A few days ago Indiecision featured a track from one of New Zealand’s top new bands, The Mint Chicks. With a new album on its way, and a live act that’ll kick your ass, you can’t afford to miss these guys. Here’s an interview about chainsaws and walking through doors.
1. Tell us about The Mint Chicks. How did the band come about?
We used to tell people we were in a band together at highschool. We would get invited to parties in people’s garages and we’d pretend we had songs when we didn’t. That’s how we learned how to entertain a crowd. If you are making a song up as you go you learn really quickly what works and what doesn’t. We did amazingly well for a band with no songs. One day my brother Kody wrote all these songs on a piano. He’d never really written songs before but they were really good quality. They sounded like the Beatles. He recorded them on my Dad’s computer and then asked me if I wanted to make the recordings into a real band, so I said yes.
Take the jump for the full interview.
2. Your live shows are pretty action packed. I’ve read reports of chainsaws and monkeying around on lighting rigs. Is this a predetermined thing, or something that just happens? Like “Guys, tonight we’ve gotta stage jump from the amp stacks and make sure we’re butt naked.”
It’s the opposite. We’re like recovering alcoholics who say ‘Today I will NOT have a drink!’, only we say ‘This is the show when we will NOT climb the lighting rigs or chop things up with chainsaws’. We try to keep it about the music but then we get carried away at some shows. Having said that, the chainsaw took a tiny bit of pre-meditation, which is, you have to bring it to the show just in case you feel the need to use it.
3. Tell us something about your new album. Can we expect more of the Crazy? sound?
It’s quite different in some ways. With Crazy?Yes! we had something to prove to the New Zealand audience. There had been a tendency to focus on what people thought was an anti-social attitude that we had. In reality we’re very mild people, but it seemed as if we’d been painted as these freaks who would never provide the goods because we were too self-indulgent and crazy etc. etc. We wanted to prove that we weren’t just these nut case no hopers. We wanted to prove that we could provide all of the bells and whistles of a ‘big’ rock band, and we could do it on our own terms. We wanted to prove that it wasn’t that we couldn’t be the biggest band in New Zealand, it’s just that we didn’t feel like it! The next album is less schizophrenic and more raw. I think the songwriting is quite similar though, just a bit improved.
4. You guys are pretty popular in New Zealand. What’re your plans for rest of the world domination?
We’re not interested in domination of any kind, but we try to walk through doors if they open up.
5. New Zealand hasn’t really had much of the mainstream music press spotlight. Why do you think that’s so?
I’m not sure. It’s definitely not due to any lack of cool music, but most of the good music that’s been made or is being made there is ‘independent’, experimental, or otherwise unsigned and unreleased. New Zealand is crushingly isolated and really small, which is probably the main reason. You’ve got to realise that the fact you’ve heard of New Zealand at all is proof we’ve probably had a lot of attention considering how few people there are there. In some ways I think that New Zealanders find it hard to understand the greater world and it’s music industry. I know I find it quite baffling myself. To generalize, most New Zealand musicians I’ve known have typically been the type of person who want to be left alone to make music and have no desire, nor talent for, ‘playing the game’.
6. Top five tracks on your iPod right now (include at least one New Zealand band that’s not Flight of the Conchords).
Just from my ‘top most played’ playlist they are (at this time): ‘Unsolved Mysteries’ by Animal Collective, ‘Miner’ by No Age, ‘Starstruck’ by the Kinks, ‘Not a Substitute’ by Jay Reatard and my NZ pick is ‘Human Weakness’ by The Features.
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