arc10: "CAN YOU HEAR US?" - an interview with Tim & The Boys (TEMPERED, 2015)
+++a Q&A with Tim of and-the-Boys fame previously published only in the out-of-print 2015 journal, TEMPERED___
Tim & the Boys formed around 2014 through Tim (his first band), Will (Housewives, later of BB & The Blips), and Dan (Dead Farmers). I was hooked from the start, and put out their first LP ‘Growing’ as the opening release for my poorly run record label in 2018. Dan moved to LA soon after and while the band had a brief moment somewhere around the 2015-2017 period, they remained under the radar for as long as they were together. They have a second LP recorded, but incomplete, and the parts I’ve heard of it are a really interesting evolution in their sound and ideas that Tim speaks to in the below interview. This Q&A begins pretty hilariously since both LPs took an age for them to complete in the end, but the sentiment (that writing, recording, and releasing quickly retains the spark of the works’ intent) is something I hold really tightly to this day in my own music and writing. I return to this interview often, in part because Tim has been a close friend for a long time, but also because I think he draws a really neat circle around a philosophy of intent and response to the underground music communities that are responsible for us ever meeting.
Max: We’ve both spoken before about wanting to record music quickly in order to capture the immediacy of it. Why do you think that’s the case for you?
Tim: I’m not interested in making music that’s perfect, because there’s nothing about our music that’s particularly perfect. Even conceptually, it’s not a band that’s achieving something that’s far out or incredibly new. Part of me says to improve something so that’s it’s good enough, but if you really want to improve and perfect it, then just do it again. Some people end up thinking about individual songs so much that by the time they record it they’ve got this idea of everything that will happen, and it becomes something that doesn’t even resemble what they should be doing.
For me, the labour can take away the personality. My favourite live bands that can’t capture themselves well on record seem to have combed a song over and over until it’s lost all its texture.
When we record our album I want a lot more texture, so that there’s a separation between what we play live and what we’re recording. I don’t want to use recording as a way of promoting our live shows; I want it to be its own thing. There’s a part of the process where you aren’t just the band anymore. The band is how you write the songs, but clearly with music, there’s a lot more people to credit than just who is in the band. So why not take that idea and bring it in? There are lots of ideas on how to do that, but I want to bring a lot more people into the recording, having a live drummer recording with the drum machine, a lot more synth parts—things we couldn’t do on a stage.
Making it a Tim & the Boys and Friends environment?
Yeah, there’s almost room in the idea of the band itself for that to expand. I want it to be weird and fluid like that. I think that’s more interesting than just the three of us ‘making punk tunes,’ but balancing that, so it doesn’t become this process where we’re worrying about fitting more people in. I want to get it done pretty quickly. On one day I’d want to record it the way we’d play it live, and then the next weekend, bring people in and say, “Play a fill in this bit, play along to the solo in this bit,” and make it sound big, or at least impactful.
When you’re talking about wanting to do things quickly, do you think that’s related to impatience? You can record and release an album in a day if you wanted to, so it feels like a lot of time is wasted.
The question then becomes, “With every hour I add to this: what’s it worth?” That’s a very ‘business’ way of doing things, but at the same time, that can be a constructive way of thinking about delivering something. I’m guilty of being a massive procrastinator, so when it comes to this I get frustrated when we can’t get it done. Not about the end product, I just want to string line it and deliver it.
You mentioned to me a while ago that you were worried about your synth parts being the weakest part of the band.
Sometimes, but they just replace emptiness with sound. It means that Will can riff and play solos, and we get to do some interesting things with it from a melody point of view. Maybe as I get better at playing keys, we might be able to do more; I’m still getting my head around understanding how synths work. At the last show we played, I forgot a patch cable and it completely changed our sound. One of those moron guys [a group of people who had been attempting to force moshes on otherwise calm shows – Ed] walked up to me and said, “the whole sound was really different for that show,” and I was like, “how did you hear that and I didn’t?”
Probably because he listens to a lot of music and isn’t as dumb as he acts.
Or he has moron friends and isn’t that bad a guy. It’s funny; those guys got upset about being grabbed and told to calm down at that show, but then went up to Peta [Tim’s partner, also of Photogenic] and asked, “don’t your friends ever go to punk shows?” Which was all because he was physically interacted with, but his whole thing was about wanting shows to be more physical. They got exactly what they wanted, but can’t see that. They only like it when it’s chaotic, not when it interferes with them, even when they’re interfering with everyone else. That’s what I didn’t get: “How dare they be violent towards my friend?” Their friend was being violent towards everyone else! Not that I care about it that much. Peta’s brother said to me: “You can’t be upset when people react to your music; you’re making loud, violent music.”
What ruffled you about that?
It was more in the way he was doing it, and it happens for a lot of bands in Sydney, where people get so excited to see them that they react before they hear their music. It’s more about doing a thing than feeling a thing. He was already in his underpants before we started; he’d resigned himself to the fact that he was going to act a fool. So it was about him, not about music, or experience, or anything else. I’d hate to think that I was making a platform for people to be drawing attention to themselves and perpetuate their own stupid ego—it’s for me to do that [laughs].
I guess it’s a phenomenon where the spontaneity of physical reaction to a show is lost. Instead, it’s a pre-prepared reaction, which doesn’t feel as immediate or exciting?
Once a band gets to a certain stage of people being attracted to them and their sense of violence or chaos in the music, people go, “oh cool, this is a platform for me to act like an idiot in an unproductive way before the music even starts.” Our music isn’t hardcore, but when you go to a hardcore show: ‘people’ churn in a circle. ‘People’ hurt each other—not ‘person.’ They move as people because they’re moving to music together. It’s a group catharsis, and that’s not what is happening lately. There’s no group mentality to what some of those people are doing. When it’s for someone to make themselves feel powerful by themselves, it plays to some sort of masculinity that claims, “I’m the big man, I’m the one guy,” rather than: “GOD life hurts.”
Is that a more honest reaction to you?
Well that’s how I’ve always seen people reacting to a hardcore show. It’s a manifestation of how people feel about life, because that’s what the music is about: group therapy. Not that you need to orchestrate how other people experience what you do and go, “everyone punch each other in the face, not just you!” I’m not going to ask those people to not go to our shows.
I think that’s what embarrassed me when I went at a guy to stop him elbowing everyone in the head recently. Maybe it felt right at the time, but I don’t want to try to exclude or interfere with anyone in a way.
This is where I think the hypocrisy and reaction of someone like that is exposed, and exposes what their motivations are in the first place. You aren’t stopping their participation; you’re participating in the way that feels right for you. If you do one thing and somebody else reacts to it, then you’re part of a group mentality. They don’t like it when you do that because they aren’t of a group mentality: they think it’s about them. Even when you held that guy still, I don’t think they minded; it was when someone sat on him that they got angry, because it was emasculating. They didn’t want to see their friend get emasculated while high. Even though he was pulling out his penis, complaining about it being small and yelling, “daddy’s horny!”
The other side to the physicality at shows, is friends of ours who don’t like seeing a band like Low Life because the response to their live show has become macho and exclusive; they feel left out.
Which is hilarious, because that’s so ironic.
But still, how many layers of irony do you need to ignore until you recognise they’re inciting something unsavoury?
But surely…Mitch [Tolman, singer of Low Life] is on-stage basically wearing women’s sports clothes with an androgynous haircut singing about football; it’s not simple for people to read that. So I don’t feel like it’s Low Life who did that, nor is it their responsibility? I listen to Low Life, and I don’t even want to dance. It’s funny that it’s intentionally dumb, but it’s very chin-strokey music. The only thing that’s simple about it is the music itself, the melody, the way it’s constructed. None of that is a bad thing—that’s what punk is made of—but what they talk about is intentionally vague and could be read into two ways.
Their songs are very character driven too, which is unusual for the type of music we listen to. They paint an image of one person, in a vague way, but I can only think of rare circumstances in the music around us where that’s the case. Are your songs ever character-driven?
I don’t write lyrics that are about me. There might be a way of processing more universal concepts that I have, but I’ve never driven a car off a cliff. I’ve never touched my dick with another man. I’ve never assaulted someone while listening to the Spice Girls. It’s rarely about something, but more an idea where you can take the innocence of a song like ‘Wanna Be,’ and subvert it with power and violence to become something that is extremely distasteful.
As a person, you’ve always had that instinct to push a joke a step too far, and that seems to come through with your song-writing. Where does the fuel for that come from?
In a song it’s because I feel, in some sense, a duty to make something simple become outrageous, because that’s what the tradition of this particular type of music should do. Otherwise, what is it achieving? Something mediocre? Not that there isn’t any mediocrity in what we do, but I want to strike people with this horrible idea of, “I’ve got a song stuck in my head, and it’s about something just foul, but I can’t get it out.” Part of that is just being titillating, and the other part is that it’s just the things I obsess over. Songwriting isn’t a catharsis for me at all. I don’t have anything that I repress in my life. Even the things in my life that suck, I talk about them with people. When I am writing about something that is very much a part of what I do in my life, or about a moment in my life, I don’t really want people to understand very specifically what it’s about.
You like the vagueness?
Yes. Even when we wrote the song about Dre [Tim and Peta’s recently passed dog], there are lots of specific things in that, but I wanted it to be vague enough that no one would know it’s about a dog. I’m always apologising to the guys because I make most of the lyrics up every time and sing them on the spot, but when I’m thinking of the lyrics, I’ll think of things that are intentionally contradictory or misleading. I like that in ‘Silent Room,’ I talk about the little drummer boy, and no one knows what that is. People might think it’s a love song about a boy? Or I talk about not being able to walk with you, and people might be like, “Why are you walking around with this kid?”
There’s something nice in leaving that open, but I’ve been subject to misinterpreting things. For someone like The Native Cats, I’ve always misinterpreted them and made their lyrics about me. Now that Chloe [Alison Escott] has made everyone aware of what’s been happening in her life, I feel stupid for trying to change its meaning to serve myself.
But why should it be like that? You could also read songs as just being about love, or something else, and I think that’s an interesting idea. I was reading something about Steven Spielberg films, and how every single one of them can be read as being about the failure to be a good father, or of failing to understand the role of fatherhood. It goes on to talk about Jurassic Park to the extent of giving birth to a monster and being ashamed of it, but still trying to hold onto it: feeling as though you’re a failure as a father, but still proud. If you wrote a song about that, it’d be interesting to me. If you happen to talk about dinosaurs in it, does that matter? I think that’s a much more interesting way of writing a song than saying, “I broke up with my girlfriend. I’m going to write a song about breaking up with my girlfriend.”
But that works both ways…
You could write a song that is about breaking up with your girlfriend, but the subplot is about the extinction of the dinosaurs: [sings] “You’re not here anymore” [laughs]. I think it’s really funny in the arts, that there’s this weird pressure to sometimes completely expose yourself, and other times not. Imagine Steven Spielberg saying, “I wrote a script about my life and I’m going to direct and star in it.” People would think that’s so weird, but so many songwriters do that, and in reality, Steven Spielberg did do that.
It’s a sub-conscious thing, and is similar to what you were saying about making up your lyrics. You can’t truly make up lyrics on the spot. You’re not mumbling into the speech-to-text function of your phone and reading out the result; it’s not random, it’s coming from a thought process that is specifically yours.
Yeah, it’s just that exorcism of words. Whether that happens spontaneously, or as a thing where I write it and revise it makes no difference. Some of the songs we recorded, like ‘Hear Us,’ every time we’ve played it, it’s had different words. When we played the NOISEY show, I re-wrote the words because I was angry about something and decided to talk about that thing on that day, which sounds like a really horrible, freestyle jazz thing to do, but I enjoy it. I like watching it happen because it’s all new, and is totally different to what I would do in visual arts, or what I would do in my job. Do you ever feel weird about the idea of people liking something that you did?
Yes. I guess it feels good, but I’m more embarrassed and shy when I receive a compliment than anything.
That’s what it feels like at work for me. At work when I receive praise, someone might say, “you did a good job getting to an end result,” which might be to sell more wine. There I think, “no der, that’s why you pay me.” If I didn’t do that, I wouldn’t have a job! I just perform my role. Making music isn’t like that at all because I don’t know what my role is: I’m just doing it because it’s a fun way to fill time. When someone tells me that I did a good job, I feel so strange about it, because I think, “how did you objectively decide that?” There is a vacuum between what went through mine and Dan and Will’s mind to create that song, and ‘you’, as that person who is out there. So now I feel strange about the idea of ‘you’ viewing it. I don’t feel nervous, or self-conscious, I feel weird that I’ve navigated that gap and don’t know how, and don’t know why. It’s weird because when you’re growing up, all you see and hear in music is this really big TV and stadium kind of thing. Then when you’re exposed to this much more personal level of music in DIY, you see that there is a relationship. I have an established relationship with nearly every person who listens to our music. I kind of get why they might relate to it because we’re already friends, but then there are strangers, or people who are on the outskirts of our group of people who are relating to it and I just think, “why?”
I remember when you were first talking about the band, Dan was looking through books of scripture from your childhood and suggesting you take ideas from there, but I’m interested in how or why you ended up avoiding that.
There’s imagery that he wanted me to use or talk about, stuff that’s in Revelations, which is about Armageddon. It’s very vivid visual imagery that—at least the way I was taught to read it—was symbolic of actual events. But if I used that imagery, it would sometimes be clichéd, and I didn’t want to talk about big red dragons, or talking horns, because it didn’t feel right in that aesthetic. I don’t want to talk about when I think the end of the world is coming; I’ve not been interested in that for a long time.
You grew up?
Exactly. You have to go through a lot of thinking to move past something like that. Maybe other people don’t, but I did. I can’t relate to it because I’ve intentionally explored that in the past in order to find meaning, but found none – which is sort of ironic. Although, the way I said that almost perfectly mimicked a section of the bible. When the Israelites were freed from Babylon, the angel’s hand came into the Babylonian King’s place where he was having a party and wrote on the wall, “you’ve been weighed and measured, and been found wanting.” That’s exactly how I feel about the bible [laughs]. But it’s so pointless talking about that, I don’t really add any value to that conversation.
Other than that it has somehow informed you.
I feel like the things I discovered from the bible made everything inside of it empty. I found out things about me, or about living, or humans—not scientific things, because that’s the immediate reaction, that science answered that—but more psychological things about life. When I talk about pain, that had a lot to do with why I have the feelings I do towards my early life. That’s because I value pain, but Christians are avid avoiders of pain; it’s conceptually what their life is about. A Christian’s life is about hopefully getting to the point where they will never feel pain again, but I was like, “No, pain has a value,” and something as simple as that can completely jar you. So when I write a song, I think of how I can talk about pain or the idea of pain. Then there are all these modern concepts that come through, like using Spice Girls lyrics. How do you take something that’s joyous and actually find that pain is an integral idea to what it is expressing, then magnify it a million times to the point where you think, “that’s disgusting.” One of the other songs is, lyrically, about driving off a cliff, but everything in it sounds exhilarating. It’s about adrenaline, and hunting down feeling good, but having that be the noose that kills you.
Not the destabilising things that lead to someone doing that, but the pursuit of feeling happy? Or at least that pinpoint, zoom lens on a feeling?
That’s a good way of putting it: a zoom lens on one portion of a feeling or situation. Music writers for example, are always like, “tell me about you, and your life,” but they never want to talk about your work unless it exposes you. I read an interview with Will Oldham recently and he was like, “none of my work does that, none of it is about me, it’s about this other thing.”
For me though, if you’re not interested in what you’re writing about, or considering different perspectives on it, then why should anyone else be interested in it? If you talk about your ‘work’ and cut out the personal aspect, I’m not sure if I’m as interested. What does interest me is the things around a band that add social meaning to their music.
How much do you have to explore yourself? I think it’s comedic that so much of the time I try not to explore myself. Which is funny because the band has my name in it.
Does it paint a character that doesn’t exist in any of the songs?
Maybe it doesn’t even exist in the performance or anything else. I like that idea of mythology as well. We talked about it a lot before we did anything and sort of asked, “Why don’t we market ourselves like The Ramones did, even explore the idea of intentionally fighting with a band and intentionally not playing with someone?”
Like a fourth wall or Kaufman-esque thing? Like a wrestling feud?
Yeah. It goes back to what we were saying about song-writing. If you constantly make these self-portraits, you’re completely ignoring the fact that you relate to an audience and there’s an interaction that’s essential to what you’re doing. That’s why you write pop songs in the first place! If you were only ever exploring your own feelings, it would be dumb to write pop songs: because nobody feels two verses, a chorus, a bridge and an outro. When I changed the lyrics to ‘Hear Us,’ it was about this guy standing in the front row who was staring at me with no expression like he’d just smoked ten bongs. He just looked at me with dead eyes and I was like, “this fuckin’ guy, why are you standing in the front row looking like the most apathetic person alive? Don’t give me this empty, vacant look like nothing is happening, because something is happening right here.” And I pretty much sang that. That song is just about being loud. “Can you hear us” was a thing I said while we were having a jam, but I literally felt like I was asking him if he could hear what was happening at that time, or if he was even aware that he was in the room. That’s essentially a part of every song. You have to relate to other people.
+++other updates___
__slight delay on the GIVE PHILISTINISM A CHANCE zine feat NO TREND, FLIPPER, THE CRUCIFUCKS and URINALS, but it will be posted to subscribers in the next couple weeks. you can subscribe by going paid on substack, or just shooting $50 (australia only) through to max@barelyhuman.info via paypal. should have 3-4 tapes & zines posted to you by the end of next year. (email/dm if you’re internationally based, i’ve sorted a few people out now but postage is expeeeensive so can’t do the bargain rate)
__i’ve got 2.5 weeks off full-time work to write a draft for a novel that will publish in late 2023; it’s exciting to have some time. (some of tim’s thoughts on songwriting have been comforting here.) more info about the book will be announced early next year i think, but it’s more or less a sequel to ‘the magpie wing,’ of which i still have some author copies to clear out of my shelf for $15-30 PWYC - email me if you’d like a copy!
__and that’s all for 2022! thanks for tolerating these email dispatches through the year. have had some really interesting email discussions with people shooting off from these digs into the personal archive, so as much as i thought it’d be empty navel gazing (maybe it is), it’s been worth it on that front. as always, email any time, and i’m gonna try to turn this into a series of new q&a’s and occasional archive pieces next year (instead of the other way around). have a great holiday break if you can get some time off work and the shitfight that is EXISTING, and shout out if you need anything.