The Kills

The friendship between Alison ‘VV’ Mosshart and Jamie ‘Hotel’ Hince is one that intrigues me. A chance meeting led to inspiring exchanges and demo tapes sent across the Atlantic. What was said in the notes sent back and forth to each other intrigues me even more; what did they say? “Hotel – let’s do this thing. I’m coming to England. Let’s become icons of our time. VV x”. Nothing that contrived I suspect, but that’s how it panned out and Outline wants to know how. But first things first; their tour bus driver recently went AWOL while the band were touring in America and he was last reported missing presumed… well, we’ll just have to ask Alison to find out…

Have you found your bus driver yet?No, the bus driver’s still missing; lots of people are looking for him. The only thing that’s come up since the last news story that’s interesting is that he had been moving the bus around between the time he went missing and the time the bus was found – we’d thought he’d just parked it in this alleyway and left it for thirteen days, but apparently two days before the bus was found, it wasn’t there, so I think he got freaked out a bit, dumped the bus and left. Although he left all of his stuff on the bus and he didn’t touch any of our stuff, so he could be dead, he could be in Mexico, he could be anywhere, I don’t know…

Maybe he was inspired by your song M.E.X.I.C.O and headed there?!I don’t think he ever heard us play that! But you know, he did make off with about three thousand dollars, so maybe that was enough reason to never go home again – I’ve no idea! It’s a mystery and I can’t wait to know the end…

When you recorded your first demo tape, it received major label attention, yet you shunned these advances – what were your worries about accepting any of these offers? I wouldn’t call it worries, but it’s pretty obvious to both Jamie and I; we’ve both been playing music our whole lives pretty much – we’ve both played in punk bands and doing things ourselves and the whole politics when we started playing music at that time was that you could do anything yourself. You’d keep anything you did, if you considered it art, away from business, y’know… well not business, but you’d be clever about it. Obviously I was taking what I’d learnt in America, y’know, growing up on DC bands, Dischord bands and stuff and the politics of that and that’s what I believed in at the time and still do, to a greater extent and Jamie did too. It’s like a joke; you’ve recorded four or five songs of something and given it to your friend to burn some CDs for you, then this happens – you have to be a bit wary, I mean, we’re not idiots; we weren’t 15 when this was happening. So yeah, everything about The Kills is about us being able to control everything we do and there being a longevity and us having the chance to become a better band and become better artists, rather than just burning brightly for a while and disintegrating after a month, which is kind of what people give up for a lot of money and I just don’t care about it – it’s not what I’m in this for.

You were both previously in bands of your own; what was the defining moment that caused the disbanding of Discount? I don’t know if there was a defining moment; we were all getting older and our tastes were getting different – I mean, that band started when I was 14, so you change a lot between the ages of 14 and 20 as to what you like and you grow up with your friends at that time and you don’t always have the same ideas six years later, which is kind of what happened – it was a gradual thing really. I think we just parted ways; we toured that whole time and did a bunch of records and I came over to England a lot in that time and met Jamie. Meeting him at that time was quite affraying because he was living in London, this big city, and he was playing the music that really loved and showing me all this new music and stuff and I just thought it’d be fantastic to make music with him, because it was sort of more along my lines of thinking at that point.

You met when Jamie was practising his guitar in the hotel room above you – but how did that lead to you having that important first conversation?I never even approached him about it, we just became friends, y’know and we never even planned on being a band. We were just like this two-person social group that sat around and did art and made films and that’s the kind of thing I do with my friends, so it seemed normal! But you know, we used to sit around and talk about books and play each other records and just talked about what we were in to and we kind of become friends because of what we were in to and I guess because we used to play music all the time… well, he lent me this four-track to take away and that’s kind of what started him having influence over what I was doing, or vice versa. He lent me this four-track when I was still on tour with my other band; he gave me a bunch of cassette tapes and said, “Just fill this up”. At that point I’d never even written a song – I was a singer and I just wrote lyrics to other people’s music, so suddenly I had eight tracks to do something with on a cassette and it was incredible; I don’t think I slept for a month. I wanted to bring something back and impress him because I thought he was the coolest person I’ve ever met! So it was like that – he’d listen to ‘em and comment on ‘em and add stuff and it kind of happened like that; that was how we first started working together.

It’s good you didn’t do the same as your bus driver and just disappear with the four-track… who knows who I’d be interviewing right now! I wouln’t steal anything from Jamie!

I love the idea that you posted each other demo tapes across the Atlantic – would you wait for these tapes in anticipation? Would you ever send each other anything else, little gifts or notes?Yeah, I mean we always wrote letters and put little bits of artwork in there – polaroids and fun stuff so that when he opened the package, he’d be really excited, y’know.

It’s so good receiving letters isn’t it, but it never really happens anymore…Well I write them – I write letters every day. I write loads of postcards and I’m trying to bring this shit back; I’ve never stopped doing it since I was a kid. I love mail, but y’know, you’ve got to send it to get it. I’m from that pen-pal generation, like, when I was nine or ten I had pen-pals all over the place and that just kinda started it off…

If it’d been a few years later, you could have done it all over the internet, but Alison may not have felt the push to come over to England – do you think that move was fundamental for the birth of the band? I don’t think I would have ever learned; I don’t think I could have done it even if I’d wanted to. I just can’t combine music with computers in mind, it just doesn’t work out, it just gets a bit gross, so no, I still use that same four-track – in fact, we have two of them now – and I still write on that all the time eight years later.

You’d made the decision to come over to England… were there any reservations? What were your feelings? No, I mean it was scary but it was more exciting than scary. I just decided, like, I decided and then a week later I did it and I didn’t have any money or anything, but I was done y’know, I was just done; I hated Florida and I needed a reason to leave. I don’t know if I’m that person anymore – I don’t know if I would just pack an entire room into one bag and get on an international flight, one way, with no fucking idea about where I was gonna live and no money, I mean, at the time I had 100 dollars, that’s about it, and I stayed the first time for about six months! I don’t know how I did it; I just slept on couches or whatever, I was just too excited to think about anything else, but gradually I got my shit together and pulled different scams to get visas and then finally we were a band and I got visas and we never looked back.

You probably had specific ways of working in each of your respective previous bands – was it hard to approach The Kills with a fresh attitude? I was totally ready for it. Everything about it was fresh, everything about it was different for Jamie and I; we’d never worked like that, we just sat at a kitchen table screaming and playing guitar and stuff in the squat of a kitchen I had across the street from his place. We just had fun, like I said, we never expected to be a band, it just happened to us really. We were just doing things because we loved it; neither of us were working, neither of us had enough money to go out, y’know – we lived on coffee and toast for about two years. We just had a blast, y’know, and at the end of that blast we had a bunch of songs that were just great. We borrowed some money to record it and away we went…