A backstage interview with Tokyo Police Club at Ottawa Bluesfest

[An interview courtesy of Ottawa correspondent Ross MacDonald. – AC]

After soundcheck at Ottawa Bluesfest, and before their show, Graham Wright and Greg Alsop of Tokyo Police Club sat down with A Journal of Musical Things to catch up, and tell us what’s next.

AJOMT: A few months ago, you announced a final show at History at the end of November. How did it feel as you heard you sold out your final show in minutes, then another, then another, then a fourth?

Greg:  It felt fucking great.

Graham: We have a song called ‘Don’t Fuck With Your heart’ and we sold a t-shirt with that on it. We once had a teacher come to the merch table and say, “I really want that shirt, but I shouldn’t wear that in front of my kids.” And we were like, the most important lesson you can teach a kid is to not let people fuck with their heart. And that swear word getting in the way of that, your priorities are all mixed up.

It felt like the old days, honestly. When we were we were really lucky when we started, we got a lot of buzz and hype right off the bat. You’d have that feeling where you would put something on sale with no expectations and then it would go shockingly beyond, but then you get expectations. Now the bar is set. And so then, the back half of our career up to this point has been an interesting study in expectations versus reality. It was really nice to, one more time, have low expectations and have them wildly exceeded. 

AJOMT: It is now apparent that your fans wouldn’t let you off easy just playing a final show(s). You are now kicking off a bonafide North American tour. Were you really hoping to slip away quietly?

Greg: We said, a final show, and then it went to those four shows. 

And we definitely got the feedback right away where people were saying, [for example] Come down to San Diego. Come here. And then our agent maybe a week after the History things happening [said] hey, I’ve got offers. Do you guys wanna even just consider them or see them? Can I send some things your way? And then, all of a sudden, he was just: there’s a full tour if you want.

Graham: So one of the things that you’re kinda glad to leave behind in some ways, although we’ll also miss it, is the grind. That’s just the way it goes. Over the years, the idea of doing a month-long tour of the States, what that means is grinding it out. You’re busting your ass on social media to get people to care. Busting your ass to sell tickets, because as I said, people have had chances to see us and you’re playing smaller venues.

But so the idea of a tour at first was, do we really wanna do that grind again? And then it became very apparent that it would not be a grind, it was obvious. It was really quickly: are we gonna not go to San Diego? Are we gonna not go back to LA when everyone is begging us to? I mean, the whole point is to go play for people.

Greg: And we get the opportunity to go there one more time. You don’t wanna if you can avoid it, it’s nice to not, just fade away. 

AJOMT: What are you looking forward to the most on this final tour?

Graham: It’s the feeling in the room where everyone, and this always happens at a good gig, but this one feels like it’s more likely where everyone is really on the same page and they really are appreciating what we’re giving them, and we’re appreciating what they’re giving us. That magical ineffable thing where it starts to self-oscillate, the synergy. But everything. I mean, I can’t wait to just do tours. Because what if I don’t get another chance to do a tour? It’s one of the coolest things you can do. 

AJOMT: You’ve played in hundreds of cities and venues around the world. Do you have any memorable favourite cities or venues?

Graham:  So many by now. In ’08, we played at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and it was a free show in the courtyard of this museum. It’s a beautiful museum. We were still really new and we’d flown in for it. I remember it was one of the first gigs we ever did on Backline, which is where you rent all the gear. I remember being shocked showing up and there’s all the stuff we asked for magically. 

Greg: But then we met with a friend there, to grab some food after soundcheck before the gig. We went down the street, hung out for 45 minutes, ate a burger. And then as we were coming back, we were like, oh shit! Something must be going on at the museum here. There’s a lineup around the block, oh, man. Are we gonna be able to get back in? What’s happening here? There must be an unveiling of a new tomb or something like that. And they’re like, oh, it’s for our show! It was something like a thousand kids just crammed into this courtyard.

Graham: Madhouse! There were trees, and people were climbing the trees and it felt like something was happening. It felt like, oh, this is a show that everyone who was at it, is gonna remember they were at it. It feels like, oh, I saw them when. And we were aware of it too. So that’s one that really has been coming to mind a lot. Even though I can barely remember any particular moment of it. Hell of a show. I wish it had been filmed. I wish there was some record of it, but it was before iPhones.

AJOMT: Conversely, do you have any memories of trauma-inducing challenges, like a broken-down van in the middle of the prairies in -30 degree blizzards? Or promoters that acted like Godzilla?

Graham: We never had too many bad promoters, we always had an agent.  But the van on the other hand was constantly breaking down and falling apart.

Greg: We were going from somewhere in the south and we were passing through Tennessee because we had to play Lollapalooza at noon on the main stage, the next day. And as we were driving through Tennessee, I was behind the wheel and I remember feeling this isn’t braking or accelerating like it usually does. Everything just feels a little unhinged right now. I eventually got it to slow down, went over to the shoulder of the road and looked and I [thought] I don’t know everything seems normal. I know anything about a fucking car. Then I saw the tire on the passenger side, and the axle had just ground through the rim and so it was just spinning.

Graham: If you put a doughnut on a pencil, that was how our wheel was attached to the van. It was just wobbling around loose.

Greg: So eventually, we [realised] this isn’t going anywhere and we had to leave it there and then walk down the freeway path to a Comfort Inn that was just off the turnpike and call anyone. We [said], hey, our van is just on the side of the road. Can you do anything about it? [and the answer was] 1. We can’t do anything about it and 2. You’re fucked. So we just had to leave our van and trailer there. 

Graham: We had to rent an SUV. We were in Murfreesboro, Tennessee and the nearest rental place was also a 40 minute drive. So someone took a cab, and we made it to Lollapalooza by the skin of our teeth and played one of the biggest shows of our career. 

Greg: The next day, I remember going in, loading in, playing an insane set of about 20 minutes.

Graham: We opened the day. And there’s still like 10,000 people watching you. Are they interested? They just kind of wandered in, but we made it. We’ve missed shows, but never because of our van, which is shocking considering what happened. Once we got stuck in a town for like a night trying to figure out what was wrong with our van and it turned out that our van had a kill switch we didn’t know about. It was right in the place where you could hit it with your knee.

Greg: So we tripped it ourselves. 

AJOMT: So often an established band releases an album, a popular sentiment is “that isn’t as good as their last album”. Whenever new material from TPC came out it was always fresh and exciting. You evolved, and with every release your new material doesn’t leave fans nostalgic. How is that even possible?

Graham: We worked really hard. We never phoned it in. We never got lazy. We frequently pushed ourselves. I wouldn’t say too far because the results speak for themselves. It starts to work, and it starts to get easy, and then maybe you’re [thinking] let’s just have some fun in the studio and it’s good to have fun in the studio. It’s important to have fun in the studio, but it’s also important to hold to yourself. We took for granted that it had to be good. I guess that our taste was good enough that what we thought was good and what we busted our ass to make good, other people [thought was good]. It’s really interesting wrapping it up now. All of a sudden it becomes the body of work. It’s now codified. I made a Spotify playlist that has every Tokyo Police Club song in chronological order. It’s all there, laid out for you. I can look at it and [think], no skips. 

AJOMT:  It’s known that bands like Radiohead have certain songs they haven’t released yet. Are there any songs that you haven’t released yet that people are clamouring to find out? 

Graham: I don’t know if there’s any that the people are clamouring for. We don’t have quite the enthusiastic fan base as Radiohead, but there’s songs that I think probably for us, there’s always a moment when you’re writing, when you’re in the creation phase. There’s always a song that’s like, this is the one! This is the song! Sometimes those are the song, but other times those songs end up not even coming out. And especially when we made Forcefield, we spent four years writing it, so there’s a big pile of outtakes from Forcefield that never saw the light of day. Which someday it will. So there’s definitely a little bit in the vault.

AJOMT: You released a single in March, ‘Just a Scratch / Catch Me If You Can’. How has it been doing?

Graham: That’s number 17 in Canada this week. We’ve been grinding up the charts. It’s gonna get to number 1 by November. That’s my goal. As we play our last show ever, I want that song [to be number 1]. We’ve never had a number 1. Where’s our fucking number 1 Canada? Tokyo Police Club doesn’t have a number 1? Not appropriate. Not okay.

AJOMT: It’s good you guys like your stuff and you’re not self-deprecating. 

Graham: Thank you. I remember my old friend Craig Norris. He said, if you went to a brain surgeon and he said, “I’m okay”, you would go to a different brain surgeon. So I don’t know why bands are always selling their shit short. 

AJOMT: After you released the ‘Melon Collie and the Infinite Radness’ albums, you held contests in some cities to perform house parties. Were you ever concerned that a winner might be in a dodgy abode?

Graham: That never happened. All the houses were cool. In one way we’re really fortunate to have been in an indie band the whole time because our fans are pretty reliable.

Greg: Everyone’s down to earth. They’re like real people. Whenever you meet someone after the show or anything, you’re just [thinking]: You’re just a sweet, normal person.

Graham: If you’re in Radiohead, for instance, you’ve got fans who are coming to your house probably. You have to have a bodyguard.

AJOMT: What’s next? Will you be staying in the music industry, as artists? Management? Recording production? Or now for something completely different?

Graham: I’m sure we will all continue to make music. It remains to be seen how industrially, I would love to keep touring and doing it, but also I have another band called Girlfriend Material, and we did a weekend recording. I realised after the weekend, [when my] fiancé was asking about it, and I [told her]: we just drank too much coffee, too much beer, and ate shit, that it was like a boys’ weekend. It was like going to a cottage. It was being a weekend warrior, and I used to really look down my nose at people that did it like that. [I thought] If you’re not doing it for a living, you’re not doing it. But for the first time, I had this feeling that maybe making music with your friends is beautiful and meaningful, whether it’s your career and your job, or just jam in a room and no one ever hears it, or anything in-between. Personally, speaking for myself, I think I owe it to myself to completely reconsider and reevaluate my relationship with music, how much I want that to be attached to my livelihood, and how much I want that to be attached to the music business, which has changed a lot from when we were starting in 2006. And I wanna be open to any answer. And if that answer is: I’m getting back in the van, I’m gonna bust my ass touring 8 months a year, then great. But if my answer is: I’ll play the guitar on Saturdays when I have time, then that’s great too. And I don’t wanna assume anything. But I do hope that I keep my music and people hear it, because what could possibly be better than that.