TV GHOST INTERVIEW

Since hearing Cold Fish by TV Ghost, I've been pretty hooked. Thought I'd landed a real scoop only to find out that the NME had pipped me by giving them a brief mention. I'm still pretty sure this is their first UK publication interview though. Interesting for the wrong reasons, perhaps?

The Germans have a saying: “do not make monuments to the living, for they can still disgrace the stone.” It's a bit like our 'don't meet your heroes' line, but cleverer. Having met two heroes previously (British Bulldog: warm, solid handshake, enthusiasm. Dynamite Kid: called me a 'poof'' and yelled dubious obscenities from his knackered wheelchair), your hack opted for the side of generosity and chased up an interview with TV Ghost.



Stricken with love, according to last.fm, yr. corresp spun their recent LP Cold Fish seventeen times, most of which were consecutive. That's not including physical plays and ripping the whole thing to an MP3 player, deleting everything else in turn. Then buying the thing on import, alongside their rare-as-rocking-horse-shit debut self-titled 12”.

People call their genre 'shitgaze'. It's a stupid term, based on a joke. Now people are talking about this whole 'shitgaze' revolution. It's enough to make you vomit up a lung. How does singer/guitarist Timothy Conrad Glick feel about this?

“Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. I dunno.”

At the time, it seems like an infuriating answer. Looking back, it was a dumb question. When has a band ever graciously accepted a genre tag? Even if the genre tag came from the dude who recorded their first 12” record?

So how would you describe what TV Ghost did to some dude or lady dude who had never heard you? “Uhhhhhhhhh. [silence].”

Looks like I'm going to have to do it for him. The Ghosters came a-creepin' outta Lafayette, IN, a “pretty crappy” rustbelt town that one W. Axl Rose used to call home. It's not riven with the crack and crime of East Coast no-fly zones like Trenton and Camden. Instead it's decaying in that mundane, late-capitalistic way, all rusted gates and abandoned lots.



The band themselves are four skinny kids on drugs and a nihilistic kick to match those dudes from The Big Lebowski. Thousand-yard stares. Remorseless stances. Nary a smile between them. You'd mistake them for complete dorks if they weren't playing some of the most vital music of the century.

There's something for everyone who hates most things. TV Ghost stick their necks up above the garage-rock parapet to incorporate telekinetic spasms of no wave, the icy-technological paranoia of Chrome and their early industrial ilk and wiry, worried post-punk. Glick howls like his bowels are being extracted through his gluteals and the rest of the band pummel away in noisy ecstacy.

Back to the interview. What's going down in Lafayette? “Oh, nothing.” It's the spiritual home of Guns'n'Roses, I tell him. Stone silence. Like his album suggests, cold fish. “There's not much of a scene here at all.”

But a lot of the recent garage/lo-fi stuff has had a lot of press coverage. Even MTV did a little feature on groups like Tyvek, Kurt Vile and Psychedelic Horseshit. “I don't know about that.” You've even played some pretty awesome stuff, like the recent WFMU festival with legends such as Teenage Jesus and Faust. “Mmmm.”

Mmmm? Mmmmm???!!! Just as rage is about to find voice, he finds enough to tell Student Direct, a propos of nothing, that Lydia Lunch thought their drummer, the improbably named Jackson Van Horn, was “pretty hot.” And then he laughs a lot, like a man who does not laugh a lot. Like this: “Ha. Ha ha. Ha. Ha.” Stop.

Which sends your writer into an inexplicable fit of laughter, capped with a pretty obvious ephiphany: those Germans were right. Whaddya expect this guy to do, come out with a Beckett play? He's a singer in a band tipped for success, not Ban Ki Moon. His defensiveness and lack of expurgation don't mean much at all when you crank the record up high.



Whatever their future status (hint: they're tipped to act as poster boys in the new US arm of the next big NME wave) they've managed to sew up a couple of high-quality releases along the way. 2010 should see them coming over here to show us what they've got. What can we expect? “Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.” Oh just go and see them. Far less infuriating.