The Kills’ Jamie Hince talks infections and making the UK/US duo’s new album Ash and Ice
AFTER nearly losing his finger from an infection, cooler than thou frontman Jamie Hince made The Kills’ new album, Ash and Ice.
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Bob Marley was taken from us too soon. The high priest of reggae ignored a melanoma on his foot, refused to have it amputated and died age 36 in 1981. Craggy, charismatic 47-year-old Jamie Hince of cooler than thou UK/American dirty guitar duo, The Kills, ignored a deep infection he had in his left middle finger after slamming it in a car door in 2013.
“I couldn’t sleep, it went all yellow. Then it went red and spongy,” Hince doth wince. Not good for a guitarist. “I went into surgery and was told I was about 18 hours from losing it.”
Once fixed, he pulled the proverbial finger out and set about making The Kills’ fifth album, Ash and Ice. It follows their unstoppable run of gritty, sex-peppered, whiskey-soaked albums since Keep On Your Mean Side (2003), No Wow (2005), Midnight Boom (2008) and Blood Pressures (2011). Hince set off, solo, on a 6000 mile journey on the Trans-Siberian Express, crossing seven time zones, to write music and lyrics he could bring to Alison Mosshart, the plucky, fierce singer in The Kills. She’s his soulmate and tug of war partner on stage.
“I really loved being on the train. I kept scurrying back to my carriage and closing the door. I felt really alive, my brain was more awake than it’s been for a long time. I’ve got no problem being on my own, I like the way my imagination works,” he says
“I philosophise a lot, I didn’t really get cabin fever, the only time I realised I was sick of it was when we got to Vostok — it sounds obvious — but the whole point of it was purely the journey, not the destination at all. It made my mind go crazy, I was starved of stimuli, I came up with crazy ideas.”
Siberian Nights was a song born from peering out on a monotonous, bright white tundra. The Kills employ Psycho’s shower scene string stabs over Mosshart’s cruel promise “I can make you come in threes, is that too close for comfort.”
Siberian Nights was “inspired by UFO by ESG, there’s a great little loop in that. It sounded like strings, I recreated it with synths and strings. You remember that first Public Enemy record? Cars would go past and there’d be this thump of low end and there’d be these sirens just going ‘Reoooow, reowwww’, (chuckles) and it sounded amazing, I could hear the Psycho thing in that, so I went with it.”
Necessity is the mother of invention. “I was never the most orthodox guitar player, I was trying to push the rhythm, the production, as far as guitar parts I’m not reinventing the wheel, I like Link Wray, I like The Cramps, I like Wilko Johnson, it’s everything around it, the platform you put it on is what I’m interested in. You can present a Link Wray riff with sub-bass and a glitch drum machine,” he says.
The touring band will see the duo engorge to twice their size; four of them will bring out the boisterous synths and keys malarky prevalent on Ash and Ice.
“There’s a lot more sonic layers involved now. I’ve got a lot of love for dance hall and R&B and dub.”
Ash and Ice’s themes are as bedroom-focused as usual (“We’re double sixing it, night after night” Mosshart sings on opening track Doing It To Death), however this time though they’re coming up not down. Hince grinned his cheeky mug off during a performance of Doing It To Death on The Late Show With Jimmy Fallon two weeks ago, what gives? “A lot of people have been saying I’ve been smiling more on stage. It feels good to be back, to have a record coming out, it’s good to be playing live again, it’s quite an explosion when we’re able to play new songs. I love everything we’ve done but there’s definitely some gang posturing on previous records, some rock’n’roll imagery, theatrical stuff, I like that but this record I feel like I’ve spoken my heart and my mind.
“I’ve gone out of my way, literally, geographically so I could write something that didn’t make me cringe. In that sense I’m really proud of everything I’ve written, it doesn’t seem right snarling while I’m playing, it seems more honest to me,” he says.
Hince is amused by the honesty of Yelp reviewers online too. When pressed about literary influences, the voracious reader keeps coming back to Disgruntled Darren from Devon and his type. “Who are these people? Where do they come from? It’s the most amazing fantasy fiction. They’ll write one star reviews of a shop they’ve been too ...eight months ago,” he says, pealing into disbelieving laughter.
“I start the day off with a pot of coffee and I read all the newspapers online, then I delve around for new music. I don’t have my own Instagram or Twitter, I’d get swallowed up if I had that, I like my life being an adventure, if I got involved in Twitter and all that s--t I wouldn’t have any adventures. It’s popular for a reason, it stimulates people. I’m pretty sure I don’t wanna be stimulated in that way.”
He’s been there, done that. Hince will not be drawn on the subject of his ex-wife Kate Moss, not even whether she was an understanding nurse for his hurt hand. “We don’t talk about that, we talk about music,” he says, dispensing the query straight to the boundary for four runs.
“I don’t have any illegal stories I want to share with you, use your imagination. Let’s just say I’ve done everything,” he says, not being able to resist perpetuating the notion he and his wife can after-party with the best.
The title Ash and Ice came from one such night of square table debauchery.
“I like that image of ashing into ice. A drink in one hand, a spliff in the other. Even though I can’t really smoke spliffs, I’m terrible like that.”
Ash and Ice is less garotting, garage rock, more sub-bass and bleepy mezzanines.
Similarly, local musicians The Drones and Ara Koufax (formerly Naysayer and Gilsun) aimed to crush rock’n’roll and dance music’s expectations, respectively. The Drones wanted to burn down the effigy of Black Sabbath et al while Ara Koufax have been reborn as Melbourne’s new clubbing oligarchs. The analogy has been made that it’s like having an artistic bushfire.
“I like that, I get that. My process was much more torturous, I’m always operating above my ability. I’d get really angry and delete everything, ‘No we’re not doing this song, start again!!’ I wanted to do something different with guitar music, I always have. Rock music was the death of jazz in a way. I know there’s a bunch of people who say jazz isn’t dead but I mean, rock’n’roll you play three chords to 20,000 people, jazz you play 20,000 chords to three people.
“I think rock’n’roll is going the same way, people are being retrospective, every new guitar band I hear sounds like they’re from the ‘80s or the ‘90s, it’s so referential. Why is hip hop and R&B and dance hall and electronic music being experimental in a mainstream way and not rock’n’roll? The Kendrick Lamar record, Future’s record, they’re mainstream but they’re out there.”
Last time the Kills were out here they took on the heat of Splendour In The Grass in 2011, wearing black in the pounding afternoon sun. Bloody rockstars.
“We went there for an extended honeymoon, right after I got married. I love Melbourne, what a great city, I feel like I can live there, we always stay in St Kilda, it’s got quite a European vibe, I saw Blondie play there at the Palais Theatre. God Splendour was hot, there was no sun protection,” he laments.
Mosshart also plays in The Dead Weather with Jack White and a motley bunch. As stated, she is a punisher on stage. “We’ve been playing together for nearly 16 fooking years. So much of our band is about touring. We’ve done thousands of shows, she still blows my mind. We’re about to go on at Coachella and there’s a dust storm and she turns to me and says ‘F--k this, it’s only weather, it’s only the desert.’ In the first song she went crazy, I couldn’t believe the things she was doing, she’s fighting the dust storm and winning, she was beating the weather.”
HEAR: Ash and Ice (Domino) out tomorrow.
SEE: Splendour In The Grass Festival, Byron Bay, July 22 (sold out); The Forum, 154 Flinders St, city, July 23; The Enomre, Sydney, July 26, $78.20, ticketek.com.au
Originally published as The Kills’ Jamie Hince talks infections and making the UK/US duo’s new album Ash and Ice
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