| | | |  | Meet John McKeown. In the summer of 2005, frankly tired of the whole Glasgow rock scene. After seven years of trawling the indie toilet circuit with The Yummy Fur that made him sick of the sound of guitars and then another three years failing to make...
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| Interview | Access All Areas.net.au: You boys are heading to Australia for your first headlining shows. Are you guys excited?
Jackie: Totally excited. As a band, it’s really fun to be able to travel around the world and just play music to people. It doesn’t matter where you do it…it’s just great. And the fact that Australia is a whole different continent to where we live is just very exciting.
Access All Areas.net.au: What can we expect from a 1990’s live show?
Jackie: People playing music really (laughs). It doesn’t explode or anything. It’s just what we sound like. We just want a nice sound and for everything to work well. That’s it really.
Access All Areas.net.au: You describe your sound as “They play rock and roll like a blonde gets out of a car!” What does that mean?
Jackie: It’s a line from one of our songs. It means like someone getting caught. A blonde getting out of a car is all about trying to maintain dignity and not being too wonky. Does that make sense? (Laughs)
Access All Areas.net.au: What do you think of current stars, who check themselves into rehab and live the party life?
Jackie: If you have pop stars working with the press then that’s ok. They will be fine and out of the way of harm. Sometimes I feel bad for those who the press aren’t friendly with. Everyone takes drugs, that’s a fact. It’s a shame for those who get it thrown across the press.
Access All Areas.net.au: You boys have supported bands like Franz Ferdinand and Babyshambles. Is there anyone that you would love to tour with?
Jackie: Yeah there is a lot. Bands from around our area man. Bands like Mogwai and Franz and Belle & Sebastian. Scottish bands really. I think if we were to play with anyone who came over here to play, they’d think we were complete twats.
Access All Areas.net.au: What are you currently listening to?
Jackie: I’m listening to a band called Goblin at the moment. They’re a seventies prog-rock band. They sound like the music out of all those old horror films. I’ve also been listening to Arcade Fire and some Bowie and some Beta Band.
Access All Areas.net.au: Who came up with the band name?
Jackie: We all came up with the name. We went through a bunch of names and we actually decided on 1960’s. It then kept changing every now and then and would go through the decades. When we got signed, it was 1990’s. I guess it’s staying that way now (laughs).
Access All Areas.net.au: The albums name is Cookies. Is there any reason for this?
Jackie: We are really obsessed with cookies (laughs). We make them all the time and we go and we buy them. Our wives think we’re crazy because we just love cookies so much.
Access All Areas.net.au: Is that what we would see on a rider for the band?
Jackie: No, I don’t have much of a sweet tooth when I’m on the road. Pretty much just some whiskey for me.
Interview by Simon Finck |
| Biography | Meet John McKeown. In the summer of 2005, frankly tired of the whole Glasgow rock scene. After seven years of trawling the indie toilet circuit with The Yummy Fur that made him sick of the sound of guitars and then another three years failing to make a dent with his subsequent electronic projects The Girls and The Mars Hotel, he’d had it with band life. His ex-Yummy Fur bandmates Alex Kapranos and Paul Thompson had struggled on to fi nd huge success with Franz Ferdinand but, fair play to them and all that, it wasn’t for John anymore. All he wanted to do was hang out with his buddy Michael McGaughrin, exdrummer
for V Twin, whom he’d met some time ago in a tree.
“It was in Glasgow,” John recalls, “in Kelvin Grove Park, I met him, staggering about in the middle of the night after a club. I walked past this tree and there were a couple of people milling about and there was all this blue tape on the higher branches. I went to Michael “Are you a
Celtic fan?” and I went “I am a f**kin’ Celtic fan” and he said “Me too, let’s get that f**kin’ blue sh*t from the tree.” So we climbed up the tree and took all the blue tape off it and Michael had a can of lager and we sat and chatted about what we were into, up a tree.”
Once they had decided to go out on a limb (pun intended), they hit the Glasgow house party scene “to take alot of drugs and get really, really, really drunk and party all night long”. As they caroused and careered through the city’s whirl, however, they sang songs to each other - “These mad little 70s New York rock songs with really ridiculous lyrics that we found really funny.”
Despite having no real intention of the songs really going anywhere further, through an old friend, the pair found themselves part of Can impressario Damo Suzuki’s backing band for a series of improvised gigs in early 2005 alongside bassist Jamie McMorrow, and they came up with a couple more tunes out of the improvised soup.
“We got really heartily sick of playing with Damo,” John explains. “He’s a lovely guy and I really love Can but it got a bit repetitious. I was more interested in the music we were making. We finished the last Damo show with the riff that turned into ‘You Made Me Like It’. We did it for
twenty minutes with Damo, this big giant rocking jam thing.”
The last thing they wanted was to play them to anyone of course, but since the three of them lived in the same street it seemed a laugh for John to pop round Michael’s fl at every day and put the tunes down onto four-track.
Then the worst thing imaginable happened. They played a gig and the crowd loved them… Before you could blink, the 1990s were a proper band with a proper manager supporting their old mates Franz Ferdinand around Scotland’s enormodromes on only their seventh gig. Then, come December last year, things got even worse – Geoff Travis of Rough Trade Records got hold of a demo and came to see them play a Franz aftershow, threatening to sign them if they made him dance. Word has it he spent the gig looking as though he was auditioning for Fame: The Musical.
The 1990s spent 2006 touring with a host of luminaries (Belle & Sebastian, Long Blondes, The Strokes, Babyshambles) and recording, fi rst with Teenage
Fanclub’s Norman Blake (fi rst UK single ‘You Made Me Like It’) and then Bernard Butler, with whom they concocted an album of timely and timeless razoredged pop-rock. |
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