PHIL: How are you finding England?
DAVE: Oh it’s great man, it’s great. It’s been the best tour in Europe we’ve had and England has just been.. great.
PHIL: The Birmingham date was cancelled wasn’t it?
DAVE: Yeah, well what happened was that the show was supposed to be tomorrow, the promoter booked the show for the 3rd, but we’re going to be home on the 3rd. We fly home on the 2nd, so we couldn’t really help it.
PHIL: Your album ‘Hard Rock Bottom’ seems to have been well received. What was it like recording with Ryan Greene?
DAVE: It was good man. For us he’s a lot of fun because he does so many other bands on Fat obviously, he works quick and he’s very precise. You get in there, we were really well rehearsed so the process was really smooth, and we had a good time with it, no stress, and Ryan is amazing, a great guy to work with.
PHIL: Why did you choose to do a Sinead O’Conner cover on the album?
DAVE: Well, we thought it’d be a good song to do. It’s a good way to break up the album, and we always do covers so we were thinking of a song to do and Tony was like “hey, what about doing this song?”. It’s still completely different to the original version for one thing and to have Karina (Denike from Dance Hall Crashers) sing it was fun, at this point she’s nearly like a 5th member as she’s been on like every damn record.
PHIL: You guys have done a lot of video sketches, who comes up with the ideas and would any of you like to take it further?
DAVE: We always joke around about it. Matt and Tony are really good at coming up with all the really funny ideas. A lot of it is stuff that we find really funny but some people really don’t. It’s more definitely for our own amusement. If we had tools to make our own movies it’d be pretty ridiculous, hahaha.
PHIL: Are any of the band still in contact with Chris and what do you think of his new Jackson project?
DAVE: Yeah, everyone is still in contact with him, for sure. He just got married and everybody went to this wedding. His band Jackson, I haven’t heard it yet, but it’s really good though, from what I’ve heard everybody has nothing but great things to say about it. It’s cool because obviously being in the Foo Fighters gives him the ability to do his own side thing and really push with it, and everyone really backs him on it. I guess he did some Warped Tour shows with Jackson, and I heard those went well, but I haven’t heard too much of it myself.
PHIL: Do you prefer playing more intimate gigs or bigger gigs like the Warped Tour?
DAVE: Like tonight I think is kind of preferable, it’s more intimate, everybodies right there. There’s a lot to be lost playing big shows because people are so far away and shit but at the same time it’s good to do those shows because it makes these shows bigger for us, you gain new fans. European festivals, and like Leeds and Reading, stuff like that, is something you can’t get to do at home. Warped Tour is really the only thing at home that happens in a festival setting. So to come here and play festivals is always a blast because people in Europe, and England, in my opinion are more willing to listen to the bands and aren’t as fed by the mainstream as they are in The United States. If there’s a band they’ve never heard before they’ll stay and listen to them and give them a chance and I think you find more of that here. That’s the benefit of playing those shows and then coming back and playing shows like this. We had to move this show into the bigger room because of sales tonight, and I think that has a lot to do with the fact that we played the festivals last year and you play to people who wouldn’t normally hear you.
PHIL: What’s happening with the Split between Tony and Joey Cape of Lagwagon?
DAVE: It comes out in March. It’s really really good, but then I’m not going to say it’s bad, hah. I’ve just heard Tony’s tracks, it’s 5 No Use songs and 1 song he wrote for the split. There’s 12 songs total.
PHIL: Are the songs of different albums?
DAVE: Yeah, he does “Exit” and “On The Outside“, but they’re all done in different ways. He did it all by himself, laid it all down and did all the instrumentation himself, it’s really cool.
PHIL: Who apart from Bigwig and Irish Car Bomb have you seen on this tour and been impressed with?
DAVE: The band that’s playing tonight, Appease, they’re cool. I saw them for the first time the other day when we played at The Mean Fiddler in London. They’re great, they’re like super nice. We haven’t had any other bands play with us apart from those bands, it’s been like a 3 band bill the whole time. Irish Car Bomb couldn’t do the shows in England. I think people booking the shows were afraid, with the name and it being in England you know? They didn’t really want to touch it too much, which in a way I think had a little bit to do with it, but they’re cool, they’re great.
PHIL: What are your views on Internet Piracy? I heard your last album got leaked on the Internet before it came out? Do you think there is any way of avoiding that?
DAVE: There’s no way to avoid it, and I think it kind of hurts and it helps us. It really doesn’t matter, as long as you do a good album and release something from a packaging standpoint that gives people reason to go buy it. It also gives the artist incentive to make something great when you buy it like add a DVD or CD-Rom footage, that kind of thing. It does kind of suck at the same time because it got released two months ahead of time. We got hold of the person who released it. I have a friend who is computer crazy and he managed to track the guy down so we got hold of him and just said “hey, look, hold on to it for a little bit, like give us a month, two weeks, but don’t be releasing it too far in advance”.
The way I look at it, the bands on Fat Records, you can sell 50,000 records and make a good living. 50-60,000 records is a good living for a band on Fat. If it gets put on the Internet ahead of time, and gets downloaded 30,000 times it’s money out of your pocket eventually. But as a whole, it’s only effected us like maybe 10%. It doesn’t really matter, I think it’ll still bring kids to the shows. The more people who can hear your music the better. I’m kind of for it, and kind of against it at the same time , but there is nothing you can do about it. It’s great for bands starting out, because you can get on the Internet, get people to hear you, link yourselves up to all sorts of people. But yeah, there’s no way to stop it, we just have to make sure we write a damn good album so people will always still want to buy it. It just gives us more incentive to do it.