Interview with The Hives
Monotonous in Colour, but Never in Sound - For 15 years, these figureheads of the garage rock revival have delivered to you several of your new favourite songs, from a few of your new favourite albums, securing their place in your heart as Your New Favourite Band. Reportedly founded by the never-spotted Randy Fitzsimmons, songwriter and ghost-member of the band, by 5 incendiary letters sent to them respectively, speculation was always inevitable - but does not remain the most exciting element of the band; for any fan, this mantle goes to their music. Outline catch up with Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist, The Hives’ lead vocalist, ahead of their Norwich gig to tell us more about the band. So here it is, in Black and White…
There aren’t many bands in today’s climate that stay together, but in your 15th year, what do you think it is that has kept you working together?
Well I think that in the first five years, it was a lack of anyone else to play with in our home town!. Basically, we were the five people in our area that were interested in playing music, so there was really no way we could hire anyone or get someone else into the band. The band very quickly developed a stronger identity than we had individually, y’know, so it always felt important for us to go on. Also, we enjoy each others company; sure we fight, but at the heart of it, they are all people I have known for 15 years and we have a lot in common.
You must have played an innumerable amount of shows in the past 15 years – how do you keep that element of it fresh?
Writing new songs is the best way of keeping it fresh! I mean, touring can sometimes be tedious, like with the last record we toured, I feel like we were more sick of it, but this time, with this record, all the tours have been a lot of fun. We kind of rediscovered how fun it can be to just travel around the world and see new faces and play music to some new people – and play music to the old faces of course. We’ve just got home from a great US tour, where we, for the first time, didn’t spend our days off in some god-forsaken shit town with nothing to do except go to a little movie theatre. This time we tried to have days off in better places; we had a day of skiing in the Rocky Mountains and just discovered that it was possible to do other things.
Do you find that the content of your songs is different now that you’re older?
I don’t really think about it that much, but yes, they are different now. I mean, all our lyrics used to be about exactly the same thing – about how good we were and how bad everybody else was! For the first two records, that’s pretty much all we wrote about, because that’s all we were interested in. It has evolved a little bit!
Why such an affiliation with Black and White?
We’ve always thought it looked good
