Tokyo Police Club Interview

In case you haven’t noticed, Tokyo Police Club is on quite a roll. Their fan base is booming, their tracks are rockin’, their tours are bumpin’, and they’re all set for recording their debut full-length. That’s right: all this success, and all the boys have under their collective belt is a relatively long EP and a handful of singles. I caught up with the chaps at Bumbershoot after the latter of their two sets; we had a short chat under the Space Needle about life on the road, baked goods, and socks. Here’s your chance to eavesdrop:

Howdy. Can you please state your name and what you do in the band?
Graham: I’m Graham, and I play keyboards in Tokyo Police Club.

Sweet deal. So you guys have been touring like crazy, and when I skimmed some of your old interviews, I saw that you mentioned the Art Brut tour as your favorite at the time. Now that you’ve been playing headline dates with regularity, what’s your favorite tour you’ve headlined?
G: I’m trying to think of what my favorite tour has been. I mean, ever since we played with Art Brut… I mean, every time before we played with Art Brut was just in dank, small, crappy venues, so playing with Art Brut was just really eyeopening in terms of nice venues, big crowds, good hospitality. Since then we’ve been able to kind of build ourselves up to a point where we’ve been able to do that on our own. But at the same time – I mean, I’m not really a huge fan of touring, I just don’t love being away from home; I don’t love eating crappily, sleeping badly. I mean, there’s times when it’s fun. I love the shows, but the whole lifestyle just doesn’t agree with me, so my favorite tours tend to be the short tours. We just got back from the U.K. where we did a week tour. Didn’t go outside Britain! It was an hour drive, sleep in, drive for an hour, hang out in the town, play some festivals; it was great. The time before that we toured England and Europe as well we had a bus, which is the only time we’ve ever had a tour bus, and it was really great. We played some festivals. We got out to like Norway and Sweden and stuff. I just loved the festivals!

Any particular country you like most?
G: Crowd-wise, Canada is usually great ‘cause obviously we’re from there and we have radio support there. I mean, in the States nobody gets on the radio; it just doesn’t matter what you do. But in Canada we actually get on mainstream radio and get great crowds that are really receptive and warm. And we’ve been touring there longer, so Canada kind of wins by default. But every country – there’s no country that’s not been good. I mean, there are individual cities that sometimes aren’t so great, but generally we’ve been really lucky.

That whole “touring not agreeing with you” gig is pretty unfortunate for you, ‘cause y’all have been touring basically whole summer. Is anyone sporting any pesky illnesses to go along with your newly wounded guitar?
G: I mean, as soon as you get sick on tour it’s game over ‘cause you won’t get better until you get home, so there have been tours like in the winter where all four of us just having the worst hacking coughs, runny noses, and the chills. So you know once any of us feels the slightest tickle in their throat, they’re downing Cold FX and juice and everyone is else is quarantining them ‘cause no one else wants to get sick. You can keep yourself from getting sick, but once you get sick you’re screwed and everyone else gets sick ‘cause you’re in the same van, same hotel rooms. It’s horrible. The worst we ever got was cold; nobody’s ever got a real illness.

(Enter Josh)
G: It’s Josh!

Josh: Hey! Hello. This is Josh, and I play guitar in Tokyo Police Club.

Aight, sick. So this is your last date on this tour, and it’s book ended with Sasquatch back in May…
G: Was that May?
J: Oh my God.
Haha, yea that was May. Which festival treated you better? Or are they two different beasts that you cant really compare?
G: They were really different. I mean, this one we came in this morning; it was really stressful, unfortunately. I really liked about this one that it was a pretty small area by the stage, so it was pretty intimate even though it was still outdoors, which is pretty awesome. But then in another way I love playing the big crowds, and at Sasquatch we were lucky because the high winds shut everyone else down so the fans had no choice but to watch us. Everyone literally had to come watch us! But both these festivals have been amazing.
J: It’s also been really nice that this one is downtown, much like Lollapalooza and those ones that are in the city. I mean, one isn’t better than the other, but when you do something like the Gorge or the Polo Field for Coachella and you’re in the middle of nowhere there’s something to say about that, and then there’s like Lolla or this where you’re right under the Space Needle…
G: Yea, I was looking at the Space Needle as I was playing. It was amazing. It was really cool.

So are y’all still playing the V Festival in Toronto on the ninth?
J: Yep.
And then you start recording on the tenth?
G: Yep. Well, we start driving to Connecticut. We probably won’t start recording until the eleventh.
Right, of course. So how excited are you for this time off? I mean I guess it’s hardly time off per se, but it’s not touring.
G: Well, I mean, it’s not really time off. It’s definitely… we’re not at home. I mean, the worst thing for me about touring is being away; I live with my girlfriend, and not being with my girlfriend all the time is just really hard, so a month recording in Connecticut is still a month of not living in Toronto, so it’s tough for me. I mean, for sure we’re recording with Peter Katis; he’s an amazing producer. It’s a really cool studio; we checked it out and I’m excited about it, but I mean, at the same time I’m kinda bummed that we’re not recording in Toronto; I can’t go home after we record. Ya know, like last time we were only recording for three days, but when we finished I could still go back to… well, my parents’ house, but ya know…
J: It’s still the difference between going home and sleeping in your own bed and being able to go upstairs in the studio and hit it. It’s gonna be three weeks in Connecticut followed by…
G: Another tour! But then in November and December we actually, legitimately have time off. We’re not trying to write songs, we’re not trying to rehearse songs, we’re not going to play shows. I’m probably not going to talk to any of these guys. I’m gonna turn off my phone, turn off my computer, and sit on my couch and read books and do Christmas shopping!
J: Yea, that’s gonna be amazing. All I have to do in that time is Christmas, so I might just go bat shit crazy and start in November.
So after all that stuff Christmas isn’t gonna be stressful at all.
G: Oh no, no, no; Christmas is gonna be the most relaxing thing ever now! And that’s not to say that we don’t like touring and stuff, but just after you’ve toured for so long the prospect of actually having nothing to do…
J: It’s a little bit frightening.
G: Yea, it’s a little bit scary. I don’t even know what I’m going to do with myself. I get home from tour and I’m back for four days, and I’m waking up and thinking “I’m in the hotel. Where do I need to be? What time do we need to be there? I gotta get the flight, gotta get the flight, gotta get the flight…”
J: I think I’m just gonna sleep till twelve. And that’s all I’m gonna do. I”m gonna sleep till twelve.

So when you go to Connecticut, is it the full-length you’ll be recording?
G: That’s the idea. We don’t exactly have a full-length number of songs written yet; we kinda dropped the ball there, but we’ve got like eight, and I figure we’ll probably get the rest together in the studio. Ya know, it’s an adventure, and whatever comes out of it whenever we finish it – it’ll be an LP.

Aight. And is the goal for that still early 2008?
Yea. The goal is February, and the weird and kinda shitty thing about the music industry is that if you wanna put out an album, you’ve gotta record it like four months before so they can do promo; it’s just the way things work. And at the same time it kinda sucks ‘cause you’re gonna record it, then you’re gonna do four months of promo, but after a month of promo it’s gonna leak on the internet and everybody’s gonna have it. And I don’t mind people having it early, but it just kinda sucks that they’re not having the album early; they’ll just have the mp3s early, and it’s just kinda boring. So it sucks that you have to record so long before and then just kinda sit on it. But for now, that’s the way of the industry.

But you’re on Saddle Creek, and it seems like recently they’ve been doing a pretty good job of preventing leaks. For example, Bright Eyes leaked only like a few hours before the release of the actual album.
J: They’ve been really on the ball with the whole mp3, digital side of things. I think that label has really been ahead of everyone else in every aspect of it.
G: I remember talking at South by Southwest to Rob, and he was saying the new Bright Eyes was the first one where they were really making an effort to have it not leak, so they were doing listening parties for reviewers instead of sending out promo copies and stuff. Evidently it worked. And if we’re really lucky, since nobody really cares about our record, nobody’s gonna go to great lengths to leak it… we were watching a Radiohead T.V. show the other night – Behind the Music kinda thing – and they were puting out their record, and somebody like broke into their studio and took the mp3s off their computer ‘cause everyone wanted to hear it so bad. At that point, nothing’s gonna stop people. So fortunately we’re not at the point where it’s impossible to stop, but it’ll happen; I mean, it’s just unavoidable. Just as soon as you finish it, as soon as anyone but the four of you has a copy of it, its gonna be out there.
J: You just have to accept it. You just have to postpone it as long as possible.

So you’re obviously pleased, or content at least with the Saddle Creek non-leaking abilities. What else do you feel about the label? How has it been treating you so far?
J: It’s been really welcoming and family-like; they do everything in that sort of Midwestern, homely style. They got us a cake that they signed. That was great. They give a lot of hugs. A lot of firm hugs.
G: It’s cool from a business point of view as well. They’ve really proved that they can take an indie band on a level like ours. When Bright Eyes started Saddle Creek, he was nothing. I mean, he sold less records than we have, and that’s saying something. And to take him now where his record’s debuting at number two in the country and selling hundreds of thousands of copies… I mean, that’s one of our… we certainly wanna break into the mainstream like that, and to look at a label that we know can nurture a band from the ground up like that is really important to us, ‘cause it means they have the resources if it blows up to keep up with it. ‘Cause I mean, there’s some small indie labels that, as great as they are, if you have a hit single or something out of the blue, there’s nothing they can do; they just can’t ship that many records. It’s just the way it works. But Saddle Creek’s got the best of both worlds; they’ve got that great indie hospitality – I mean, I could call up Rob right now if I needed to – but at the same time, they’ve got the money and the resources and the prior reputation and experience to work it as best they can. So it’s a really good way for us to work now.

A quick question about that cake and overall homeliness: I saw pictures of it – and it looked pretty delicious – and I’ve heard that you brought cupcakes to your early shows. Is this baked good theme something that’s gonna go along with Tokyo Police Club?
G: Well, I hope so! I hope people don’t expect us to keep doing cupcakes; that was when we first started off, when we were doing Battle of the Bands to literally two people…
J: So you make twelve cupcakes to bribe the judges and still have eight to eat by the end of it.
G: Yea. But I remember our first show at Pop Montreal, and that was the last time we tried to do cupcakes. I mean, we had our girlfriends frantically baking.
J: We had this one bartender on our side, and she would just put them on her tray and walk around with them.
G: But I mean, if people want to keep bringing us baked goods…
J: Which they have…
G: Yes, which they have, that’s still very good. I mean, you have to be really careful to make sure there are no razor blades or crack in them, but people are pretty trustworthy I find.

Back to breaking into mainstream: you released two singles off of your A Lesson in Crime EP…
J: Three…
Hold on now, I’m getting to that one! And then non-album with “Swedes in Stockholm” as a b-side, which is one of my favorite…
G: Wow, really? That’s awesome, ‘cause that’s an old, old, old song. Oh man.
Haha, what can I say? Well, you just released “Citizens of Tomorrow,” which has been on MTV2 and has been a fan-favorite for forever. Have you felt a new wave of publicity coming off that?
G: Since the “Citizens” video and single came out, we haven’t really done a lot, ya know? We finished our U.S. tour and then this weekend we’ve just done a few shows and this festival. I think it was a feature on the MySpace page, which is always good. But yea, it’s kinda weird how many singles we’ve put out. It’s ‘cause that was on Paper Bag and the “English” single we put out on our own, so there was really no correlation in there. But I dunno, I really haven’t noticed. We’ve never hit a point where there’s a surge; we’ve never done that thing where you do a few shows and nobody’s there and then at the next one everyone comes. It’s just been like every tour there’s been a few more people there.
J: People have just been kinda gradually like “oh yea, that song: let’s clap.”
G: Yea, that’s how you know when you’ve hit it big: when you get ten seconds into the song and people start jumping up and down. Which we now have two songs in the set that people really recognize right away, which I’m really happy about! That would be “Nature of the Experiment” and now “Your English,” especially in the U.K.
J: Which is good. Don’t wanna be a one hit wonder.

I wouldn’t worry about that. But on another note, it seems like people get really hung up on the robot lyrics even though it’s just one song. Does that weird y’all out at all?
J: Yea I know really, it’s just one song! One!
G: Yea man…
J: The reason it was like the robot thing was that the guy who did the art, which we like a lot, he listened to that one song and understandably came up with the robot thing. And then once we released the EP, we had people coming up and saying “oh, you released a concept record,” and they had all the justifications on like how it started off with an emergency and this whole apocalyptic thing followed by rebuilding. It was really cool to hear about all these weird things.
G: Total accident!
J: Not what we planned on. At all.
G: I do understand it, ‘cause I mean lyrically it’s probably the most straightforward song on the record. I mean, it’s really clearly a song about robots. All the other songs are kinda a bit vague or abstract with bits about this or bits about that, or even just nothing at all, but that song is really clear-cut, and clearly that’s what it’s about. And I mean, robots are one of those things along with pirates that are really gimmicky things people really latch onto. So I mean, there have definitely been times when you get all the video proposals with us fighting robots, which gets annoying, but at the same time it’s probably helped us get attention, ya know? And people will be like “Tokyo Police Club are totally sci-fi indie rock,” and I’d check out a band if I heard them described that way. I think at the beginning of your career, you can get away with a couple of gimmicks to get people to listen to you; the trick is to translate that into being taken seriously on a strictly musical level without gimmicks, which is what we’re doing right now as we move into the next record. To my ears there are no really obvious gimmicks. You’ve gotta hope that people will appreciate that without being quite so “bam” in your face about robots and whacky stuff.
I wouldn’t worry about the music not carrying itself.
J: Haha. I hope not, or it’s gonna be a real short party

So for that new record, can we expect to see more of the same: really infectious short songs?
J: Yea, I think so. It’s always been a thing of ours that we try to do what interests us. And that’s usually an infectious thing where we’re like “yea, I’d like to play that.” We don’t like to have fat or anything that shouldn’t be on the song on there, and that in itself lends to the songs being two minutes.
G: We hate repeating ourselves. We have A.D.D. when it comes to music, so the new songs on the record are exploring new territories just because of the fact that the seven songs on the EP mark seven things that we did, and we’re not gonna do any of those seven things again; we’re gonna try to do different things. So in that way there are definitely gonna be different things. And since there are more songs, there might be a slow song that never breaks out or whatever. But at the same time, it’s still us and our sensibilities as songwriters; it’s still pretty much like “oh, that’s pretty long – let’s cut out like half of it.” I don’t think any of the new songs breaks three minutes. We’re gonna have like a 25 minute album.
So don’t change what ain’t broke?
G: Exactly!
J: Makes us happy…

To cap it all off, I talked to Thunderheist…
J: Thunderheist!
Haha, yep. From Toronto and Montreal. Well, I asked them about up-and-coming Canadian artists to watch, and they gave me a ton of club rap names. That’s good and all, but I also wanted to come to y’all on the stereotypical indie kid front. Who should we keep an eye out for?
J: Melgrove Band. Awesome. Really good. We actually get to tour with them in October. Really looking forward to that.
G: Yea, that’s a West Coast thing where we play Neumo’s in Seattle and stuff like that.
J: I mean, they were a band that before we were even a band we were listening to, so it’s just really awesome to work with those guys.
G: There’s so much good stuff. Born Ruffians are good friends of ours from Toronto. Will Currie and the Country French aren’t really a touring band. Good friends of mine, and they’re wicked.
J: Immaculate Machine, who we played with last night, are really cool.
G: Obviously there’s Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene, New Pornographers, and all the bands everyone knows about who are also big influences on us, and we love ‘em. It’s really a great time to be a Canadian band.

Awesome. Well thank you guys very much.
G: For sure man. Thank you.
J: Great, thanks. I’m gonna change my socks.

Tokyo Police Club – “Box”
Tokyo Police Club – “Box” (zShare)

Tokyo Police Club – “Cheer it On (Trey Told Em Remix)”
Tokyo Police Club – “Cheer It On (Trey Told Em Remix)” (zShare)

Tokyo Police Club – “Swedes in Stockholm”
Tokyo Police Club – “Swedes in Stockholm” (zShare)