INTERVIEW – KID CONGO POWERS, April 2024

INTERVIEW – KID CONGO POWERS, April 2024
By Shane Pinnegar

Chief Pink Monkey Bird himself, Kid Congo Powers, kicks off his Australian tour tomorrow night in support of their great new album That Delicious Vice, the title of which came from a tangential translation into Spanish of the title of his 2022 memoir Some New Kind Of Kick – itself named after a song by The Cramps, who Kid played with from 1980 to 1983.

That was after forming The Gun Club with Jeffrey Lee Pierce, who he rejoined in the mid-80’s, before going on to a spell with Nick Cave’s The Bad Seeds, then again reuniting with Pierce until The Gun Club’s dissolution in 1996. The Pink Monkey Birds formed in 1997, and their latest offering is their sixth studio album.

Thursday 18 April Corner Hotel, Melbourne VIC
Friday 19 April Theatre Royal, Castlemaine VIC
Saturday 20 April Lion Arts Factory, Adelaide SA
Sunday 21 April Rosemount Hotel, Perth WA
Wednesday 24 April Republic Bar, Hobart TAS
Thursday 25 April Oxford Art Factory, Sydney NSW
Saturday 27 April The Zoo, Brisbane QLD

Hello how are you doing?

I’m doing very well. Thank you so much for your time today. It’s good to talk with you again.

Ah. Likewise. Likewise.

We last spoke – well, firstly, Happy Birthday for a few weeks ago…

Thank you.

We last spoke just before your birthday in 2018. It was gonna be a bit low key for you, you said, but you were planning something big for your 60th the following year –

Wow, so much younger.

Yes! – so, how did the big Sixtieth go?

Yeah, well, the Sixtieths went well. I did have a big bash – I had several of them. I had a [Washington] DC party and we played that, and then I had two New York parties that I played. I played at one and then one a bunch of my old band members of different ilks of New York bands came and serenaded me with some songs, and it was fun, so that was good. And then I had one at home.

How fantastic.

But yeah, I just turned 65 so…

Yeah. And you were playing, I believe, on the night.

I did. I did play with a new project I’m working on with Alice Bag who actually sings on the new Pink Monkey Birds record.

She certainly does. I got the album yesterday and I had a couple listens and it’s amazing. I love it. The thing that struck me the most about it was the sparseness of the sound, but –

Ah, thanks so much. Thanks so much.

– but even with all that space in there, it’s so full as well. It’s totally engaging. Is it harder sometimes to know what not to play?

That’s not hard at all for us, you know [chuckles]. And also, I really think sometimes the music I make seems sometimes to be a product of my environment, and I’m living in the desert now – in the Arizona desert. Although in the city of Tucson, it’s very small city, but it’s surrounded by very much vastness, and mountains and big sky – all the things I was missing living in the East Coast of America and in New York and DC. And so yeah, I think that creeps into the music and also the fact that we went from a four piece down to a three piece, so that also created more space, you know, more space in the music.

 

Is that the primary change in the dynamics with the lineup change?

Yeah, I think that is? Yeah. It had a lot to do with it. I mean, our bass player left the band year a year and a half ago, so we had the decision whether to go on as, you know, get a replacement or to just make a record as a three piece, which we had done before – we had played as a three piece a few times when the bass player couldn’t make it, you know, in a 15 year span. Whatever circumstances dictated, we had to play as a three piece. But yeah, you know, we like the dynamic and I think we used it well to our advantage.

Absolutely, yeah. It sounds great. I’m really looking forward to hearing the new songs live on Sunday night in Perth. Are you in Australia yet? You must be, the tour starts in 2 days…

Yeah, I’m in Melbourne. And actually, we ARE having a bass player on this tour – and it is Mick Harvey of The Bad Seeds who… in my time in The Bad Seeds in the late 80’s, you know, we played together. We actually – besides guest spots here and there – we’ve not played together in a band since that time. So, it’s really cool, I’m excited.

Well, I was going to ask later on if you would let that slip, who was going to be the mystery guest we’d been teased about, because you’ve been keeping your cards quite close to your chest on that one. That’s very exciting indeed.

Yes. Yeah.

The guitar sound on the album – all that twang and that surf sound, it’s got a very cinematic feel. Who do you cite as your prime influences as a guitarist?

Yeah. Well, I mean, obviously people like Link Wray, of course.

Duane Eddy?

Yeah, you’ll hear Duane Eddy. And a lot of that twang is Mark, the lead guitarist, and he has all of those influences, and again, you know, because we have been recording also in Tucson in the desert, I think a lot of the time the band shows up with music that’s gonna reflect that. “Oh, let’s make some desert music.” We’ve always done lots of instrumentals on our records, every record has instrumentals on them. So, it’s not an unusual thing, but I like doing those ‘cos you can, without words, paint a picture and evoke a feeling. I like the feeling of vastness, the feeling of space.

And you know, I’m a big fan also of people like The Cramps – they influence me a lot, still, even though I have played with The Cramps in my time. But I was a fan of them before I joined the band, you know, like I really love the sound of their first EP, Gravest Hits, [which] was produced by Alex Chilton in Memphis at the Sun Studios. And that has an incredible vastness and incredible sounding guitars of Poison Ivy – and that’s somewhat of a Holy Grail of sound that I sometimes aspire to.

Nice. Back in the olden days, the thought of somebody playing rock’n’roll into their 50s or 60s was considered kind of crazy. How has your touring regime changed as you’ve got older?

Try to get more sleep. [laughs] You know, it’s changed, just trying to be more sensible. Not as long hauls on the tour. I have a definite limit of time, of each leg is going to take. And, just not a lot different really, you know.

Now that the drugs and alcohol are gone from my regime, that gives you a leg up. But you know, we are a live band. We love performing live. I love performing live. It’s my favourite part of the whole package of things that we do, you know, with recording and making film clips and making artwork and so forth and costumes… the performance is the best part for me and the most gratifying. It’s where, you know, I can’t seem to live without it.

Actually, I was talking to Mick the other day about it. You know how some people retire from music? And I’m like, how could you possibly do that? Anytime I’ve made myself do an enforced – errr – ‘fast’ of not doing music, I just get depressed, you know? That’s what happens – it’s like ‘I’m going to rest, I’m not going to do music’ and then I just end up depressed. And the only thing that makes me happy again is playing music again. So that tells me I will be going till I drop.

You read about people joining bands and all that sort of stuff because they want the excess. Whereas surely that should be the recreational sideline rather than the focus.

Exactly. So yeah, the idea is in the creation and actually the communication with people, you know, whether it be just through music or whether it be through words or the amazing exchange you get when you perform live with an audience and yourself. It’s huge. It’s pretty potent stuff. You just start flying when you start playing.

You mentioned Alice Bag earlier on. You’ve known her for decades and decades. It seems almost strange that you’ve only just started collaborating recently – and now you’ve got so much different stuff going on as well. She’s on your album, you’re doing this other project with her…

Mmm. It’s just the time. You know, we both are busy people, but also, you know, we knew each other back in the day. We were teenagers at that time. And she had a very successful group at that time, The Bags, they were one of the forefront of the L.A. punk bands that were playing, and I got busy. I did lots of things, and we lost touch. And then she actually wrote a memoir that came out around 10 years ago called Violence Girl. And I read that and it was… I really identified [with it] that it was really an incredible story she has. And I found out a lot of things about her I didn’t know. And so she was coming on a book tour through DC, and I just reach out to her and, you know, then we reconnected and said we’ve got to do something. And then ten years later, we finally started doing something! Circumstances just have to dictate how that happens.

Yeah, right. Is there a danger when you know someone for so long and respect each other and they’re a good friend, that when you do start working together it might not work out or even worse, turn the friendship sour?

Yeah, well, if there’s no risk, there’s no reason really, for me, you know? And there is that risk. But what are you going to do? Not do it because you’re afraid to do it? No, that’s not the way. That that is not our punk way that we do things, you know! [chuckles]

No, I do subscribe to a very certain ethos of that time, and that was our ticket to free expression and free speech and free reign to do whatever we want in music. And luckily I’ve been able to do as damn well as I pleased this whole time in music. And that to me is the greatest success and same for her. You know, she dropped out of music for a while and then she started making songs again, making music again, and that’s how we ended up together. She ended up on the same record label I’m on – In The Red Records – and that kind of introduced us also back into each other’s lives as label mates and becoming aware that we were both doing things.

You’ve such a storied history with a career of jumping from band to band, a restless history some might say. When you started the Pink Monkey Birds was it always planned to have longevity or was it just going to be a short-term thing until the next big thing came along?

It was a short-term thing till the next thing came along… but also it was actually, kind of necessity was the mother of invention with that because it all started because I just didn’t have anything else to do. There was no other thing going on and actually I was booking a club in New York called Tonic. It was a run by John Zorn, the avant garde musician, and it was a very artist run venue. They would have one person for a month of Sundays being the [talent] booker, you know.

And so I had a month of Sundays and it was around Christmas time, and there was one weekend there was like no-one could do it. You know, I’ve had all these great people come and play and then no-one could do it. I couldn’t find any act at all. So I was like, well, I guess I’m gonna have to put something together to do this, and that kind of started it, really, you know?

The Pink Monkey Birds started in very slowly and I very much had to learn in public what to do – I was the guitar player in bands for so long, and I quickly realised that nobody wants to hear the guitar player sing! Yeah, not even if you’re in The Rolling Stones or anything – they don’t want to hear it. Yeah, those egotistical guitar players always want to be the star! [chuckles]

So, I set about really trying to find my voice. It was a lot of learning in public, how to present my voice and also to establish it because there’s a lot of expectations like – oh, he doesn’t sing like Jeffrey Lee Pierce or like Nick Cave or like Lux Interior! You know, he can’t sing… I just had to kind of go through that whole stage of convincing people that there was another kind of voice that could come into this kind of music, and so it just took time. And I was really ready for the long learning curve of that to happen, and I think that also has a lot to do with the longevity of the band – that there was no one waiting for that to happen, you know, but once it happened, people were glad for it. Very, very happy for it.

Yeah, sure. Happy accident.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It was a plan, but… it was a long-term plan.

Yeah, cool. All right, we’re almost out of time. Very quickly, the album cover for That Delicious Vice – How did that come from a high school project of yours?

Well, in the early 70’s in school I was in art class and we were doing lino cuts – you know, linoleum cuts and stamps. And I was a Ziggy Stardust obsessed David Bowie fan. And so of course my design was all lightning bolts and stars and glam rock imagery. I actually found this when my mother passed away, I found a box of my high school things in her garage and that was in there.

So, for a minute I thought, well, we’ll just use this for the album cover – because I do take a lot of stories from my memoir [Some New Kind Of Kick, Hachette Books, 2022] and use a lot of that as springboards for lyrics [on the new album]. And so I thought, you know, why don’t we have this adolescent’s-looking, comic book-looking cover. So my partner, Ryan Hill, the artist, he made that happen in a good way – it looks just like it.

Fantastic. I love that. Alright, I’ve kept you a little bit too long already, my friend. Thankyou very much for your time – can’t wait for the Sunday show in Perth, it’s going to be great.

Oh, thank you. Ohh, we’ll have fun. We’ll have a blast.

Category: Interviews