Tea and cake with the Barenaked Ladies
Time: 15:30 06 May 2004
Place: London, UK

THE INTERVIEW
Ed arrived in the room first, and seemed to be dead chuffed (US translation – extremely happy) to see the cake laid out for them. He dug in straight away. Steve came in a minute or two later and was equally happy to see the cake. Obviously, cake-talk took up the first 5 minutes of the interview!

Then it was down to business, via the roundabout route of High Wycombe, Howard Jones and his strange affinity with self-slamming windows...

The UK Tour – 26th April – 6th May 2004
(Barenaked Ladies played the final date of the UK Everything tour the day before the interview happened.)

Are you off home soon?
Steve: Tonight (sounding relieved) This is our last…
Ed: As soon as we finish the tape
Nic: (laughing) We’d best crack on then!
Steve: Well you know, when you’re at the end of the run, you’re just kind of, “OK time to go now”. We were supposed to leave tomorrow morning.
Like, you know if Stephen Duffy had been around, I probably would have gone out with him tonight and hung out, but he’s not, so I just wanna go home.
Ed: I’m ready…. It’s been two long weeks, because we’ve only slept in two hotel rooms the whole time. We’ve been on the bus the rest of the time, so it’s a bit of a grind.
Steve: The time change with phoning home – that makes it harder too.

Did you enjoy the tour overall? Was it good?
Both: It’s been great, fantastic.
Nic: The concerts I’ve been to were just fantastic
Steve: Which ones did you guys come to?
Nic: Hammersmith (London) and Glasgow. I flew up to Glasgow
Steve: Yeah, they were both fairly good
Shaun: I went to Bristol, London and then Birmingham.
Steve: I really enjoyed Birmingham last night
Ed: It was a good show
Steve: I was tired but it was fun tired
Shaun: Steve, you were doing an ad lib about Sainsbury’s and Lou Reed, and you said after that you should have stopped it at “Sainsbury’s plc”, but I disagree - it was all fantastic. I’m glad they made you carry on.
(laughter)
Steve: There’s a point where you just say “OK, am I just Weird Al-ing now?”. When you just start parodising another song and you go, “Hey now I’m just expected to be Weird Al for a verse and a chorus”… but it was fun.
Every night’s had something really fun in it. I really enjoyed Glasgow. I really enjoyed Dublin ‘cos that was our first time playing there.
The hall was good – beautiful venue. Basically the same as, I think, the Royal Court in Liverpool… it’s the same designer, and I think we had around 1000 people.
Ed: It was our first time there and it was good, it was a great show.

Did you get time to look around the city?
Ed: We had a day off the day before and we got to look around – it’s a really nice city. I was walking around and after about 15-20 minutes I thought “I wanna come back here”. It’s a nice pedestrian city . I understand it’s changed a ton in the last 5 or 10 years.
Nic: Yeah, I think they’re pushing the great nightlife/bars – a lot of stag nights happen over there!
Steve: Really? It’s seems like it’s very, uhh, you just don’t expect it. It seems very clean and exciting. You don’t’ have to search to find the culture, it’s right there.
Nic: (Dublin has) had quite a big cash input from the EC, I think.
Ed: Yeah that EC stuff’s no joke, eh?
Steve: No, they weren’t kidding!
Ed: We got there and our money was no good, and our cellphones didn’t work
Nic: It’s a whole other country…
Shaun: Welcome to Ireland!

Did you get to have a look around any of the other cities? Which did you like?
Ed: We had a day off in Glasgow too. (to Steve) You stayed here.
Steve: Yeah
Ed: But I had a great time in Glasgow - I met up with an old friend. Actually a cousin of a good friend of mine, and he had Tyler and I over and we enjoyed his feed of the North American sports network.
We watched a Leafs game till the wee hours of the morning. It’s mostly been a pretty busy tour actually – just show to show to show. Not a lot of spare time.

What kind of things do you enjoy doing in the UK that you wouldn’t get to do in North America?
Steve: Well, driving on the wrong side of the street.
Ed: I do that sometimes in North America too though!!
You know everyone frequents the record shops here for stuff that we’d have to import at home.
Steve: Although it’s easier to get stuff now – there’s nothing that you can’t get here that you can’t get at home by going to Amazon.co.uk.
In some ways it’s why I’m baffled that they put the record out here now, cos anybody that really wanted it already had it. They just bought it when it came out in America.

That wasn’t the band’s decision?
Steve: No. I think (Reprise/Warner) wanted to release it when we were over here to support it. But I think one of the things that’s affected the record business is that people just order it when it’s available, if they know it’s out there.

I get the impression that the crowds you play to over here are smaller than those at the arena tours you do in the US…
Ed: They are a good 8 to 10 inches smaller in general.
Steve: You notice how in some of these older buildings the doorways are lower than in America?
Ed: It doesn’t make sense until you play a show and see how short the people really are over here. We feel like giants.
Steve: (They have) hairy feet.
Ed: Yes. And magical swords.
Steve: You know what I think in some ways they’re kind of levelling out though too. I mean we, it’s hard to gauge size of our popularity over here. Cos on a short tour like this, we played Manchester and not Liverpool, so we get some of the Liverpool crowd coming there.
And here we get fewer people going to all the gigs than we get in America, even though the towns are closer together than they are in America. There we get a lot of people who travel from show to show to show. It’s hard for us to tell how many that is. Probably under a hundred, but still it’s a lot of similar faces.
Shaun: I think the proportion of people following you here is probably the same. There is a fair number of people who do follow you and they love every minute of it – and I’m one of them!
Steve: I think it’s great. It’s just different. I think it’s hard for us to gauge how more or less popular we are here versus there. I think there was a point in time when it was more tangible, but in the US we’re more public figures than we are here.
Ed: We’re a lot more mainstream there than we are here. A large part of the audience here has really sought us out. It’s more of a word-of-mouth thing here, whereas you can’t help but know us in North America.
I think here it’s a lot more of maybe an astute music listening crowd, where they’ve sought out the band because they care and they really want to be there. We have tons of amazing fans in North America too, but we’ve been so exposed there that it’s easier to just come by us so we get a lot more casual fans.
Steve: Which is great and hopefully you win them over across the course of the show. But they’re there more for the event cos it’s the thing to do in town that night. We get less of that over here.

Does it make a difference to the atmosphere of the show? Is there a real difference between the audiences?
Ed: I think we approach them exactly the same way.
Steve: The venues are different and it’s usually a general admission floor here, which makes a difference to the vibe of the show.
Shaun: You don’t bring any of the big stage stuff over here.
Steve: Right. Mostly the places are just too small to set it up that way. And the stage sizes vary too much. And it’s expensive.
I think if there was a point where we weren’t taking a financial bath every time we came over here, we would consider doing more of that. I think when we were doing the Stunt show at Wembley, which was the biggest show we ever did over here, we brought more production for that show. But otherwise it’s difficult to do.
Have you seen any American shows?
Shaun: I saw a couple of Peepshows – and they were fantastic.
Steve: They were more like this…
Ed: More like what we do here, yeah.
Steve: But the Everything tour had the shopping cart dance and a lot of video gags that we couldn’t do here. And more elaborate stage sets…
Ed: Elaborate stage sets, but they get the same show, PLUS all those other things. I don’t’ think we compromise and make it into a colder meaner show where it’s about the production. I think the production just adds to our show.
Steve: I think we’ve gotten better at that too. I think we stopped trying to do a stock show and make it as relaxed as the shows you saw on this tour, with bigger production values.
And in bigger venues you need that because that’s what helps bring people at the back into the stage set. If you have a large set-up you take advantage of that.

It seems you’ve changed things now to be much more inclusive of your older songs.
Ed: The Peepshow tour did that to us. We realised we had all this body of work that we never play and people like to hear it. And the reason we were successful in the first place was because people like to hear that stuff. And I think we had gravitated to become a little more hits-addicted and applause addicted – more to that original burst of applause when you start to play something that’s recognisable…
You know playing at Manchester and doing Asleep at the Wheel was one of the best reactions of the whole night. So we’ve received a lot of encouragement from the audiences to stray from the hits and play deep into the records. It’s rewarding for us.
Steve: We did the bluegrass version of One Week on the Peepshow tour. It started as a joke I think in rehearsal and we just said, let’s do it like that.
We started the Everything tour with the full band version, but we’d done the chicken dance at the end for so many years that we felt that people who’d seen that before would just feel like they’d seen it too many times. So let’s just do the song straight and move on, and we did that a couple of times and it just fell flat… (Ed agrees). It felt like – nothing.
Our sound man Robert, who’s, ummm, almost always right, had said to us “Don’t do the bluegrass version on this tour – you’ve got to play the hit. People will expect to hear it on an arena tour.” And people kept saying to us, “You know arena crowds are a dumber crowd; they come for a bigger rush”.
I think what they mean is, it’s a larger crowd than you would attract from your core audience. The Peepshow attracted the core audience but this is attracting more of a larger radio audience. But you know what, I think if they’re coming to see Barenaked Ladies, they’re coming to be surprised anyway, and we pulled the bluegrass One Week out for that, and we just haven’t looked back since that point. It’s been fun for them and for us.
Ed: I think… the song is a hit and it’s “hitness” has it’s own identity that is kind of separate from the song. And I think this new approach to it gets back to the song.
Steve: It reminds people that we still mean it.
Ed: Yeah. It’s us enjoying it and it’s not about the Number One-ness of the song.

...Click to go to Part Two...