um, and we feel comfortable when we go on stage, we feel like it’s people that are there to actually see us, as opposed to people that maybe are coming for the hype or maybe heard something about you but they’re going to be overly scrutinising and you know projecting high expectations or something. So it feels good, to have your own audience there.
moodgusic: You recorded Latin in a barn, in Ontario, what was that like for you guys?
GW: Well, it wasn’t neccecarily a barn, it’s a barn but it wasn’t, it’s not like a working farm barn.
BB: There wasn’t a lot of hay left.
GW: Yeah.
BB: Or cows..
GW: A friend of ours bought this farm with a barn on it and converted it into a proper studio. He gutted it down to nothing and rebuilt it back up and made it a proper living space so, and he has put a studio in there so, and it was great to go out there ‘cause it’s a distraction from downtown Toronto. You’re kind of isolated in the countryside and that helps you focus on just working on the music.
BB: There’s really nothing we do out there, I mean it’s in the middle of nowhere.
GW: But make music.
BB: Yeah, we get up in the morning, make coffee and you’re there with you bandmates and you kind of slowly start your day I mean maybe the first thing we start on isn’t necessarily something that is overly like pressing, or not like a daunting task first thing in the morning. So you kind of jam and have fun and sometimes something creative comes to that, and then the same thing at the very end of the day, y’know maybe you’ve been working all day and to unwind at the end of the night you just horse around again. But there’s really not a lot of pressure other than the pressure we put on ourselves.
moodgusic: and did you have a specific intention, when you went into the recording of this album, for some sort of finish product?
BB: Over time we did. I mean maybe not in the beginning, in the beginning I think we hit the studio just wanted to properly document what we’d already sort of started to sort of create on stage and touring live. Um like you mentioned seeing us in 2008, um that was a really busy year for us, touring a lot and in that time we were trying to work on our record, like chipping away at it, little bits at a time only because we didn’t want to lose an energy that we were building up on stage. So like playing y’know 30 shows in a row, you get fresh off of that tour schedule, we want to be able to go into a studio and record that. So that’s what we were trying to do at first but it was proving to be kind of challenging because we were just chipping away at it in pieces and then going away again on tour.
GW: It was hard to get a total picture for everything. So it wasn’t until you sort of have all the songs, like a good photograph of all the songs and then you kind of realise what you can, you kind of get a better idea of what you have as a whole and then you can sort of sequence the record and maybe finish songs off a certain way and stuff like that.
BB: Yeah so at that stage when we could see what it was, was when we probably made our only conscience decisions on the record in terms of content where we did go back and record whole new things. Because we felt like in order for the album to be as dynamic as we wanted it to be, it would need a couple of those tracks just to take it one way and take it the other way and hopefully bring in those final dynamics that we felt the album was missing.
moodgusic: How does the writing process compare to maybe what you do on the side projects; singer songwriter stuff. Does the absence of lyrics make it easier to write?
BB: Yeah, mainly the absence of a front-person. I think in some more traditional bands people have more traditional roles, not always like you can always transcend that a little bit, like the drummer happens to write all the lyrics y’know that often at times is a new dynamic to any situation. But by and large we don’t have those set roles, where for the most part we’re reacting to a certain beat or a rhythm or something we’ve kind of come up with on one of Graham and my pieces of gear, we’ll be making a certain beat that’s going through a delay pedal and creating a certain fluttering kind of pulsey effect that maybe we really like and it sort of seems to be feedbacking in this key. Y’know so those are some of those beginning steps, it’s kind of like that is the spine and then we start building things off of that and it is a pretty free form way of writing, because like I said there’s not going to be one guy who steps in and goes, “well hey guys leave me room ‘cause I’m going to start croonin’ and girls are gonna start swoonin’ over me!”, y’know it’s not really like that.
moodgusic: So you get questions about the name a lot, don’t you?
GW: Yeah.
moodgusic: Some people might take offence to it, maybe the older generations. What do your parents or older relatives think of the name?
GW: I think at first, uh they’ve been supportive, at first maybe they were like or thought it was a silly joke or whatever and then I think my dad first thought maybe or couldn’t see how a band with that name could be very successful. But I think gradually, as we’ve been doing more and more stuff it’s shown him that no, actually times are changed a little bit, and we can actually come to Ireland and play a show and travel the world and stuff like that. But they’ve been supportive all along, it’s not like there was this big blowout like, “Oh my god my son is such a bad child”, ‘cause even my grandma liked the name too so.
BB: [laughs] That’s awesome.
GW: She was okay with it, she’s just like, “Oh.. kids.
BB: My wife’s grandmother wrote it down on her pad of paper next to the phone next to my name, and the first time I went over to visit because she was getting debriefed obviously by her son and so she was really really nice to me. And now that we’re buddies, her and I, like someone will make a joke like, “Oh you love his band name don’t you?” and she’d be like, “No! No, no I don’t I hate it!” she’ll say that but what’s cool about her and cool about some of these people they don’t hate us for it you know. [laughs] They understand and they don’t understand, but they’re forgiving. [laughs] But every generation brings something different to it and even our generation’s not as immune to it as we’d like to think. But maybe in a different way, we don’t take offence to the f word, but we make associations based on band names just due to the way that the internet is working and the blogosphere is working, y’know we make associations really immediately. Therefore I think more than every fine band’s sort of naming and building an image that is what relates to a particular movement, scene, sound or a blog or a vibe and Holy Fuck doesn’t really fit into those. [laughs] It just kind of sits out there like the weird cousin that no one wants to hang out with.
moodgusic: Did it ever cross your minds to maybe change the name? I know Starfucker changed their name, but then they changed it back. As a band did it ever come across?
GW: I think we maybe thought about it at one point or another, but we always stuck to our guns, I mean it is what it is.
BB: Maybe if we were coming at it from a different type of music, like right from the beginning, because of what we’re stylistically, the sort of show that we’re trying to put on every night, the type of records that we’re trying to make, I don’t think changing the name would really be advantageous to us. For one thing it would look a little bit like we’re I don’t know, giving in a little bit. But why give in if we’re making weird instrumental noisy music that you can hopefully either dance or clean your kitchen to and it’s just some weird thing. It’s not traditional pop music so what can we give in to. Like if we change the name we’re not suddenly going to be on the cover of Rolling Stone.
moodgusic: Next year in 2011 do you guys have any plans?
GW: In the first bit of 2011 we get to go to Australia and Japan which will be a lot of fun and then after that nothing really. No real set plans, though I’m sure there’ll be shows that’ll come up that we’ll do and we’ll start the writing process again and work on new material.
moodgusic: What have been the records you’ve enjoyed the most this year.
BB: I’m not the most current person anymore, there was a time in my life where I would try to be quite current and I find myself so overwhelmed that I go through phases. I probably really won’t know what was good this year until next year or the year after. I was on the ferry today with my headphones on and I was really enjoying the Beach Fossils records.
GW: That came out in like 2009.
BB: Oh yeah, well there you go. Uh I like Caribou’s new record, that’s a fantastic one, I really like this band called Royal Baths, and Bishop Morocco, Clipd Beaks.
GW: Same stuff really, we’ve been listening to the Caribou record a lot and I got the Tame Impala record which I like, I just got that recently. We’ve kind of been going a little crazy and been going to second hand record stores lately so I’ve been buying a lot of second hand stuff and just the other day I’m trying to go through my head about what new music should I be buying. I guess I like the new Beach House record.
BB: I feel like we should be asking that question more than we do.
GW: We should be asking you guys and get you to tell us.
BB: In fact I have a friend who would always be quick to volunteer some great stuff and he’ll send it my way he’ll send me the likes to their myspace but more than ever I’m not ever getting back to those emails until a couple months go by. Y’know I’m very bad these days, I feel like we’re living in a time of the immediate more than ever with twitter and things, I’m having a hard time adjusting because I’ve always been the type of person to mentally compartmentalise something for a future date. Like I’ll get everything ready and then I’ll put it out and I’m kind of like that now about receiving information like I’m putting up my safe guards and only little by little do I let things come in. And like one day I’m going to watch an episode of 30 Rock or something, I just haven’t let that guard down right now and I don’t know why, I think I’m afraid because I’m finding too many old things that I’ve already missed out on. Y’know I’m trying to read older books and listen to older music and watch older movies.
moodgusic: That's great, thanks for the interview.
Holy Fuck are currently touring Europe. For information about that band and a listing of their tour dates visit ~ http://holyfuckmusic.com/
Their third LP Latin is out now, it's worth checking out.
interview recording ~
[audio http://moodgusic.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/2aba7-interview_with_brian_and_graham_of_holy_fuck.mp3]
Interview_with_Brian_and_Graham_of_Holy_Fuck...mp3
