BLACK AND BLUE

The Kills make music that’s intense, personal, raw, and dangerous. Which is just another way of describing real punk rock
~ By NATALIE NICHOLS ~

Photo by Steve Appleford
Duo-lity: Alison Mosshart (VV) and Jamie Hince (Hotel)

Two ecstatic revelers face each other across a single microphone, howling through the inches as though they were miles. One is male, the other is female. Both have dark hair – one short, one long. They are pale and wield guitars. Filling up a private void with their voices and exquisite noise, they create a maelstrom as old as time and as young as yesterday. These are the Kills, and they are punk as fuck.

Two exhausted travelers face each other across a kitchen table. One is coming, the other is going. Both have long black hair showing roots – one brown, the other silver. One drinks coffee and smokes endless menthol lights, methodically stubbing out each butt in a heavy glass ashtray. The other sips water and nervously eyes the clock.
I am the traveler who is going. This is my last night in London. Alison Mosshart, the half of the Kills known as VV, is the traveler who is coming. The Florida-born singer-guitarist and her bandmate/roommate, British guitarist-vocalist/drummer Jamie Hince (a.k.a. Hotel), have a little time off before again hitting the road, starting a U.K. tour on October 19. But for now – for one hour in this cavernous, chilly space strewn with boxes, instrument cases, piles of stuff, and the occasional piece of furniture – Mosshart and I are talking about punk.
Before we do that, she notes that the absent Hince had to go tend to his girlfriend or something, killing a whole line of questioning I hadn’t really wanted to get into, anyway. Ironically, this information also somewhat ruins a mystery I’d wanted to preserve by not asking those questions, but what can you do?
That is, a lot of people speculate that the sexual energy the Kills create on stage stems from a romantic relationship. But when Hince, 28, and Mosshart, 26, got together four years ago, they were driven by something more all-encompassing.
“The first thing we said to each other, before we played music together, was just, ‘We don’t want a band in our lives; we want our lives to be a band, every element of it,’” Mosshart recalls. They didn’t fall in love, but they were quite taken by romantic notions of creativity, specifically the Velvet Underground’s fusion of avant-garde art, out-there rock, and offbeat community. Hince met Mosshart when she was touring the U.K. with Discount, a punk band she’d cofounded in junior high. Soon they were exchanging cassettes across the Atlantic – an unsatisfying method of collaboration, to say the least. So Mosshart took the leap and flew to London, eventually moving in with Hince as they immersed themselves in an artistic world of two.
“We never found the right people to do it with [before], absolutely giving up everything else and kind of making their lives a disaster,” she says. “But I think in every way it is worth it.”
A romantic notion indeed, but the Kills’ erotically charged live show is more about the natural amplification of their intense creative partnership. A year after their 2002 debut EP, Black Rooster, the duo offered up the full-length Rough Trade debut Keep on Your Mean Side, a stark blend of sneering vox and snarling guitars too easily lumped with the latest garage-rock revival acts, its punk-blues voodoo even more glibly equated with that other boy-girl duo, the White Stripes. But the songs on Mean Side and this year’s No Wow (Rough Trade/RCA) aren’t the result of neat, music-biz-driven formulas; they’re living things that scratch into your brain like an invading species, the spawn of obsessive thoughts and even more obsessive actions. Yet, they are surprisingly varied: sometimes raw like early Mudhoney, other times as ethereal as the poppier Velvet Underground tunes, still other times as feral/folky as vintage PJ Harvey.
Mosshart is a big fan of Harvey, as well as the VU, but she’s not well-versed in musical history. Hince, on the other hand, “knows everything – every band, every record,” she says. In fact, for a couple of years she didn’t even know the name of the first punk band she fell for. At age 11, she was captivated by Fugazi, which she heard on a mixtape some neighborhood skate kids played all the time. But she was about 13 when she finally found out who these politically charged, D.C.-based DIY-ers were. (Later she would discover Patti Smith, the VU, and other favorites.)
“It just sounded good,” she says of Fugazi. “It was the energy. I’d always wanted to see them, but when I was 14, I started touring with [Discount], and so every time they’d come anywhere near, I’d be on the other side of the planet.” At 16, she was vacationing with her parents in Montreal, where Fugazi was playing. “It was the most mind-blowing thing I’d ever seen in my life,” she says. “There was so much energy, so much behind it; it was just so intelligent, and really artistic.”
However, Mosshart is dubious that the Kills are punk. “Currently, it’s really hard for me to say what this is,” she muses. “In 20 years’ time, when people say, ‘This is what you were,’ that might be interesting to me, but I can’t really get along with it now.” Besides, she associates punk with a moment in time. “Punk to me was an epoch; it was a way of being outside of society completely.” Nowadays, she feels that’s not an option. “I meet a lot of bands, a lot of cool kids with loads of ideas, [but] the decisions they make aren’t punk – it’s a career. Everything’s too modern, there’s too much information, there’s too much everything. People can’t be secretive.”
 
> Kissy Kissy <
 
With frenetic grace, Hotel lays down guitar lines that let VV tap the source – a dark place full of sexual need and heartbreak, brain-frying experiences, and contempt for the world. Her hair flies every which way; chains dangle from her wrist and hips. And her wild-beast eyes flash, sometimes narrowing to predatory slits, other times widening to take in all the puny humanity at her command.
 
Secrets mean a lot to Mosshart. She was the type of kid who “always had my head down, doing stuff,” she says, affecting a pose of being bent over a project, working away. “I really just enjoyed being by myself, and it wasn’t a pouting thing. I loved locks, I loved drawers, I liked hiding things, I liked being really secretive. I liked things like time capsules, digging holes in the ground and putting stuff in them. I don’t know where that comes from; my parents are quite outgoing.”
In Hince, she found a kindred solitary soul. “One of the rules is that nobody comes and visits [in the studio],” she says. “We can’t work when someone else is there.” But the process is far from rigid. “Things come out of nowhere,” she says. “We tend to write songs in 15 minutes, and usually the ones we like the best, we wrote the quickest. The ones that just come really naturally, half the time they don’t make any sense in your mind until you’re saying them on stage, so those are the ones I like the best.”
Ooo, spontaneity. How very … punk.
“Jamie and I are opposite in that way,” she notes. “He can see song structures, and he can work things out like that. He’s perfect at it. I’m the one who just writes 15 songs in a couple of hours. But they’re all like fits, the same thing over and over for five minutes; I can’t get off of it. I just get obsessed with it, and then stop.”
The Kills’ songs sound like incantations, simple yet loaded with hidden power. It’s in the numb mechanical throb of “Love Is a Deserter,” where Mosshart exhorts “Get the guns out” over and over; and the hypnotic melodicity of “Rodeo Town,” in which she croakily croons “If I’m so evil, why are you satisfied?” These obsessive repetitions lie skittishly atop tunes crafted as interlocking cycles, with each spin propelling the music to another place, familiar and yet different than before.
To Mosshart, performing has that same sort of closed-loop quality. “Being on stage was the first time where I could be anything, I could behave like anything. There’s absolutely this space where someone can’t intrude,” she says. “It was this real freedom thing, a real addicting thing.”
Yet the difference between being on stage in a four-piece band and being part of this naked duo proved terrifying. “Probably our first 20 shows, we didn’t take our eyes off each other,” she says. “It was a total fear thing, because we had spent a year together or something, looking at each other, playing at each other.” So on stage, the locked-in gaze came naturally. “It took a really long time to turn away from each other a little bit,” she says, “and we still need that. We completely rely on each other for everything on stage.”
When they’re headlining club gigs, they can afford to be more introverted, but recent stints opening for Scottish heartthrobs Franz Ferdinand and arty punks Bloc Party provided the time-honored challenge of engaging someone else’s audience.
“The Franz tour was really interesting, because their audience was 15-year-old girls with banners, stuffed animals, and watches that they were looking at. OK, this is a tough crowd,” Mosshart says wryly. “By the end of that tour, I felt 60 feet tall. I’d learned how to cope with an audience of 6,000 15-year-old girls and feel confident, and feel like I was reaching the back of the room.”
Regardless of audience size, however, both VV and Hotel have to be up for it, or the gig will fall short. “That’s what is exciting about it,” Mosshart says. “You know, they’re just like, ‘Two minutes!’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, my god, I can’t do it. I can’t do it. I can’t do it. I can’t do it.’ Then you’re on stage, and you’re like, ‘I can do it.’”
Maybe the fear motivates them, but also, she says, “There is no greater judge than me to him and him to me. It’s a terrible evening if one of us feels bad about it. We are probably up there just trying to impress each other.” (Ooo! Punk!) “That was the way it was when we met. It was just such a, not a competitive relationship, but a really inspiring one where you are just pushing the other person the whole time.”
Still, musically at least, Mosshart feels she learned a lot more from Hince than vice-versa. “He taught me tons of stuff. I don’t know what it is that I taught him.” She reflects for a moment, smoking. “I think that my job is to be, like, ‘We’re gonna do this band, OK? We are.’ He’s like, ‘Umm.’ I’m like, ‘Trust me.’ I was so determined. I just sat in front of him, shaking my head, saying yes.” She demonstrates, peering sincerely into my eyes and shaking her head vigorously. “But almost in a psychotic stalker way, like the way that I approach everything.”
 
> The Good Ones <
 
VV yelps and keens and roars, dancing madly with the mike stand and bouncing around the stage. Leaping onto the monitors with her guitar, she looms above the crowd like Polly Harvey’s 50 Ft. Queenie come to life. She wipes her upper lip and practically bares her fangs. She is going to devour everyone.
 
The proof of the Kills’ authenticity is in their performance; the wiggy photography, offbeat collage, and campy penis drawings in the CD booklets would mean nothing if they didn’t take it to the stage. Each time I’ve seen them, the gig included a climactic bit of symbolic fornication that seemed totally impulsive, but which, I realized the second time, was part of their shtick. Total commitment to dancing along the edge, coupled with an understanding of how to deliver the goods. How very Velvet Underground.
“Every band somehow has been influenced by the Velvet Underground,” Mosshart asserts. “They didn’t sell any records at all. They hardly played for very many years. Yet, everybody is influenced by them in some way, whether they like it or not. That’s the kind of thing that is so inspiring to me.”
She likes that the VU’s music skipped boundaries with impunity. “There wasn’t that genre thing, where it was like, ‘Oh, this song sounds [too different]; we just can’t put it on here.’ That’s what is so cool about it. It’s not boring.”
Being not-boring – or not being bored – is key for Mosshart. The Kills’ own tunes have an element of mystery she herself enjoys. “Every day, I use those songs for whatever it is I need,” she says. “That’s how they’re written. Those are the kinds of songs I really love. I like having that imagination element to it.”
Not surprisingly, Mosshart finds our own times somewhat devoid of imagination. “I always worry that nobody would ever write a chapter, let alone a book, about this decade, because it’s just so plastic,” she says. She hopes the Kills can help change that. “I just want to make a mark,” she says. “I’m not saying I need to be in the Kills for 35 years and run it into the ground. But yeah, somehow do something differently, compared to what’s going on right now, and just try to be the other side of it.”