A Barenaked Wonderland
Time: 19.45 2 December 2004
Place: Dressing Room, Shepherds Bush Empire, London, UK

THE INTERVIEW - part two
Previously on a Barenaked Wonderland... Ed proved his multi-talented status by singing and eating mince pies, whilst jangling a sleighbell wreath... Kevin proved that rubber duckies really can('t) fly... Steve picked the one and only decent present... and we left our favourite drummer with a humping dog hanging from his leg... onward!

Jim: I’m going to open my present.
Nic: Unfortunately Jim, I’m afraid you got the worst of a bad lot!
[Jim opens his present]
Ed: [laughing] A spurting cock-shaped shower sponge!
Nic: It was supposed to be a microphone! Imagine my horror when it arrived!
Jim: Oh you know what goes on in there. [holding sponge upside down] Touring musician [right way up] Studio musician!
Steve: This is for the porn star showering
Jim: They sing in the shower.
Ed: I have to go intro Boothby momentarily.

Steve: I’ll grab your last couple of questions if you like, as they’re all disappearing. We were talking about the TV show.
Nic: Do you want us to tell people about that? Or is it still early days and you’d rather we waited?
Steve: If it works... we’re shooting the pilot in January. Then the Fox network decides if they’ll take up the pilot and we’ll know if it’s being made into a series.
Nic: So when will the pilot be shown?
Steve: It probably won’t be unless they take it up. What we’re shooting won’t be aired other than to test audiences and to Fox.
Jim: We’re trying to get into the test audience showings, to try and boost the laughter!
Nic: Get all your family and friends in there! Have you filmed any of it yet?
Steve: No. Well, we’ve actually filmed a little bit of it at the Macy’s parade.

Shaun: I did hear you were thinking of doing a kids’ album?
Jim: Yeah, but not next. Our manager wants us to do it next but…
Nic: Is that down to demand from all of your kids?! Congratulations on the new baby, Jim.
Jim: Thanks. You know we’re surrounded by kids a lot now, so we’re influenced by them, but it was mostly our managers who thought that it would be a good idea. I think we’ll definitely be into that but not yet. It’s a challenging perspective to write for kids without being condescending.

[Boothby Graffoe, the comedian/singer who supported BNL on this UK tour (brilliantly, by the way!), pops his head round the door. Steve wishes him luck]
Steve: Did you see Boothby at the beginning of the shows yet?
Nic: Yes, at the Leeds show. I really liked having the comedy and singing as support.
Shaun: It’s a fantastic idea!
Steve: It engages the audience more than some indie band that no one cares about.
Nic: And more people seem to turn up for the support as well.
Jim: Rather than stand in the hallway.

Jim: I think with the children’s album, a sort of non-thematic album should be next. We just did a Christmas album, so to do another concept record might not be the best. We want to kind of keep our songs as they come.
Steve: We have a lot of songs written already.
Shaun: You’re talking about doing an album next year.
Steve: Yeah, I think we’d start looking at at least doing the writing in the spring. It depends what happens with the TV show. The aim would be to have one out a year from now more or less.
Shaun: And have you got any plans to come back here again.
Nic: Cos we’re so greedy!
Steve: I think we’d like to come back and do some festivals.
Nic: It’s a while since you did any festivals isn’t it?
Steve: Exactly. Plus the reason for coming back this time was to keep it fresh enough to do the festivals.

Shaun: Do you have any input into how things are publicised over here?
Steve: Not enough. Because I mean, I think in order to save money this time, they just haven’t done a great job.
Shaun: That’s self-defeating
Steve: Yeah, I think so.
Jim: I think for us the one thing we do have control over is the live shows and spreading our music that way. It seems like it’s so hard to control the media and we’ve never been successful at that over here. I feel just by coming back more frequently, that’s something that would help. And not rely too much on the press or stuff.
Steve: Especially with the way they publicised tonight’s show. Tomorrow sold out fairly quickly, and then the way they’ve got this one tonight and then the way they’ve got this one advertised tonight... a lot of people just didn’t know there was a second night.

Nic: Well, tonight’s show wasn’t definitely on sale until about, 10 days or so before you came over. So nobody was even sure the show was happening.
Jim: Really?
Steve: There’s a lot of work to be done... We’re at a point now, because we don’t have Warner Brothers behind us, that we’re hiring individual people for different sales and marketing and all that kind of stuff and it’s hard, for us at least, to feel like we’re on top of that.
Shaun: So this thing about Warner then… it’s Reprise isn’t it?
Steve: Right. Reprise was our label in America and Warner’s the parent company, so now here in the UK we’re nothing to do with any of those companies. In North America they’re still distributing our stuff, so they still doing the sales to retail. That’s basically the extent of our relationship right now. Except for the fact that they still own all of our back catalogue, so there’s still some ongoing dealings.
It’s certainly not an acrimonious relationship with them. Here we never got on with them all that well, but in North America they built us up to the level we got to.
But the whole business has just changed so much, it just doesn’t seem like the right time to be with a major label. We’re lucky enough to be able to afford to make our own records, so that’s the main thing about being with a major label – they’ll fund recording. Well if we can do that ourselves and pay people for publicity and radio plugging or whatever else, as the work's done rather than just getting a small royalty and having a label decide whether or not they’re actually going to do that work.
Nic: But it puts a lot of those decisions back on to you.
Steve: We can say, this person’s not doing a good job then we’ll hire somebody else to do it. Or we can say, you know what? we’re not going to spend any money on videos. That kind of thing. That was always decided by the label before.
Nic: So are you pleased to have that kind of control back?
Jim: Yes. It’s very liberating.
Steve: We were mentioning the online presence. It’ll allow us to do a lot more online stuff, we’ll be able to make much more stuff available in different ways.
Jim: Recently I’ve made these little movies and there’s been some trouble putting them on the site. Warner’s been stalling for some reason. But that’s something we’re wanting to put on - these small home movies.

Shaun: Steve, everyone’s been saying that your voice is on top form on this tour. Even better than it was in the summer
Steve: That’s nice. In the summer I felt I was at my peak. I’ve felt a little bit out of shape on this tour, just because I’ve had a few months of not doing the running around that I do on tour and the sound at some of these gigs has been difficult.
Nic: Well I was blown away at Leeds.
Steve: That’s really nice. Thanks. The summer tour I really felt that my singing was at its peak. The holiday material has less opportunity to sort of blow, there aren’t as many big voice songs for me, but they’re fun to sing. And they have a lot of nice opportunities for fun harmony singing too.
Nic: This album reminds me quite a lot of going back to the fun of Gordon.
Steve: Yeah, it was like that for us making it too.
Nic: Is that because you made it a lot quicker?
Jim: I think the time restraints we had made it a lot simpler and we were sort of happy and relieved just to make a record that sounds close to just the five of us making music. There’s not a lot of overdubs and stuff.
Steve: It’s very close to Born on a Pirate Ship in the sense that it’s fairly stripped down and a lot of live off the floor stuff. Plus it was mixed by Michael Philip Wodewoja, so it’s got some similar sonics that way, but it has the playfulness of the early stuff. It doesn’t have the overdubs that Gordon had. One of the great things about making Gordon was we were just learning and we’d be like “Hey, let’s try this, let’s try this” but that album still has a clarity to it, and this one has a clarity as well.
Jim: Yeah. It was really fun doing it.
Nic: It does come across on the album – like Steve cracking up on Jingle Bells.
Steve: Yes. Well on other albums we’d have fixed that but that’s always the stuff we laugh at.

Nic: I do need to know what you did to Sarah McLachlan. Did you put a bucket on her head at the end of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen to shut her up? What happened there then?!
Steve laughing: Well, if you know the original version it kind of ends a bit messy. So we just thought it’d be funnier if it she just went, whatever it is, “God rest ye mer…. Duhduhduh duhduhduhduh”. Like we just pulled the plug. We intended to re-record that with Sarah and then it didn’t happen. So that was our little joke for ourselves about the fact that it didn’t happen. I think also if we had just put out a new version, people who liked the original might have been pissed off.
Nic: It’s gorgeous. I bought the album when it came out in October and I just couldn’t listen to it – I can’t bear to do Christmas stuff that early! But this week since Leeds, it’s been on constantly and I’m feeling really Christmassy now!
Steve: Since May, my kids won’t stop – they’ve had Jingle Bells on continuous loop!

Shaun: Did you think about putting out a Christmas single or is the American chart just not built for that?
Steve: For American radio we put out a sampler of four songs. Radio stations are kind of picking and choosing. But there are a lot of radio stations that know us that play exclusively Christmas songs from American Thanksgiving till Christmas. And I think it’s probably part of Nettwerk’s plan as well, where they realise that there’s a point in time when playlists just get dropped and there’s one or two in every market that play exclusively Christmas content and they’re constantly looking for stuff. Especially new stuff. I think the sampler has Elf, Jingle Bells, Do they know it’s Christmas, and God rest ye merry gentlemen.
Shaun: You did Radio 5 this afternoon. And played Elf’s Lament?
Steve: Yes.
Nic: I heard it while I was in the car.
Steve: How’d it sound? Did it sound alright? Could you hear the singing?
Nic: Yeah, it sounded great.
Shaun: The drawback with that particular station is that it’s medium wave, so it’s always going to sound a bit tinny, it doesn’t matter what you do. Over here we have a tradition of Christmas singles and Elf would have been perfect for that. It could have pushed you back up there.
Steve: Or would they ever have actually added the stuff? You know they were pushing Elf’s Lament for playlists and I think after conversations, decided they weren’t going to add it... they already had Michael Buble’s Christmas song out too.
Nic: Your Band Aid song is way better than the new one.
Steve: I haven’t heard it.
Nic: There's actually some feeling in yours. The new one is just a bit… blah.
Jim: In a way, it’s more to do with the gesture. I don’t know how they would have pulled it off in an elegant way.
Shaun: Do you have to pay royalties to use that song?
Steve: Yeah. We pay mechanical royalties to the songwriters and we would pay whatever songwriters wrote the song, and then we could still make royalties off the single or off the sale of the record. We’re just donating a proportion.

The interview came to an end pretty much at this point as it was getting close to showtime. Once again Steve, Ed, Jim, Kevin and Tyler, plus Fin and Pierre Troublay, all treated us very well and were, without exception friendly, relaxed and very funny. A big, big thank you to the band and their management for letting us have such good access and for answering all our questions without any hesitation.

Fin

Did you see what I did there? Heh.

Actually, it's a bit of a lie - there are some 'hidden extras' if you click right here.

©2004 Copyright Nic Blackmore and Shaun Greening