



Let's talk about how you first started out with Thee Oh Sees. Is it true that when you met John Dwyer you were working as a waitress in a cafe?

I was working as a coffee maker. I would just make him his coffee every morning, amongst a million other people that came in, but yeah that is how we met.





And so how did he end up recruiting you for the band?

It's funny, he would come in every morning and I had just moved over from England to California where people... it's not that they don't have a sense of humour, but John's from the east coast and his sense of humour is somehow closer to England and he was a relief when he would come in every morning - he was the one funny person that I would serve coffee to, so I never forgot him.





He was constantly handing out flyers for all the different bands that he was in and eventually I went to some of them. I think we would smoke cigarettes together on my break and we just made friends, as you do, and I told him I was singing in another band and he eventually came to see that band and asked me to sing with him. But it was about two years of knowing each other before that happened.





When you first joined the band was it still very much John's baby?

It was a very different band when I joined. Really different music: slower, quieter, many more harmonies. Just a really different thing. I felt like I had joined The Velvet Underground or something, I knew it was that good.





If you've been in bands your whole life, you know when you've joined a good one and it was clearly John's vision, but it was such a good vision, that I was so happy to be a part of it. I know that must sound really cheesy, but I do mean it - it was great. And then over the years more people have joined and it's become more of a group effort and we do write more together for sure.





So do you feel like it's more of a band now rather than 'the John Dwyer Experience' or something?

Well they go back and forth. We released two albums last year - no, three albums - and two of them were pretty much John. He gets lots of different people to sit in with him and I was singing on a couple of those albums, but there was only one real full band album. It kinda goes back and forth and we just recorded another which is a full band album again. I think he just writes so quickly that he's got to get it out of his system.





I wanted to ask you about that, because some of the records - Putrifiers II for example - do feel very much like 'John albums' in contrast to some of your other work. Is it weird for you sometimes seeing stuff come out under the band's name that you've not really been that involved in?

The first time it was a little bit weird and then I just had to step back from it and think about it. John is my dear friend and I love him completely and it's right that he should be able to do his thing untethered I suppose by what our time restrictions are.





I had a job so I wasn't available the way he writes, which is full time, and also we each of us have to have the freedom to achieve our vision and I don't give a shit that it's released under the band name. We are all of us that, so it's fine. It took a change of thinking, you have to get a little bit freer. But it's good that it's this way, we're all free to do it if we need to.





So when you do play as a full band are you mostly recording live?

Previously we have always done that. There's been the occasional overdub, like an extra set of harmonies or an extra keyboard line or flute or something like that. This album that we just did had a couple more vocal overdubs, particularly with me because I'm not a great piano player and so singing and playing my piano parts at the same time was too much.





So I played my parts while we recorded the whole band live and then I came back in to sing my bits. But John also did some of that this time. We're trying to do a little better job at singing I think and just experiment with a new way of doing it.





How does that work when it comes to playing live then? Do you just strip things down for gigs or...?

I don't do any looping and mostly we try and recreate it. The more I learn the bits, the more I'm able to play and sing at the same time. I making myself sound like an idiot - it's just not very good, but I'm getting better. It's just that a lot of the songs we recorded were relatively new, but with practice it gets better. But yeah, we try and keep it as close to live as possible. You'll hear the album, it's not that fancy, but there are certain bits where we've added in elements.









And once you're done with recording, do your songs keep mutating with your live shows...

Yeah always. They always change. Because you can write and you can record the songs, but once you've played it live there's that element of changeability, because John will just change things on stage or write a new part on stage or an improvisation that just happens while you're playing live. I'll be curious to hear how the songs change over the next year of us playing them.





When that happens do you sometimes wish you'd put the new version out on record instead?

We have come back and re-recorded some of the ones that have changed that much, because then it's become a different song. Because that good thing that came from that live moment on stage, you want to record it and have that captured and not lose it.





A lot of people talk about Thee Oh Sees as a very prolific band. Do you see it that way or do you wonder why other acts aren't putting out as many albums as you are?

I do think that, partly because this band is what I'm used to, but also partly because all of our friends here run pretty much on the same path, doing it a similar way. There's so many collaborations and generally people here try and record what they've done.





For example, our buddy Ty Segall made a record with Tim Presley from White Fence - they put that out and I don't know how many records he made last year, but it's a fair few and that just seems normal to me. But I understand someone labouring over a really beautiful album and taking their time with it - there's nothing wrong with that, it's lovely. It's just that we don't do it that way.





You mentioned Ty Segall there. He's part of a scene in San Francisco that seems to have undergone a resurgence around you since your band was founded. Do you see yourselves as at the centre of something there?

It feels really shared, I've certainly never felt like the centre of it. There are other bands here that have been doing it as long as us and really just as influential on the younger bands that are coming up - Sic Alps would be a perfect example. But I have to say, it doesn't feel like we're the centre or Sic Alps are the centre or anyone else; it's much more of a community than that.





You go to each other's shows, you help each other out. It's nice. For me, I'm a bit older and I'm a bit tired of any kind of showboating or bullshit, so I really appreciate that. I like that there's a family feel to it, otherwise I wouldn't really be as interested in doing this honestly.









You guys still have a reputation for pretty wild stage shows though.

Everyone always says that! I'm sure that mostly comes down to John and his antics, his on stage antics. The rest of it is... well you play a show with as much energy as you have. You're not going to go out there and do a halfway job. People do say that and it's very nice that they say that, but I don't know how wild we are. I don't particularly feel that wild myself, but if people think that then cool!





Well you say that, but you did once throw a TV out of a window didn't you?

Haha! It wasn't a very wild moment though. It was actually kind of a little bit of a disappointment because my friend who I was throwing the TV out of the window with said 'it's going to pop, it's going to make this kind of explosion' and it didn't. It just kind of landed - it didn't do anything. The only reason I did that is that it's a stupid cliche that rock 'n' roll people are supposed to do and my friend was like 'you've gotta throw a TV out of a window' so I was like 'okay', but I would never have thought of it on my own.





Do you feel that people come to your live shows expecting... maybe not TV throwing, but fireworks of some sort?

I don't think you can feel too much pressure, you have to just play the best you can each night. If you felt too much pressure about making things a certain way each night, you'd probably turn into a bit of a monster. You just have to take it as it comes and have to be a bit more genuine than that.





You're playing 390 Bar in Shanghai, which is a venue with quite a small, low stage where you're right up in people's faces. That feels like a dynamic that would work well for you guys...

Well for years we always played on the floor. Probably only the last two years that we haven't done that. So we played on the floor in the middle of everybody with a circle of people around you. People would be holding my mic stand and the piano, holding John's mic stand so that it wouldn't all get tipped over.





We've progressed to a stage which is a funny transition. I like smaller places better, but I enjoy the challenge of learning how to try and translate a show that feels good to a larger stage. I don't know if I could put that into words - how you do it - but just making that energy of what you do come across. That probably sounds really cheesy, but hopefully you know what I mean. But that venue sounds perfect.





So have you been out here before at all then?

No, never. None of us in fact. This is our first time, it's pretty exciting.





What did you think when someone asked if you'd like to play China?

I couldn't believe it, I really couldn't believe it. Because it's not a place I ever... I had always hoped to go to Japan, because I've had a life long love affair with the country - I read The Tale of Genji when I was 11. I guess I didn't think of coming to China as something that was possible honestly.





It's not that I didn't think that people would be into music, but that we could go over there and play. We're a small band, you know what I mean? You think that big bands would do it, but not just like a little mini rock 'n' roll band like us. I can't wait, it blows my mind that we're doing this.





Thee Oh Sees play 390 Bar on Friday 22 as part of Split Works' warm up for JUE Festival in March. as part of Split Works' warm up for JUE Festival in March.

Time Out