Ready Steady Go Interview
"We wanna be good, we wanna be better than good, we wanna be great. Too many bands are just satisfied with being okay. I'd rather be terrible than mediocre" Fighting talk from Gigolo Aunts singer Dave Gibbs.
Making classic songs is the trademark of the fun loving, music mad, all round nice guys Gigolo Aunts. Essential releases include a tearaway album of classic pop called 'Flippin' Out' and a collection of singles featuring the finest in three minute power pop. The band follow the big hearty footsteps of Big Star, Badfinger, Raspberries and Teenage Fanclub.
Their recording career has been tragically short and sweet in the UK with just a solitary album released on Fire Records.
Ready Steady Go! caught up with the Gigolo Aunts singer Dave Gibbs and Steve Hurley during a rare visit to the UK supporting the Wonder Stuff.
The music of Gigolo Aunts is often solid, often very, very loud and rightly so. Pop songs like this should be noticed. The louder it is, the better. But how do they manage to keep a balance? Why doesn't it go all HEAVY ROCK the louder it gets?
Dave Gibbs: "We can't play softer! As soon as we can we will. There's something about loudness when you're on stage that's exciting. There's exciting stuff that's quiet too. We try to be loud and soft all the time. We saw Jeff Buckley last night and it was great but I couldn't help the fact that after about three songs I just wanted something a little more, everything was so slow, so quiet, so precious. He was perfect, if he'd have sung three songs I would have gone home thinking he was the greatest guy that ever lived. But sometimes you've got to have something more, at least live you do".
Steve Hurley: "We kind of grew up on contrasting things. Like really odd stuff and like some hard rock stuff and I think it sort of over time manifested itself on our sound".
"In America, people who are out to see band are out to have a good time" says Steve talking about the difference between American/British audiences, "Over here it's slightly more serious".
"We have this weird thing when we do interviews, people say, 'you guys are so fun and wacky, you don't take anything seriously', but that's not the case at all" argues Dave. "We try to take everything seriously but we try to make it so that there's definite communication between us and the audience and we wanna break down the barrier and show them, they are absolutely no different than we are. Which is not a very cool thing to do. So we try to involve them as much as possible. Sometimes it works but over here, sometimes when we do that, people don't get it".
Ever modest, Dave says they signed to a tiny indie label in the UK (Fire Records) to enable them to tour and develop, moving at a slower pace than some of their inferior major label contemporaries who wanted the instant attention and megabucks that usually comes with it. The boys are clearly not ready to forsake their art and become pretentious rock stars as Dave explains, "Maybe we'd be more successful if we were different. It's a great thing if you can get up on stage, if you are like a twisted, tormented person. You can get up on stage and you can re-invent yourself and it's a beautiful thing. But for us, it's just not the case at all. On stage we are exactly like the way we are and we intend to stay that way. We couldn't change that much 'cos we've known each other so long".
The Gigolo Aunts are like a "weird family" according to Dave who points out all the band and their parents grew up together, went to the same schools etc and like brothers and sisters they "fight like cat and dog" sometimes!
"We're obsessed with not being phoney and ever starting to do rocker type things. The other three of us would probably slap 'em silly or make a video tape and make them look at it".
Steve lets us in on the Gigolo's secret to song writing.
"A lot of the good ones tend to come along really fast but occasionally there's the one thing that's been hanging around for a long time, maybe a year later, find some way to use it"
"Steve and I both write the songs" offers Dave, "and we both have direct opposite ways of doing it, so hopefully that will be an advantage for us. So if he's dried up for songs, I'll have a whole backlog ready to come out".
Speaking about the lyrical content of their songs Steve says, "I think most everything comes from personal experiences. They're not necessarily about personal experiences but whatever observations come through one of our brains. A lot of them are about characters, about somebody you might see".
One of the songs on the album, 'Gun' offers strong sentiments on society.
"It's more of a commentary song than a protest song" Dave points out.
"It was more of a reaction from what is on the television" says Steve, "It was more about how different companies cram people's fears and was supposed to be about guns or could be one or two different things".
As far as influences go the Gigolo Aunts are music maniacs. A feature in the CD/Magazine Volume (Issue Ten) featured an article listing their all-time top 100 recording concepts. The list was littered with rockers Kiss, Mott The Hoople, Boston and Aerosmith at the lower end of the 'hot' 100 and the Byrds, Teenage Fanclub, Big Star and the Beatles at the top end. The CD included a cover version of Tracy Ullman's 'They Don't Know' and the band turn the quirky, throwaway ditty into a heartrending, melodic pop beast of titantic proporations! No, really!
"We are influenced by anything we think is good. Some of it is modern but a lot of it is older" says Steve, "There is good stuff out there but you've got to search for it"
Steve names his 'older' favourites. Showing impeccable taste, he goes for the Beatles, Beach Boys, Kinks, Big Star, Byrds and Neil Young. Dave goes for his favourite 'new' artists. Like a true Anglophile he plumps for Whiteout, Thrum, Scarce, Dambuilders, Lenny Kravitz ("The band are divided on the Lenny Kravitz issue" he laughs!), Teenage Fanclub, Eugenius, BMX Bandits and millions of fellow fledgling bands from his hometown of Boston.
"We've recently got into dance music, since we've been over here" laughs a half mocking Dave, "We never heard that stuff like the Aphex Twin. But we don't like Orbital".
Like any sane person, the sound of clocks ticking endlessly away over synth licks is not the Gigolo Aunts idea of fun!
"We're going to start our own dance label called Orb-noxious" jokes Steve.
"Some of it's actually pretty good, but I wanna go on record and say, I don't like M People!"
A nation of bored housewifes sigh! Don't ever dare suggest the Gigolo Aunts don't know where the needle hits the groove though. After all they both picked out the Stax boxed set as high as number four in their all time top 100 calling it "essential listening for white boys".
They do have an obvious respect for British bands and they overcame a genuine fear of meeting up with the Bernard Butler era Suede to eventually become firm friends. Dave takes up the story.
"We like Suede a lot. There was this one article that came out in the Melody Maker where we got accused of slagging them which is ridiculous 'cos we'd never heard of them at the time, as they didn't have anything out in the states. They just had one record out over here and so, we could only buy it on import only sadly. We finally heard them on the plane the first time we came over here. I really like that song 'The Drowners' a lot. We got that tour with them and there was so much hype on that tour and we were like, 'Oh, they're gonna be really nasty people' but they were really nice, friendly, watched our sets".
They even went a step further than that when Bernard Butler started playing live with the Aunts showing a mutual admiration.
Gigolo Aunts are mates with a certain Evan "the hunk!" Dando?
"He used to live across the street from the store that I used to worked at and he used to come in and stumble across the street, Juliana Hatfield used to work in the same store" says Dave. "He'd come in have some coffee, smoke and there's no smoking in the store, so he can't smoke so he'd stand outside and look at the records. Nice guy".
What things bug you the most?
"Busy signals drive me up the wall, waiting in lines drives me crazy, people being nasty and people that say, 'Oh I love the rain', when you know that everyone in the whole, wide world hates the rain! I hate rain, I hate getting wet unless I'm in the shower" says Dave.
What do you think of MTV?
"It's a huge influence on TV in America and in Europe. I don't really like either of them. But here, the amount of dance music just drives me up the wall, 'cos I'm a guitar freak. I collect guitars from all over the world. My guitar is like my best friend! And of course with dance music there's just no guitars, so I get really bored with that".
"MTV can be pretty interesting these days everything is really tongue in cheek now, everything is making fun of itself, like Beavis and Butthead going round saying this sucks while showing a video".
Finally, do you find the American sense of humour different from the English?
"It's more physical I think. Less ironic".